Dating While Colorblind: The Paradox of Post-Racial Love

Wednesday, February 12, 2025. This is for Dr. Kyle Killian, my dear friend and supervisor for the past 7 years.

Once upon a time, in a world where people sincerely believed that love conquers all—and yet kept making dating apps with increasingly complex algorithms to help people avoid the wrong kind of love—some researchers decided to study romantic attraction through the lens of racial ideology.

Because, you see, humans are strange creatures.

They want to believe in free will but also prefer to be shackled to patterns they don’t even notice.

One such pattern, known to the social sciences as homogamy but to your Aunt Cheryl as “birds of a feather flock together,” is the tendency to be romantically drawn to people who resemble us in some fundamental way.

Same hobbies, same religious upbringing, same favorite childhood TV show. And yes, same race.

Now, if you’ve ever been at a dinner party where someone proclaims, “I don’t see color,” you may have felt an immediate, burning need to leave the conversation.

That is what social scientists call Color-Blind Racial Ideology (CBRI), and it turns out that believing race doesn’t exist has actual consequences—especially in the realm of romance.

Enter a study by Brooks, Hawkins, and White (2023), published in Personal Relationships, which examined 374 young adults (ages 18 to 25) to see if color-blind racial ideology influenced whom they found romantically attractive. It did, but not in the way that makes for a tidy, post-racial love story.

The researchers expected that most people, in keeping with homogamy, would be more attracted to partners of their own race.

They also suspected that color-blind ideology would shape this tendency—but in opposite ways for White and Black participants.

White folks who were more color-blind (i.e., insistent that race does not matter) would lean even harder into same-race dating.

Meanwhile, Black folks who strongly endorsed color-blindness would actually be less attracted to other Blacks.

What Does Color-Blindness Mean?

Because, as my dear friend Dr. Kyle Killian, an expert on interracial relationships, might say, “Color-blindness often functions as an erasure of identity, and when you erase identity, you erase connection” (Killian, 2012).

To test all this, the researchers presented participants with six dating profiles: 3 Black, 3 White, all equally attractive (as determined by a pre-screening process that surely must have been one of the most awkward research discussions in history). Participants rated their romantic attraction to each profile while also completing assessments of their racial ideology and multicultural attitudes.

The findings? As predicted, both Black and White participants reported a slightly stronger attraction to members of their own racial group.

But here’s where things get weird: White participants who scored higher on color-blind ideology actually became less likely to favor White partners over Black ones.

Meanwhile, Black participants who scored high on color-blind ideology became more likely to prefer Black partners—flipping the predicted effects on their heads.

White men had the strongest same-race bias overall, while Black men had the weakest. If homogamy is supposed to be a universal principle, someone forgot to send the memo to Black men.

This Raises Some Interesting Questions

If color-blind racial ideology is supposed to make race irrelevant, why does it seem to reinforce in-group preference for Black participants but weaken it for White ones?

Dr. Killian might argue that this reflects the historical burden of racial identity in America.

For many White participants, color-blindness may operate as a way to signal progressive values, freeing them from the pressure to consciously prefer White partners.

For Black participants, however, endorsing color-blindness might mean absorbing dominant cultural narratives that prioritize Whiteness—making same-race attraction feel less automatic (Killian, 2012).

Of course, like all good social science, this study comes with caveats.

The participants were young.

They were either Black or White, leaving out a whole spectrum of racial identities that complicate the picture further. And let’s be honest: answering survey questions about who you find attractive is not the same as actually swiping right or introducing someone to your mother.

So, What Does This All Mean?

Well, love is weird. People are weird.

Race is a social construct that somehow still impacts our most intimate decisions.

And the next time someone at a dinner party says, “I don’t see race,” you might smile politely and say, “That’s fascinating, but did you know that color-blindness actually influences who people want to date?” Then you can watch them choke on their Riesling.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Brooks, J. E., Hawkins, C. K., & White, D. A. (2023). Same-race bias in romantic attraction among young adults: Daters’ race, gender, and racial ideologies. Personal Relationships.

Killian, K. D. (2012). Interracial couples, intimacy, and therapy: Crossing racial borders. Columbia University Press.