How Many People Choose a Partner by Race

Inter-racial relationships still face a fight for societal and cultural acceptance. In a poll, conducted by Meetville.com (dating app to find the right person), opinions on this topic evenly divided, with 49% strongly against dating someone of a different race and 51% not exluding such possibility.

Between 5/23/14 and 9/16/14, the poll asked 73,347  to respond to the following question: “Would you strongly prefer to date someone of your own racial background?”

Author Erin Tatum, author at Everydayfeminism.com, believes that “Racial preferences reduce people to their ethnicity and reinforce racial hierarchies by insinuating that race alone is a powerful enough factor to negate everything else that someone has to offer. It’s true that anyone can have undesirable traits and you shouldn’t feel obligated to be with a person solely for inclusivity’s sake, but that doesn’t mean that those traits are ethnically specific.”

An overwhelming majority of the participants were from the USA - 89%, from Canada - 1%, from Britain - 3%, from Australia - 2% and from other countries - 5% of respondents.

Alex Cusper, Meetville service analyst, makes a brief conclusion that “while great strides in race relations have been made in the United States since the days of the Civil Rights Movement, racial divisions have by no means disappeared.”

Meetville, a leading mobile dating service, regularly conducts research among its users. Millions of people from the U.S., Canada, Britain and Australia answer hundreds of questions every month. You can find the results of the poll here. If you are interested in research on a particular topic, please contact us. Any reprint of the material should be followed by clickable links to the survey.