Racism and race-based discrimination is everywhere you turn on gay dating apps. You can barely get that one night stand over without having to riffle through a range of profiles publicly displaying their hatred, masquerading as sexual preferences. Scruff is finally making an effort to combat discrimination on the app by making its ‘ethnicity’ field optional.
For many of us, the filters on Scruff allow us to filter out the ideal man, like ordering ingredients in your Subway sandwich. Insert joke about a foot-long here. This becomes problematic when it comes to race-based filtering since being able to filter out an ethnic group does nothing to progress the dialogue on racism within the gay community.
Scruff have announced that their ‘ethnicity’ field when filling out your profile is now optional, meaning you can’t be filtered out based on race. It isn’t ideal, but it’s a step in the right direction. The app’s CEO and co-fonunder Eric Silverberg wants it to do its part to end global racism:
“We recognize that the queer community of color faces discrimination and racism as part of their regular lives, It is why Scruff is the only platform that vigorously enforces its community guidelines to ensure that harassment, racism and abuse doesn’t happen, and if it does it is dealt with swiftly.”
This comes as a change to the company’s attitude just a few months ago. The app, which has 12 million users in 180 different countries, just last year was defending their ethnicity filter stating in an interview with BuzzFeed:
“Ultimately we wanted to build an app and a service that enables guys to find the kind of guys they’re into and for some people that includes… That can mean many things for different people. Sometimes they have ethnic preferences, sometimes they have height/weight preferences, sometimes people have body hair preferences.”
This pressing issue is a complicated on, where the lines between attraction and discrimination are blurred. Other companies are also tackling hatred on their apps, with Grindr announcing earlier this year that it is working on a new version of the app caller Kinder which will set out to tackle racism, transphobia, and body-shaming.
