“Looking for north Europeans only”: Identifying Five Racist Patterns in an Online Subculture

This article identifies and provides examples of five recurring speech patterns on dating platforms that users might experience as racist and/or xenophobic. Empirical material comes from over 3000 Copenhagen-based profile texts on Grindr and PlanetRomeo—two platforms that cater primarily to men seeking men—as well as from interviews with twelve recent immigrants to the greater Copenhagen area who use these platforms. Theories of everyday racism (Essed, 1991), sexual racism (Callander, 2015), and entitlement racism (Essed, 2013) informed the formulation of these five patterns, which I identify as the following: persistent questions about the origins of people with migration background; racial-sexual exclusions; racial-sexual fetishes; conflation between (potential) immigrants and economic opportunism; and insults directed at immigrants based on race, nationality, or religion. As an exploratory study, this article mainly serves to inform readers of the various ways immigrants and people of color can experience racism and xenophobia while participating in online sexual and social networking platforms; but secondly, the chapter archives the mercurial and fleeting (albeit historically embedded) discourses on these platforms for future researchers interested in comparing racisms over time and across cultures.