New Bumble Feature Shows Which White People Posted Black Squares And Which Ones Actually Protested
In the wake of a protest-filled summer, Bumble Founder & CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd announced the app will be allowing its users to sort white profiles by who only merely posted black squares versus who actually went to a BLM protest.
“Bumble was created to make dating a less toxic experience,” said Wolfe in a recent interview with TechCrunch. “To create a safer space, we saw it necessary to differentiate which users on our app fought against white supremacy, versus those who did the absolute bare minimum for the clout."
The need for “woke clout” has become so rampant that Bumble reported that following the protests, 56% of white users were swiping to intentionally seek out black people to date.
The announcement was initially met with praise from farmers’ markets & hot yoga spots in every liberal bastion city across America. However, some white users expressed concerns about the feature. They cited fearing they would be exposed for thinking that posting a black square without using their platform to speak to white supremacy was “brave” or "something at least, I don't know. Leave me alone! I'm trying."
Many noted that if their performative allyship was not appreciated, they could have been using their platform to post Valencia-filtered brunch photos and wine boomerangs. “It wasn’t performative, I made a sacrifice too,” says Danielle, a recruiter in San Francisco. “The black square ruined the algorithm for me.”
Some Black users, while liking the idea of the feature, are skeptical if it will really help the racial disparity on the app.
“I guess this helps. I don’t know," said Marcus, a Black grad student in New York. "There’s, like, no Black people on Bumble anyway. I’ve seen Brooks Brothers catalogs with more diversity than this app.”
“It’ll be nice to know which white men actually care about the cause,” says Vanessa, a Black marketing manager in LA. “If you made a Venn Diagram of the men who respond to me with ‘your life matters’ and who only posted a black square with the caption ‘today I need to start listening,’ it’d be a single circle.”
FLEXX reached out to other popular dating apps to see if they had plans to incorporate a similar feature. Only Tinder responded with a short message, saying “there’s no point, we’ve dug too far into rock bottom to boost our app’s reputation. You want to see my cock?”
