Pinterest is pretty much the top search engine to check for quality pictures these days. As a writer, I use Pinterest almost everyday for pictures, and inspiration, but I’ve found myself becoming quite frustrated more frequently with their search results.
The main issue with Pinterest is that as a black woman yes, I do expect to see some diversity in my searches, and NO, I don’t want to type “black” first before typing beauty and families. Sadly, I had to just last week. Living in 2017 it just seems mind blowing that everyone wants to suck your heritage and culture dry, but at the same time, they don’t want our faces to represent their inspiration.
This realization came to mind when I was purposefully looking for some brown faces to use in an article. After scrolling for about a good minute, or so, faces of color were still unseen, and if you scroll like I scroll you can see about 50-100 pictures a minute. My results were unacceptable.
When searching for families I expect to see at least one beautiful picture of a black family. I saw none. Every single family was of European decent. I decided to type the word “black” just to prove my theory that Pinterest may, in fact, be racist. Well, all sorts of beautiful pictures came up then. I was annoyed, but I typed in “black” before beauty and received the same results. Honestly, I don’t believe I would have ever seen even a quarter of these beautiful black women if I had just simply typed “beauty”.
My thoughts took me to Twitter, because companies have been excellent at interacting with people on Twitter. Nope. There was no response to my tweets to Pinterest. I even told them I was disappointed in the lack of diversity in their search results. Still nothing. Why was that? Do they not care?
Google’s not known best for diversity, but if you typed “families” in a google search, your results wouldn’t anger you. There would be no need to type in “black” first, so Pinterest, we have a problem.
