Just to share my own experiences as a long time Detroiter, although I’ve since moved to the country, Grindr culture in the Detroit area can be intensely and hostilely racist.

Detroit itself, as I’m sure you know, is mostly Black. If you subtract a couple mostly white neighborhoods, it’s almost entirely Black. The close suburbs are becoming a bit more mixed than they used to be, but they are majority white. They tend to also to be overtly racist in the sense that people fear and revile Detroit proper and often extend that hostility to Black people in general. The history of white flight is all mixed up in those attitudes, but that’s a subject too intense for a comment like this.

But what it boils down to is that white people in the suburbs, including gay white people, are seldom shy about expressing hostile racism.

My Black gay friends in Detroit do not like to use Grindr unless they keep it set to exclude the suburbs. If they don’t, they are quite likely to get responses like the ones you describe in this article.