Dispatches from White People-Land.

In the wake of Mayer -gate,Tracy Clark-Flory expounds some more on race and dating practices.

Typically, we don’t bat an eye when a white guy says he has a thing for Asian women or a white woman professes a love for Latin men. We thought nothing of Tiger Woods’ preference for white women (until we discovered he was collecting his own personal harem). It’s generally accepted that people have, and are entitled to, their romantic (stereo)types. After all, like so many things, sexual attraction is one hot mess of nature and nurture. How can you separate pure animal lust from social conditioning? Is your racial preference a factor of innate biology or are cultural expectations messing with your romantic wiring?

Uh, we don’t? I’d recommend she talk to some Asian women or Latin@s being “admired” to see what they think. I’d bet many of them would be less than sanguine about being someone’s dehumanizing fetish. (As I said the other day, anxieties about it seem to come up a lot in conversations I’ve had about hypothetical interracial pairings.) And that Tiger Woods line suggests that she must have completely avoided the black commentariat when that story broke.

I’m not sure how a non-black person exclusively dating black men because s/he thinks us/them especially masculine, or a non-Asian person trolling for Asian women because he thinks them demure and accomodating is “a factor of innate biology” and not cultural programming. How do you “love” a fantastically varied, arbitrarily defined group of people in the abstract if you’re not essentializing them?

G.D.

G.D.

Gene "G.D." Demby is the founder and editor of PostBourgie. In his day job, he blogs and reports on race and ethnicity for NPR's Code Switch team.
G.D.

Latest posts by G.D. (see all)

  • I’m an Asian woman and I despise Asiaphiles. The worst part was when I would try to tell them that saying “I like Asian women” was actually very rude and insulting to me… they would usually respond with variations of “why can’t you take a compliment, bitch!”

  • Grump

    What if one gave a reason to liking a certain group that was based on something more specific? Like, like a group of people because of their accents(Southern women in my case) or their cuisines?

  • distance88

    How do you “love” a fantastically varied, arbitrarily defined group of people in the abstract if you’re not essentializing them?

    Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. This point really gets at the heart of what is problematic with such exclusive ‘preferences’.

  • That article is a mess on so many different levels- from the misplaced Tiger comparisons to the Barack the Magic Post-Racial Negro poll at the end. But the concept of social conditioning and cultural expectations rings true for me.

    The lowest common denominator is too easy as a jumping off point. Totally agree with the fact that there are white women who grew up in sheltered communities whose interests for black men stem from the fact they heard “it” was bigger or white men interested black women because they heard “it” was smaller or Latinas/Latinos because “it” is hotter or Asians because “they” are subservient and so on. That brand of racism is actually not very different from Mayer’s racially allergic penis. But I don’t think it is fair to use it to sum up racial preferences.

    While most white kids were rocking the Farah Fawcett poster on their teenage wall I had one of Indira Rubiera from the Toro Band. I learned to dance meringue, bachata and salsa and was taught the Spanish I speak from my childhood girlfriends and their very welcoming families. I prefer pernil on Xmas Eve and sancocho is the cure of choice for New Year’s Day. I drink Brugal and understand there are only two things that can happen when one does that. That’s just a long way of saying any generic woman or another Italian like me cannot understand me or the things I am passionate about culturally or emotionally in the same way. The relationship is doomed to superficial status. Maybe that makes me an anomaly Gee but it also sounds like someone could write a dissertation on social and cultural conditioning as a factor in race based preferences.

  • I’m interested to learn about what exactly is and is not acceptable from those who hold within- and between-race dating preferences to different standards. To wit it is clearly more culturally acceptable to date exclusively within one’s race than outside it, and while an obvious rationale is that it’s difficult to essentialize an ethnicity of which one is a member, I don’t quite buy that. To take a crass but well-known example, many mainstream rappers have no problem essentializing black women (Tip Drill anyone?). I say this not to indulge in tu quoque, but only to point out that essentialism isn’t solely a interracial problem (though it often is).

    Not only that, but outside of idiots shameless enough to proclaim their exclusive love for men/women of a certain race, fetishism can be difficult to diagnose. Where does it inhere? In the objective facts of a person’s dating history? In what they say? What they think? Their unconscious assumptions? To position myself, my girlfriend is of a different race and while I don’t consider myself to have a fetish, that hasn’t stopped people from insinuating to my face that I do. These kinds of experiences have impressed upon me the importance of not glibly slinging around accusations of fetishism except in unambiguous cases like that cited by atlasien. Generally I prefer to assume until proven otherwise that any romantic connection, whether or not it crosses ethnic lines, is at bottom motivated by love and not stereotype.

  • I’m raising my hand yet again as one of the shameless idiots who also just happens to be honest enough to admit my racial preferences. The fact is that over 95% of the marriages in America are same race marriages and that is almost uniformly the case across over 100 different languages spoken making interracial couples one of the smallest minority groups in America. And I think that proves your point but further, it’s not that essentialism isn’t solely an interracial problem it’s that it is primarily a same race problem. That 95% is a far more apparent example racial preference and essentialism than anything I’ve raised my hand to admit to, the singular exception being that what I’ve admitted to is not conventional and so deemed unacceptable or fetish or shameless and idiotic. The simplistic answer to the 95% is that America is an almost completely self-segregated country in this regard and so typical Americans are pre-conditioned to gravitate towards their own race, to proclaim exclusive love for those within their own race. It is only normal because we have been taught that it is and in turn, we search it out because it validates us and our history.

    Again, I could be an anomaly but I had none of those “normal” markers and so my preferences were determined by the markers I was exposed to. I don’t think love is spontaneous combustion outside of romance novels and movies. Instead I think love is a result of shared interests, culture, physical attraction and personal chemistry. We don’t bump into each other in the dark and then have babies and I don’t think we can take away something as critical to our own individuality as race and culture when we talk about love and relationships.