boldly going where ming has gone before...
the title is referencing ming's analysis of racial and sexual preference from last year, which you can read here. if you haven't already noticed the "fluent in fag" link to your left, here's your chance to check it out.
i had an experience this weekend that caused me to remember that post, so i thought i'd share.
i went to a club here in lagos with some of my friends (mixed, but mostly nigerian/black), where i was hit on very aggressively by an egyptian man who kept drunkenly telling me that he has been here in lagos for three years and he just can't force himself to be attracted to black women. hence, he loves the color of my skin, hence, he loves me. all of my usual issues with drunken assertions of love from complete strangers aside, i found myself troubled by the assertion that he just can't be attracted to black women. it reminded me of a similar statement from a gay man i knew in college, who insisted that he just wasn't attracted to black men, and that it wasn't a racist thing, it was just a question of attraction. i had little trouble dismissing that statement as subconcious racism, in part because i knew the kid to have grown up in a class and race divided area and to have a lot of embedded prejudices underneath his pretensions to social liberalism (i also later fought with the same kid about the use of the term queer, whether or not transgender rights should be included in the gay rights umbrella, etc), but now with the egyptian guy i'm thinking about the issue again. the guy was at the club with his friends, all of whom were nigerian/black, and wasn't technically white himself, being egyptian/of some sort of arabic origin. i'm clearly having a hard time gathering my thoughts into any sort of coherent statements, so i think i'll try to bullet some of them.
* what does it mean to say that you're not attracted to someone because of the color of their skin, or conversely, that you are drawn to someone because of their color? is it fundamentally different from my "no one shorter than me" rule? doesn't it ignore that within skin colors there is endless variety of body types, features, styles, etc? how can you just rule out an entire race? this, of course, echoes my chasin amy-inspired "how can you rule out an entire gender" defense of bisexuality, but i think that the basic premise is even simpler. i honestly can't believe that this guy has been here three years and NEVER seen a black woman he thought was attractive. even the kid in college acknowledged that he wasn't ruling out the possibility that he could be attracted to a black man sometime in the future, and i think later in the year did actually hook up with one. so clearly there should be room for individual variation here.
* is the "no black women" rule related to a general misogyny? this guy came to club with several MALE black friends. clearly he either thinks differently about black people when there's no question of sleeping with them (sigh. i know it's overgeneralizing, but i'm going with it for the sake of time and space), or has accepted that if he refuses any contact with black people he'll lead a very lonely life. combine that with the way he approached me (he kept trying to convince me to either come home with him or let him drive me home, and when i categorically refused insisted that he was a good person and just wanted to talk to me, that he loved me and wanted to tell me everything about him. he also kept trying to tell me about how good his job is, how he makes so much money, and how he's looking for someone to take home to his family. here's a tip, boys -- men who think women have brains or common sense don't talk to them this way.) and i'm starting to think that the whole "no black women" rule is a manifestation of a particularly nasty hierarchy where he thinks that women are divisible by race into the good (white women), the attainable (women of his own race), and the bad (black women). maybe. i'm thinking it's about time to abandon this train of thought, though.
so we're back to the main question here, which is whether or not a sexual preference based on race is inherently racist. which is a question of how i think desire is manufactured. being the social construction junkie that i am, i tend towards the "we learn from an early age that society thinks that couples are supposed to be the same color, and we internalize that into a racial preference, but it doesn't mean we are bound by it." but i'm curious what other people think.