# Transcript

AZITA CHELLAPPOO:

Investigating philosophy. Challenging the mere preferences argument.

So where do you think that the mere preference argument goes wrong? Or why do you think that racial fetishes are nevertheless objectionable?

ROBIN ZHENG:

Yeah, this is kind of going to be a long answer because there are a couple of strategies that I think are pretty good but that I don’t ultimately adopt. One of them is to attack that first premise, that there’s nothing wrong with preferring certain hair colours or eye colours or other traits that you think are attractive.

And there are a lot of people who have argued that this is problematic. And I sympathise because love and sex and romance are goods that are currently unequally distributed. So there have been a lot of studies that show that beautiful people make more money and so on and so forth.

So you could dispute just that first claim by saying that physical appearance is this totally arbitrary thing that you’re born with. It doesn’t have anything to do with how good of a person you are or how talented or how skilled you are. And so it is unfair and morally problematic to prefer people who look a certain way compared to another way, when looks really aren’t what matters in relationships. So that’s one way you could go.

But it’s not my strategy. My strategy is instead to look at that second premise. And then, here, there’s another popular strategy, which I’m also sympathetic to but I think doesn’t go far enough. And so a strategy that a lot of people take is to say, no, no, no, there is something different about racial fetishes and preferences based on racialised physical traits. And that difference is that racialised physical traits are always connected to racist stereotypes.

So in the case of ‘yellow fever’, stereotypes that Asian women are particularly sexually alluring, that they’re exotic, that they are submissive or docile or really good in bed, those problematic stereotypes are at the root of racial fetishes. And that’s what makes them problematic.

So I think there’s actually a lot of evidence that supports this. If you look at history, in terms of different kinds of policies there have been, and if you look in the media in terms of the kinds of representations of Asian women there have been, it’s hard to deny that those stereotypes are really deeply entrenched.

But I agree with people who would make the objection that there might not be stereotypes in every case of yellow fever. So my strategy - finally we get to my strategy - is still to focus on the second premise, but I say that there are two important differences between racialised traits and non-racialised traits.

The first difference is that racialised traits, when they are the subject of a racial preference, a racial sexual preference, produce unfair burdens on the targets of the racial fetish.

So for instance, a lot of Asian women, East Asian women, have reported that they feel immediate feelings of doubt or suspicion or insecurity whenever they go out with someone who seems like they might be interested in them only because of their race. And the reason for that, I think, is that people don’t like to feel homogenised. They don’t like to feel that they’re just one like any other and that they could be replaced by any other who’s also an Asian woman. And they also don’t like to feel otherised in that they don’t like to feel like they’re being held to a different standard from everyone else. So whenever an Asian woman encounters someone of another race who’s interested in her, she might feel a sort of doubt about whether she’s really being loved for who she is or whether she’s being found attractive for who she is or whether it’s just because she’s Asian. And that just doesn’t feel good.

And no matter what the truth is, so whether the man actually does have the fetish or not, she has to deal with this kind of doubt and insecurity around it. And that’s a very unpleasant and difficult thing to have to navigate through. And it’s something that white women don’t have to do if they’re being approached by white men, for instance. And so that’s the kind of unfair burden that I think lands on Asian women who are subject in many cases to racial fetishes.

So that’s the first difference, is that unlike hair colour and eye colour, being liked for your race is something that makes you question whether you are really being liked or loved or approached for yourself or just as an object in a larger category.

And then the second difference, I think, is that racial preferences, racial fetishes themselves contribute to racial dynamics that uphold racial inequalities. So just the fact that there are people who have racial fetishes for Asian women will make everyone think, oh, what is it about Asian women? There must be something about them which makes them somehow different from other women.

And that difference, that othering, again, is contributing to this idea that the races are really distinct and that they have different properties and therefore that different treatment is warranted.

So overall, my strategy is to say that second premise of the argument is false because racialised physical traits, when they’re the basis of a sexual preference, they create psychological burdens for the targets of a racial fetish, psychological burdens that others don’t have to face.

And then also, that they contribute to the idea that races are real and differentiating factors that make it so that we should treat people differently according to their race.