Transcript

AZITA CHELLAPPOO:

Investigating philosophy. What are racial fetishes?

Hi, I’m Dr Azita Chellappoo from The Open University, and I’m here with Dr Robin Zheng, who’s a lecturer in political philosophy at the University of Glasgow.

ROBIN ZHENG:

Thanks so much for having me. I’m happy to be here.

AZITA CHELLAPPOO:

So, Robin, you’ve written a paper titled ‘Why Yellow Fever Isn’t Flattering, A Case Against Racial Fetishes’. And I’d like to explore that argument with you today. So you argue that racial fetishes are morally objectionable. So maybe let’s start with the question: what are racial fetishes?

ROBIN ZHENG:

Yeah, so I define racial preferences that are racial fetishes to be ones that are exclusive or near exclusively involving people from a race outside of your own. That could be for sex, for love, for romance. But the idea is that you have this way in which you prefer certain people of a certain race to the exclusion of others.

So one example of that is the yellow fever that you mentioned in the paper, which is a somewhat derogatory term, which we can talk about, for a specific kind of racial fetish in which white people, usually white men, have this preference for East Asian women. And so that would be an example of a racial fetish.

AZITA CHELLAPPOO:

You note that a common defence of racial fetishes is that they’re just a preference. And you call this the mere preference argument. Could you say a bit more about what that argument is?

ROBIN ZHENG:

Yeah, so this is something that you hear a lot from people and that you see a lot in media coverage and interviews and also scholarly studies when people who have this kind of racial fetish try to defend themselves. So the argument is really simple. It’s got two premises and a conclusion.

The first premise is that there’s nothing wrong with sexual preferences for things like hair colour or eye colour or these physical - merely physical traits. And that’s the first premise.

Then the second premise is that there’s no difference between racialised physical traits and nonracial physical traits. They’re just appearances.

And then finally, the conclusion from that is that, well, if there’s nothing wrong with preferring hair colour or eye colour or something like that, then there’s nothing wrong with preferring people of a certain race, so long as it’s just based on the way that they look.