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How do you navigate the dating world when some view your ethnicity as a fetish?
By Sergio ArangioSpecial to the Star
Fri., Sept. 28, 2018
On a summer evening in 2016, Samantha Baker was having a quiet night of ‘Netflix and chill’ with her boyfriend at her Pickering home. As they began to get intimate, he leaned into her ear and whispered how much he loved her “light-skin” vagina.
Um... gross, Baker winced. When she processed his words later, she became even more disgusted with the racial remark.
Samantha Baker her racially charged experiences with Toronto men has lead her to walk away from the dating scene for the time being. (Sergio Arangio photo)
That wasn’t the first time Baker’s South Asian beau had called out her Jamaican-Macedonian background in the bedroom. In fact, aside from sex, she says, he seemed to look down on her race. She began to feel like she was being racially fetishized — that is, sexually objectified as an exotic fantasy.
Baker had previously thought that was just how men were but her boyfriend’s perpetual racial comments were different.
Their four-year relationship didn’t last.
Today, Baker, 24, still encounters men who fetishize her ethnicity. Some have gone as far as to use the N-word around her, thinking that dating a person of colour makes it OK for them to say it. It doesn’t, she says.
She feels like they are not seeking out a relationship based on an actual personality, they are basing it solely on race.
“They want to have sex with me because they’ve never had sex with a Black girl,” says Baker.
It’s enraging to be viewed as an ethnic conquest, Baker says.
Racial fetishization exists across genders and ethnicities. According to a 2016 University of Cambridge paper on racial fetishes, the cause stems from a history of racial oppression that indoctrinated our society with racism and negative stereotypes, thereby nurturing a culture of more often men— but sometimes women — who simply view ethnicity as a sexual fantasy.
By Sergio ArangioSpecial to the Star
Fri., Sept. 28, 2018
On a summer evening in 2016, Samantha Baker was having a quiet night of ‘Netflix and chill’ with her boyfriend at her Pickering home. As they began to get intimate, he leaned into her ear and whispered how much he loved her “light-skin” vagina.
Um... gross, Baker winced. When she processed his words later, she became even more disgusted with the racial remark.
Samantha Baker her racially charged experiences with Toronto men has lead her to walk away from the dating scene for the time being. (Sergio Arangio photo)
That wasn’t the first time Baker’s South Asian beau had called out her Jamaican-Macedonian background in the bedroom. In fact, aside from sex, she says, he seemed to look down on her race. She began to feel like she was being racially fetishized — that is, sexually objectified as an exotic fantasy.
Baker had previously thought that was just how men were but her boyfriend’s perpetual racial comments were different.
Their four-year relationship didn’t last.
Today, Baker, 24, still encounters men who fetishize her ethnicity. Some have gone as far as to use the N-word around her, thinking that dating a person of colour makes it OK for them to say it. It doesn’t, she says.
She feels like they are not seeking out a relationship based on an actual personality, they are basing it solely on race.
“They want to have sex with me because they’ve never had sex with a Black girl,” says Baker.
It’s enraging to be viewed as an ethnic conquest, Baker says.
Racial fetishization exists across genders and ethnicities. According to a 2016 University of Cambridge paper on racial fetishes, the cause stems from a history of racial oppression that indoctrinated our society with racism and negative stereotypes, thereby nurturing a culture of more often men— but sometimes women — who simply view ethnicity as a sexual fantasy.
