***The past is never dead. It’s not even past*****.” William Faulkner**
***“Racism is not an event, it is a structure.”*** **Dr. J. Kehaulani Kauanui**
**At the end of Part Two of this blog series on interracial love, I asked two questions:**
* **Is it any wonder that Black women, the demographic least interested in dating and marrying white partners, cite feeling fetishized as a leading reason why they avoid crossing over the racial divide?**
* **Given the definition and origins of fetish, how could it be any other way?**
**Often we hear in regards to incidents of past injustice sentiments like “what’s done is done.” For instance, in a recent response to a question about African American reparations, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, said, “America should not be held liable for something that happened 150 years ago, since none of us currently alive are responsible.”**
**Or as a blogger who describes himself as an “enlightened white boy” proudly proclaims in a post entitled** ***Yes, I Like*** ***Black Women******… Is That a Problem?*****, “What’s done cannot be changed. If you’re going to hold all white men accountable, to this day, for the abomination we call slavery, you should also include your African ancestors who sold you into it.”**
**Distancing himself from travesties of the past, the blogger writes that he’s into Black women for all the right reasons. “I’m not into black women because it’s some sort of fetish or because I want to relive the days of slavery.”**
**In case his readers question his enlightened state of mind, he assures us that he’s one of the good guys, “I would have changed it (slavery) IF I could have!”**
**Both men express popular white sentiments: colonialism, slavery and the racism they spawned were events from the past that left no enduring impact. William Faulkner and Dr. J. Kehaulani Kauanui suggest the opposite is true. Racism, birthed in a history of injustice, remains very much alive today as the heart of an enduring structure.**
**None of us were alive during slavery, but, if we’re white, even if we see ourselves as ‘enlightened’, we unconsciously benefit from a white supremacist system born of colonialism and slavery.**
**None of us were on a Portuguese sailing vessel in the 1500’s when race based cultural ignorance coined the term fetish. But, if white people interested in pursuing interracial relationships uncritically follow what they believe to be ‘normal’ behavior they run the risk of standing deckside with long forgotten sailors reducing the focus of their interest and desires on the distant shore to objects of fetish.**
**Leave the colonial view from the ship behind. The departure is long overdue. Rather than make vacant claims insisting that we would have changed the past if we could have, instead let’s answer author, activist, and historian Bryan Stevenson’s question,** ***what are you doing now*****?**
**One thing white people can do now is listen to the voices of those still targeted by the manifestations of an unjust, racist historical legacy, voices like those of Black women whose present day experience echoes centuries old dynamics set in motion by long forgotten Portuguese sailors struggling to name what they did not understand.**
**Hear what the women are saying:** ***Embrace me in my full humanity as part of my world not apart from it. I’m not interested in being anyone’s dark little secret of fantasy, the eye candy for white men or for that matter, white women, who want to indulge in their fetishized image of me without taking the time to see who I am as a Black woman.***
Source: reddit.com/r/Erotica/comments/eixzpg/interracial_love_is_it_a_fetish_part_three