Race/ethnicity has been fetishized for years and has always been wrong, but, being that this is the age of social media, there’s a giant grand stage for people to objectify people of a certain race or ethnicity. Before moving there, it’s important to actually get to why it is bad and problematic to do that. Most people will tell you that there’s no big issue with the term “I don’t date ___ people”, and that the term “I only date ___ people” is completely innocent and should not be taken so seriously. These people obviously don’t realize the damage they are doing to barriers as a whole. This isn’t even particularly a black/white issue either because of the obvious fetishization of Hispanic girls, or the male “Latin lover” trope, or the dozens of people who say they only like Asians. It is dangerous because it creates this ideal picture of what a white girl looks like or what a black girl looks like when in reality everyone’s different. But these people will be so fixated on such a miniscule thing as race or ethnicity then they will formulate their ideal girl and cannot accept anything that is not what they want. A girl will be so obsessed with making sure the one she marries is black that she can find any black guy and say “green light, he’s black, he’ll work”. It becomes so superficial and shallow.

Now this isn’t to be mistaken to say that interracial couples are bad because they aren’t, if two people from different races fall in love that’s amazing, good for them. But in all honesty if you look at it from an even broader lens it doesn’t even necessarily have to be interracial because I’ve personally known white people who say they will only date white people, or black people only dating black people. Though it’s important to note that in reference to interracial couple and this problem this actually hurts them, which many people don’t understand. People fear dating out of their race because of the fact they don’t know who is genuine and who is looking at them for what hue their skin is and only that. So interracial couples are not normalized anymore because people are too paranoid to go through the racial boundaries. The problem lies in this consistent agenda to sexualize certain people. If you look at it with all this in mind, the people who think it’s okay to do this don’t sound like people with “preferences” it sounds like someone being some kind of fetish predator.

Social Media perpetuates this even more. I saw an ad for a website called "SwirlMingle”. Now, to be fair, in my opinion, all dating sites are pretty dumb but this one in particular is the dumbest of them all. You sign up, pick what gender you’re interested and just click an option box of what race/ethnicity you want to be filtered through so you solely only get them. So yes, this sexualization was always a problem but now there’s websites that support that people can go on and use it and thus it is normalized. Now the website will claim it’s actually helping interracial couples and have “love has no race” rhetoric all over the website, but how can that be advertised when the entire goal of the website is to filter out races and only focus on what you like. If love really had no color there’d be no encouragement to pick preferred races as if that mattered in who a person is. Now people can argue that there is an option to be open to all races so its okay, but that should be the only option on a website that claims to be made because "we think race has no place in our love lives". Sites like this support their weird fetish and the trend will continue, using stereotypes of black women being loud and confident, Black men being dominant, White women being simple or Asian women being submissive; as if they could only be that. Race isn't a fetish, nor does it dictate a personality.