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My stance for a long time has been that, if you find the facial or bodily features typical to a particular ethnic group attractive, then that's no different to expressing a preference for redheads or petite women.
But I've met men who've explicitly said they're moving to Japan because they think Japanese women are more submissive than Western women, and they want a woman who'll submit to them and who they can control. I think there's something creepy about wanting a partner that you can control and dominate, and I think that believing that members of certain ethnic groups are more susceptible to being controlled and dominated is a perfect example of what activists are complaining about when they talk about ethnic fetishism.
The topic is a personal one for me, as I almost exclusively date foreign women (it's been nearly a decade since I was physically intimate, beyond kissing, with someone of my own ethnic heritage), a disproportionate share of whom have been Asian. I've been accused of racial fetishism on many occasions (with varying degrees of seriousness), but my counter-argument is essentially the above: it's not fetishism if you just like the way Asian women look, it's only fetishism if you find them desirable for creepy reasons rooted in ethnic stereotyping. (My girlfriend could be accused of lots of things but she's certainly not "submissive".) In my angrier moments I've suspected that some of the people accusing me of racial fetishism really just harbour some subconscious hostility to miscegenation that they won't cop to, so they're just dressing it up in progressive language.
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