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(I guess this comment may be somewhat low-effort and/or more suited to the Wednesday Wellness thread, but in light of recent discussion I feel that it may still be appropriate for this thread.)
Are racial sexual preferences natural and mentally healthy, or racist, unnatural, and mentally unhealthy? Is a white man who finds himself afflicted with "jungle fever", an Indian woman who feels a desire to become "bleached", or a black man who has succumbed to "yellow fever" suffering from a delusion that has been inflicted upon him by stereotypes in the media (both pornographic and non-porn)?* Or are these preferences inherent and natural? Is a person obligated to find sexually attractive all people who share the same general category of sex/gender, weight, and figure? Or is attraction permitted to hinge on such minor attributes as skin/nipple color, hair texture, and lip size?
*For example, perhaps the aforementioned black man suffering from "yellow fever" actually just finds skinny, demure-seeming women attractive, but has been brainwashed into thinking that the women who fit that role are overwhelmingly East Asian, and there's no use looking for them elsewhere. Maybe the Indian woman thinks that only white men are capable of building attractive levels of muscle, with few exceptions. Et cetera.
As Scott has Noticed, humans are remarkably libertarian only when it comes to romantic love. This is the one area that has survived accusations of racism, sexism or transphobia. You can debate this all you want but people will always be free to “fetishize” other races if they want. I don’t think people even mind being fetishized themselves by their partners, those who complain always seem like humble bragging to me
A more interesting question - is miscegenation healthy? Obviously from a liberal perspective this is a taboo question to even raise. But hapas for instance often seem to argue they shouldn’t even exist, as though they are a crime against nature. And I’ve seen some research to suggest they have far higher rates of depression than other groups
Miscegenation is definitely healthier than inbreeding , there's a point where the two genomes from your parents end up so far apart it starts getting unhealthy but humans are remarkably similar to each other as a species, I don't think for any two humans, even San Bushman + Aboriginal Australian pairings etc. are so far apart the distance becomes a negative.
What would be an example
I wonder about this. SS Africans for instance have no Neanderthal DNA, unlike all other races. There is some speculation that there are other hominid species of DNA in each race unique to them. That suggests there is at least some degree of species variation.
It's so prevalent it even has a standard name (although it's still less prevalent than the opposite where crossing different strains leads to improved fitness): Outbreeding Depression.
From the article:
Of course, we aren't identical. I'm saying more that any two random humans no matter are still more alike than each other genetically than for most other things we group into the same species. For example if you were to look at Maize you can get kernels in the same head of corn which are more than an order of magnitude more different from each other genetically than any two humans are from each other. Similar less extreme results hold for lots of bacteria etc. If we were to be as strict in calling things separate species as we are to call humans and chimps separate species we'd probably have at least an order and a half of magnitude more known bacteria species than we do today.
I meant an example from two humans, not biology writ large.
Anyhow the definition of what constitutes a species is a matter of debate within biology
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