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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.
Racial sexual preferences are natural, mentally-healthy, and racist.
Attraction is about reproduction. If you want your child to be like you, to psychologically, phenomenologically experience the world as you do, to live again in them, it's important that their genetic makeup be very close to your own and this means mating with someone relatively closely-related. If a Frenchman has a kid with a Chinese woman, he'll be genetically more closely-related to a random French kid on the street than to his own child. His child will not experience the world the same way he does. Can never be fully French, or fully receive that cultural inheritance. Instincts, inclinations, minutiae of perception and cognition and desire will be blended with something very other. So in general it's the case that, all else being equal, it's vastly better to reproduce with someone of your own race, down to a fairly narrow scope.
Oh, I thought you meant preference for one's own people. Yeah, no, what you're talking about here is different and occurs to me as sad but understandable.
So look, women are hypergamous and have been selected to be aroused by foreign conquerors since before we were human. They generally do prefer males of their own race! But if that race is broadly marginalized in social and economic terms, it becomes imperative to try to mix with the winners. This is how the race blends and survives -- its beautiful women, i.e. storehouses of positive genetic innovations and low mutation load, are folded into the superior population which will continue on into the future in a dominant mode. All else being equal she'd be happier with a male of her own race if that race were (evidently) superior, than she will be with a male of a superior foreign race, but life demands such sacrifices and the proto-women who got on board with this program vastly outcompeted those who did not.
As to the men, yeah, the incentives are very different. Sperm is cheap and all that, and men are wired to be aroused by what we see as cheap or free opportunities to copulate with what amounts to a lower-status female because, hey, why not? But actually marrying one is a sign that a man couldn't get a higher-status mate of his own race and we all understand this.
Economic/attractiveness disparities among races fuzz the dynamic a bit; e.g. a member of a low-status race managing to marry a member of a high-status race is obviously a different situation than the opposite. Probably the key thing to bear in mind here is that it's not like all races are identical but for cosmetic considerations and some aren't higher or lower than others in critical, objective, documented respects.
So, it depends.
Oh come on. Asian women are obviously more feminine in general than, e.g., black women. I speak in terms of physical gracility, hormone balance, proclivity to physical aggression, and so on. It doesn't take media programming or indoctrination by porn to notice this. It's right in front of our faces all the time. Unfortunately for Asian men, they're also obviously more feminine than the men of any other race along exactly the same metrics. Everyone can see it and this is all born out in spades by dating app data. (It's also why there are so few male Asian leading men in movies, etc.) Come to think of it, from where I'm sitting, your perspective (as I understand it) is the 'delusional' one that could only have come about by social programming.
No. I can't even imagine what that would look like in practice.
These 'minor' attributes correlate with all kinds of major ones. Reminds me of referring to race as being about 'the color of someone's skin' which is rather less than the tip of the iceberg.
Kind of depends whether you find some value in the other.
We also know that combinations of traits can often be greater than the sum of their parts. Maybe the inclinations and instincts of a Frenchman are enhanced by admixture with those of a Norwegian or a Greek.
Of course, you've got to be selective -- but one has to selective about a mate in general.
It can go either way. Yes, sometimes magic does happen, but given how massively-polygenic a lot of complex traits are it seems much more likely to me that in any given foreign matchup something is going to break.
Different populations have evolved different complex solutions to similar problems. Maybe a child inherits a full set of both and is extra-good at whatever that thing is. But inheriting two partial incompatible solutions is bad news.
But this is all theoretical. I haven't seen anything solid on this topic since https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2017/04/is-mixed-race-breeding-bad-for-you/ which is hardly conclusive.
Oh to be sure. It's an interesting exercise to imagine having children with partners of many different races just to see what it looks like for yourself to be blended with those things. But, a responsible parent does wish to ensure that he's at least not doing his children a disservice by creating them with internally-inconsistent genetic loadouts such that they have conflicting instincts, mental traits meant for highly-intelligent people but not the intelligence itself, etc.
Mixed race people exist. The data on whether mixed race people outperform the average of their ethnic ancestry should be pretty simple to come by.
AFAICT, Latinos act like the weighted average of Indian and Spanish people, but have slightly better health.
If you click that link in my post (the one to which you're responding here) you'll get some insight into how not-simple that is, actually. Mixed-race people are almost definitionally born to outlier parents, e.g.
Hmm, so continuing on that -- if it's true that mixed-race people are already positively selected (since the opportunity to intermarry is cosmopolitan and affluent) then actually answering the central question here may be nearly impossible.
This is the situation as I understand it, yes.
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