To me, 'preferences' were always like-- where I'm concerned, I prefer dallying with creatives; I prefer painters, musicians, and sculptors; I prefer people who are well-read. While I can respect some types of preference, the ones I don't respect are the ones that smell like "nah, you don't have a preference; you're just saying that so a Black person-- or even just a person with exceptionally dark skin-- can't romantically get close to you".

That just reeks of uninvestigated bigotry to me-- and note; I don't say this as a 'we should be able to hook up' kind of thing-- if anything, I don't believe the uninvestigated bigot deserves to be with anyone, really.

I want to respect people have preferences but that whole vibe always felt icky to me.

Speaking to the subject of "racial preferences" generally since I'm a het:

So long as we're dealing in a paradigm where physical attraction to things like facial features is to be expected (i.e. all of human existence so far and for the foreseeable future), there is going to be bias in a given individual towards and against certain races, e.g. some races have more prominent jawlines on average. These things simply will have racial correlates.

However, that is many layers removed from what we are seeing here. There is a profound difference between "I like narrower noses" and "If you're black, swipe left" because, among many other things, these are averages and not cookie-cutter predetermined features (e.g. you will get people of all races each with widely varying nose widths). There is a substantial extent to which preferences for certain features will have racial correlates, but that doesn't mean the preference is itself racialized. If you're putting "no blacks" in your bio, you are obviously and openly operating from a racialized paradigm, and that deniability is out the window. You're just a bigot.

The stumbling block for this issue on Hexbear is usually the following: Something does not need to be explicitly racist to be racist. You can be racist without thinking to yourself that you hold races in different regard. Your preferences can "just happen" to be for someone with blonde hair, blue eyes, alabaster skin, a Hellenic nose, etc. but wow, isn't it such a coincidence that your preferences, which clearly just fell into your head from a coconut tree, just happen to perfectly line up with Aryanism? Even though the number of people you've known in your life with these features all together might be very, very, low? It's just a crazy coincidence that you can go to some college campuses when they are in session and see genuinely the majority of girls have their hair dyed roughly the same color blonde.

It turns out someone's aesthetic sensibilities can be informed by implicit racial ideology as well. In America, it's overwhelmingly Aryanism, and therefore Aryanism is popular in many other countries as well (along with the countries that were innovators in it, like Germany), but I'm sure there are other racialized ideals in other societies that are similarly pervasive, I'm just not familiar with them.

Sorry, I just wanted to rant about this again.