ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on racialized preferences in sex, dating, love, and marriage. Choices, preferences, and decisions in sex and love perpetuate racial injustice in a range of ways. To discuss sex, love, and race, a basic understanding of race and racialization and the idea of dominant race is necessary. There are various ways in which racialized sexual and romantic preferences have been thought to be a problem, a manifestation of what Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman calls “sexual racism” rather than mere preferences. While preferences of sex and love are personal and intimate, they are shaped by and contribute to the racialized attitudes and facts of injustice in our society. The context in which the white race is dominant and others are subordinated or oppressed creates evident asymmetries when it comes to racialized preferences in sex and love. While preferences of sex and love are intimate and personal, they are also shaped by, and contribute to, the culture we live in.