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Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

How isn't that racist?

Racism doesn't need to involve blathering idiots who want to burn your house down, all it takes is someone to treat another person worse because of their race.

Which is to say, we're all at least a little bit racist. One of the greatest lies of modern society is that racism is somehow exceptional, or intrinsic to a character, when it is in fact highly contextual and can be brought out of anyone.

Race in dating is very heavily influenced by popular perceptions of particular races, including stereotypes - that someone won't give a black person the time of day even if they are articulate and hit other criteria is racist, though the fault here seems to lie more with society than the individual.

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Is it racist to be more or less attracted to certain physical attributes including skin colour? I'm gay but I don't think that makes me sexist, I prefer certain colours of hair but I don't think that makes me.. whatever the bad thing there is... personally I've rarely been physically attracted to anybody black, does "never having dated a black person" equal "treating another person worse because of their race"?

(I do agree that everyone is capable of racism even if they aren't going round lynching people, just not that racial preference when it comes to sex is always about racism.)

I disagree. Mating is deeply biological phenomenon; the rational brain has little to do with it.

For example: I'm attracted to slim women. But some of my best friends are curvy. I'm not discriminating against curvy women; it's just that I find the skinny ones more attractive, without any rational reason for it.

I believe this is less biological than you think it is. You're attracted to slim women because there are a truckload of cultural artifacts celebrating slim women. If you were born 500 years ago, or in a different part of the world today, you may very well be attracted to curvy women.

And this is even more true for race - there may very well be people who are biologically wired to dislike certain skin colors, but IMO they are well into the minority. Race in dating has much more to do with cultural perceptions of race than any evolutionarily hard-wired perception.

In any case though:

> " it's just that I find the skinny ones more attractive, without any rational reason for it."

Which makes you, I guess the word would be... weightist?

The whole point of my post isn't to point at people and go "you monster! you won't date black people!", it's to point out that even subconsciously influenced racism is racism, and the net effect for the target individual is the same, regardless of if you're "simply like that without rational reason" or if you actively and consciously dislike them.

The fact that we've been programmed by culture and circumstance to discriminate against a certain group doesn't make it our fault, but it is still discrimination at the end of the day.

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