Equal Opportunity Fetishes

The rules of interracial dating are supposed to be like this: If white dates Asian, it's a "fetish." If white dates black, it's "going jungle." These formulas usually leave Asian males and black females ogling Caucasians attending ethnic campus events with what ranges from amusement to indignity ("Why are they here? It can't be to learn about our culture. Must be a fetish!")

Interestingly, this interracial-itis only seems to affect whites. Minorities are exempt; a charge that members of historically oppressed groups have "fetishes" slides off like butter on a hot Teflon-coated pan. It is our "get out of jail free" card, and I thought I had one of those cards until last summer. Now I am not so sure.

I think I have a Latin fetish.

It started out innocently not unlike the way Melrose Place started out (remember the time when every cast member would have still passed the Rorschach test with fewer than six Oedipal references?) She was petite, had lovely chestnut-colored hair, deep brown eyes, a smile that wrinkled the corners of her eyes and mouth. She pronounced the "x" in "Mexico" the way you're supposed to say the "J" in "Juan," took photographs with more gusto than Annie Leibowitz and played a mean game of cards.

We hung out a lot, had some great conversations and watched out for each other. The night before I went back to Connecticut and she three time zones away to California, we talked a long time. We promised to keep in touch.

Truth be told, the relationship was probably more of the friendship than the romantic ilk. This is due to my uncanny ability to turn any potential girl-friend into a friend-girl. Nevertheless I was attracted to this girl. I admired her courage, her passion, her integrity. It was her personality that I was smitten by, and nothing else. Definitely not because of her ethnic heritage. That thought never even occurred to me until I got back.

But when it did, it did so with the unsettling persistence of a maggot wriggling inside an apple. A week after my return, I was driving with my sister in the seat next to me. My mom was dozing in the back seat. It's an unspoken rule in our family that the driver gets to pick the radio station--it is only fair to get a privilege for a responsibility. We approached New York on 1-95, and I was scanning the FM band of the radio, stopping at 97.9 megahertz, A Latin station.

"What is this stuff?" my sister said after a minute.

"It's Latin music," I said with the kind of fixed stare ahead that would have made Rasputin look like a Dalmatian puppy.

"You never listen to Latin music," my sister said.

"Yes I do," I lied.

"No you don't," my sister persisted.

"Look, I'm trying to drive," I said.

But it gets worse. A week later, I was browsing through the course catalog. Usually I comb the government department's course offerings and then skip all the way to sociology. Not this time. This time I stop at the Romance languages and decide right there to add Spanish A to my course load. Since then--and to my dismay--I've several times expressed a craving for some "real" Mexican food as opposed to "yo quiero Taco Bell." I've also looked at some Mexican literature and got interested in the history.

As someone who has participated in those single-sex sessions where we complain about fetishes, all this makes me feel very hypocritical.

Others study Spanish, immigration or bilingual education out of academic interest, or because they have volunteered teaching English-as-a-Second-Language to eighth graders in East Los Angeles or because they realize over thirty percent of the U.S. population will speak Spanish by 2050. I suspected my reasons were less noble. And this suspicion, however slight, turned first to guilt but then to an important realization.

After much thought, I've discovered that learning Spanish and studying the history of Mexico are purely academic pursuits, not excuses to impress women. This girl piqued my interest in Mexican culture because she was Mexican herself, not so much because she talked about Mexico or Mexicans particularly. It was just that after meeting her, I recognized that even though Harvard has a healthy Latino population, as well as courses on Latin American culture, I knew nothing of that culture and sincerely wanted to learn. In other words, that girl was the alpha or the catalyst to my interest in Mexican culture, not the omega or the ultimate end.

I know how defensive I sound, and that brings me to my main point: Fetishism is a problem. A superficial preference for black males or Asian females or any other group grounded in stereotypes can and does offend deeply. Such a racial ranking of desirable (mostly sexual) partners represents ignorance of the basest kind.

But liberally charging the lone Caucasian at an Asian American Association's event with fetishism is just as dangerous a problem. While fetishism pinpoints cultural ignorance, random charges of fetishism impede attempts to address that very cultural ignorance by dispensing guilt. I wanted to learn more about my friend's ethnic history simply to fill a gap in knowledge I did not know was there until meeting her. Yet guilt tainted any attempt to fill that gap.

Initial cross-racial attraction can be a powerful and enduring motivation for learning about another culture. However, it is important to recognize that such an interest, once sparked, is often sincerely driven by intellectual curiosity rather than an ulterior motive to couple. Unfounded charges of fetishism may frustrate attempts at cross-cultural edification and defeat the very goal originally aspired to by ethnic groups. Alexander T. Nguyen '99, a Crimson editor in Pforzheimer House, is former president of the Asian-American Association.