Is Sexual Racism Really Racism? Distinguishing Attitudes Toward Sexual Racism and Generic Racism Among Gay and Bisexual Men

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Web End = Arch Sex Behav (2015) 44:19912000 DOI 10.1007/s10508-015-0487-3

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Web End = Is Sexual Racism Really Racism? Distinguishing Attitudes Toward Sexual Racism and Generic Racism Among Gay and Bisexual Men

Denton Callander Christy E. Newman Martin Holt

Received: 18 June 2014 / Revised: 12 January 2015 / Accepted: 16 January 2015 / Published online: 7 July 2015 Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Abstract Sexual racism is a specic form of racial prejudice enacted in the context of sex or romance. Online, people use sex and dating proles to describe racialized attraction through languagesuchasNotattractedtoAsians.Amonggayandbisexual men, sexual racism is a highly contentious issue. Although some characterize discrimination among partners on the basis of race as a form of racism, others present it as a matter of preference. In May 2011, 2177 gay and bisexual men in Australia participated in an online survey that assessed how acceptably they viewed onlinesexualracism.Althoughthemensampleddisplayeddiverse attitudes,manywereremarkablytolerantofsexualracism.Weconducted two multiple linear regression analyses to compare factors related to mens attitudes toward sexual racism online and their racist attitudes more broadly. Almost every identied factor associated with mens racist attitudes was also related to their attitudestowardsexualracism.Theonlydifferenceswerebetween men who identied as Asian or Indian. Sexual racism, therefore, is closely associated with generic racist attitudes, which challenges the idea of racial attraction as solely a matter of personal preference.

Keywords Sexual racism Gay men Online dating

Racialized attraction Racial prejudice Sexual orientation

Introduction

Discrimination between potential sexualor romantic partners on the basis of perceived racial identity has been referred to as sexual racism. Stember (1978) initially dened sexual racism as,the sexual rejectionof the racial minority, theconsciousattemptonthepartofthemajoritytopreventinterracial cohabitation(p. xi). Today,sexual racismis popularly employed in media and research settings as shorthand for racialdiscriminationbetweensexualorromanticpartners.There is contention, however, about whether this is an appropriate label when it comes to understanding something as complex and personal as desired. Indeed, some commentators contend that distinguishing among partners on the basis of perceived race is not racism at all but a justiable personal preference (e.g., Matheson, 2012). Researchers have sought to unpack the intersections of race and...