Your Attraction Is Yours

I remember a day in my multicultural counseling class as a graduate student. I was innocently chatting with another student about attraction, and I mentioned that I found myself more attracted to White men than to men of other races. I didn't realize my professor had been listening, and without missing a beat, she responded, “Harry, that's a form of internalized racism, because you've been taught to elevate Whiteness and to see them as more attractive than others”. I remember being shocked and taken aback. I was just starting to come out, and now I was afraid that if I dated a White man, I was somehow doing something wrong.

I truly think this conversation set my dating life back years. I already carried enough trauma and baggage from my religious and culturally conservative childhood — enough to make coming out and dating as a gay man difficult. Now the added fear that I was somehow engaging in a form of racism, or possibly going to cause myself some unnamed harm by dating the Colonizer, was just too much.

What no one taught me was that attraction is complicated. There is no one-size-fits-all model for it. Yes, many different factors may go into the why and the how, but at the end of the day, attraction is a subjective feeling. We may not always know the why and the how.

I have come across many other Asian and BIPOC men who struggle similarly. Many of us worry that who we find ourselves attracted to makes us harmful, or tells others that we're okay with being fetishized or tokenized. Some of us forego relationships altogether out of this fear, and even shame ourselves for it.

That shame is the true harm. Shame drives disconnection. It makes us lonely and causes us so much pain and grief — all of it for something many of us cannot control, all of it because we are afraid to allow ourselves to be our truest selves.

I don't think my professor meant to cause harm the way she did. I truly believe she was trying to tell me to reflect, to think, to be mindful of my attraction. But she also placed an enormous amount of shame on me. And that's what gets misunderstood in these conversations: no one should be made to feel ashamed of their attraction. By telling someone their attraction is wrong or harmful, you are shaming them. You are teaching them to doubt loving someone — and you can't build a relationship on doubt.

So instead of assuming an Asian or BIPOC person is enacting a racist or tokenizing stereotype when you see them in an interracial relationship, take the time to understand their relationship.

Years later, I realized that my professor was inviting me to reflect on my attraction, not shame it. Reflection was never supposed to make me doubt who I'm drawn to. It was supposed to teach me discernment: the ability to tell the difference between attraction, which is mine and needs no defense, and fetishization, which belongs to whoever is doing it to me. Shame collapses that distinction. It tells you the problem lives inside your own desire, so you turn inward and interrogate the one thing you can't control — and all the while, you never learn to spot the actual harm when it walks toward you.

Discernment does the opposite. It lets you hold your attraction with curiosity instead of suspicion, and it hands you the clarity to name what you will not accept from someone else. Attraction is yours. It rises up on its own, and it doesn't owe anyone an explanation. The work was never to interrogate our desire — it was to build enough self-trust that we could stop mistaking our own hearts for the thing that harms us.

None of this means our preferences form in a vacuum. Of course they don't. The media we grew up on, the faces held up as desirable, the beauty standards handed to us by a culture steeped in white supremacy — all of it shapes the landscape of who we notice and who we're taught to want. My professor wasn't wrong that these forces exist. Where I think she erred was in collapsing that broad, structural truth onto a single student in a single moment, as though my attraction were a personal moral failing rather than one small expression of a world none of us designed. Naming a pattern across a culture is analysis. Aiming it at one person's heart is shame. And shame, it turns out, is remarkably bad at helping anyone examine anything.

So to the Asian and BIPOC men carrying this quietly: you don't have to earn your way out of shame to deserve connection. You just have to let yourself be your truest self, and trust that who you love is allowed to be part of that. That's not internalized racism. That’s owning your sexuality. That's coming home to yourself.