*takes a deep breath* I'm sorry for what I'm going to launch into, it might be terribly boring, but I've dealt half a year with this very topic, so it's itching under my nails to get at this from a more society-culture related point of view.

Firstly, the term 'fetish' has a long history and is rather slippery in that it defies a clear definition. The most commonly used definition is certainly the fixation on a certain object (shoes, for example), body part (e.g. feet), or behaviour for sexual gratification that is not usually attached to sexuality. The term dates back to as far as Marx, where fetishism had nothing sexual about it yet. In antrophology a fetish is an object to which divine power has been transferred, so to speak a transcendental place-holder for something that cannot be seen. I personally believe that Freud adopted this view later on when he developped his psychological theory and took fetishism to the realm of sexuality, where we seek it out commonly these days. For Freud, a fetish is whatever stands for something that is socio-culturally unacceptable or at least taboo. It is not acceptable, for instance, to look at the male phallus, so you look at the heel of a shoe and, subconsciously, see the phallus no less (for Freud pretty much everything is a substitute for a phallus, but that's a different story). In short, sexual (socially unacceptable) desires are sublimated into something more innocuous, more socially acceptable.

This is why the definitions of what a fetish actually is vary greatly. Personally, I lean towards a more loose definition of it -- I dislike the 'fixation' part (that is when it becomes a sort of 'pathological' fetishism, and I use the word without judgement), so I define a fetish more into the direction of a strong preference, something one would like to have, but which does not necessarily have to present to achieve sexual gratification. Under my definition -- and some other definitions floating around out there -- your 'fetish' for white men, bambina, would indeed be a fetish. There will be others, however, who will argue the opposite. Either way, I don't think that you have to worry about it at all. You like what you like, and it's not harming anyone...so who cares what other peole think?

As for the reasons why. *takes another deep breath* Basic cultural theory assumes that the society we live in, the rules we play by, the, as it is called, 'cognitive frames' we are provided with by our culture, construct our reality. By giving names to things we also give them meaning. A tree is always a tree, of course -- the real tree does not vanish. But a tree has no meaning if we do not call it a tree. Neither do the letters t-r-e-e have any meaning other than the one we constructed for them. We are all naturally prejudiced -- and we have to be because it is our way of making sense of the world. We need to learn our social structure, the language, the 'what means what' (e.g. different cultures perceive time differently) to be able to navigate our way through the world (that's why this knowledge is often summarised under the term 'conceputal map').

Thus, I am not using the term prejudice in a negative sense, or to express that people are judgemental, racist, whatever. I use it to express that our culture shapes us, maybe even moreso than we shape our culture, and that this shaping leads us to assumptions and presumptions (necessary ones, to a large extent) that, in turn, will shape our expectations, preferences, and perceptions.

With this basic concept established I would like to comment briefly on the, let me call it 'sexualisation', of black people (in western culture, I cannot comment on other cultures...I presume the construction is different there). During the first contact with 'the other' (namely black people) during colonial times, the description of these new encounters of course was really fashionable. What happened, in a nutshell, was a over-sexualisation of black people. The myth of the hypermasculine black male was created (hypermasculinity referring first and foremost to the penis, but also to the heightened sex-drive attributed to black males). Black women, similarly, were reduced to their sexual characteristics. There are depictions of (black) women who basically only consist of large breasts, large nipples, large butts. Whereas it was unacceptable to see a white woman naked -- let alone her genitalia -- it was perfectly acceptable to look at the depiction of a black woman's vagina (in close-up). Black people, male and female, were strongly constructed as 'sexual animals' who were more driven by instinct, more animalistic than civilised (and please, this is by no way true of course). They were reduced to sexuality, their sexual characteristics, their 'naturalness' (as opposed to being 'civilised'). This view of black people became a stereotype and was thus 'fixed' in discourse (which is basically the way we see our world) -- and I firmly believe that despite the many attempts to right this false picture over many years, we still face some of the consequences of these stereotypes. This is perhaps why you get addressed by some guys in the way you do, bambina.

Vice versa, I believe you were straight on -- you may have the picture of the white, domineering male in your head. Again, there is nothing wrong with it at all -- but it is a possible explanation, and one that makes a lot of sense to me.

So, haha, I bored you all to death I'm sure. Sorry for this, but I had to do a little procrastinating