I’m a white man with a lifelong attraction to Black women. Often I’m asked why? Recently, a white friend added another question to the inquiry: Is my attraction a fetish?

Popular modern vernacular, internet variety, suggests that a fetish is heightened pleasure found in strong emotional and often sexual attraction to a particular objectified body part, activity, skin color, power relation–pretty much anything–that lies outside the bounds of what is thought of as ‘ordinary’.

As one online pundit explained, a man’s sexual attraction to women’s breasts will be deemed to be ‘normal’ simply because many men are attracted to breasts. In contrast, an attraction to a woman’s feet qualifies as a fetish because not that many men are turned on sexually by feet.

But there’s much more to the story: when I dug beneath the internet surface to explore the term’s roots, I found that ‘fetish’ originated from Portuguese sailors’ 16th Century initial interactions with various West African tribal groups. In need of a word to capture previously unobserved cultural practices—in particular spiritual worship of objects imbued with otherworldly powers–that fell outside the limits of their Eurocentric colonial lens, the sailors created a new term. They called what they saw “fetish.” When the sailors returned to Europe, among the many things they brought home was their new word.

That new word became an essential element of Western anthropological studies of non-European cultures—of white people ‘studying’ people of color. Their “Theory of Fetishism” led to conclusions that African juju was no more than bedeviled witchery. The theory was consecrated by the highly esteemed German philosopher, G.W.F Hegel, when he pronounced in his “Lectures on the Philosophy of History” (1820-1830) that African people, governed purely by fetishized impulse, were incapable of abstract thought and, in a word, inferior.

Towards the end of the 19th Century, a French psychologist, Alfred Binet, famous for developing the IQ test, a tool employed by American eugenicists in the early 1900’s to justify white supremacy, expanded the Theory of Fetishism to include a wider range of African cultural practices, in particular those of a physical nature (e.g. public nudity and sexual behaviors), that fell outside European norms. Using the adopted lens, African sexuality was defined not only as “perverse” but Binet concluded that the uncivilized “savages” practicing such behaviors were racial and sexual “degenerates”.

When I contacted the friend who asked me if my attraction to Black women was a fetish and shared what I discovered, his response was: “That’s interesting but what does any of that information have to do with interracial relationships today? It’s 2019, my man, we’re a long way from Portuguese sailors and IQ tests.”

I thought for a second and then said, “Maybe we’re not.”

Clearly, what I discovered is the stuff of a much longer conversation.