I don't want to date gay men, does that make me homophobic?
I am assuming it makes you a heterosexual male. While it is possible to be heterosexual and not be homophobic, it is not possible to exclude people based on race and not be racist. That is a form of racism, albeit one we cannot legislate out of existence because whom one wishes to sleep with is very much a private matter. You are entitled to want only female sexual partners. It doesn't make you homophobic. You are equally entitled to only want sexual partners who are not black. However, if that is a preference, you are, in fact, racist.
Let's be very clear here, you're stating that every race is "technically" racist when it comes to race preference, because they all exhibit this behavior in the data.
Like I said elsewhere, I concede that according to the dictionary definition of racism, it is racist. However, in the real world, calling someone a racist means that a person should feel guilty and ashamed for their wrong choices. Are you telling me that a person (indeed, the vast majority of all people included in those studies), because they're "technically" racist, should feel ashamed for finding one race statistically more attractive than another? If you're not saying it's a bad thing, then you're saying that that form of racism is ok, in which case I'd wonder why you're arguing this at all.
I think a) there is a difference between "I just happen to date my race more" and "I actively exclude people based on their race." b) I think there is a difference between "I happen to be heterosexual" and "I am homophobic."
Homophobic goes well beyond "I don't have sex with people who are my gender" and into "I don't like people who do that, I think they are doing something wrong, etc.."
Just because people date a lot more of their own race doesn't necessarily and automatically mean they intentionally exclude people not of their race.
This is something I have thought a great deal about. I have a genetic disorder. I am white. It is a predominantly white disorder. I was diagnosed late in life. I did not know I had it when I was younger. I grew up in the racist deep south and I married a white man, who was a carrier, so one of our children also has the disorder. I got diagnosed in my thirties and later divorced. Following my diagnosis, during my divorce, the idea of ending up accidentally pregnant by someone who was a carrier really freaked me out and so I went through a period where I actively discriminated against white men, not because I don't like sleeping with white men but because it is a quick and dirty genetics test. (I have blogged about this, if you want the link.)
Anyway, during my divorce, I intentionally went out of my way to not signal to men what my dating/relationship history had been because I did not want to repeat the mistakes of my past and I was very aware that if I told men that my ex husband was, for example, blond, then blond men felt more confident about approaching me and non-blond men felt like I was suggesting I was not interested in them and were more reluctant to pursue me. Even with actively trying to eliminate that sort of bias from men who might be interested, I found that if you analyzed the data, I tended to date more of certain kinds of men. However, I cannot say WHY that was.
One possible explanation was that I simply had more opportunity to date men of certain categories. For example, I have tended to have more relationships to men who were in the military or former military. On the one hand, my father and ex husband were both career military, so I tend to more readily get along with people with a military association of some sort. They tend to understand me better and interpret my bluntness more positively than people without such a background. On the other hand, I was near a military base and I had friends in the military. So I happened to have a much higher opportunity to meet or be introduced to military personnel and former military members under circumstances that made getting involved with them easier.
I was not consciously and intentionally looking for military men or former military members. Nonetheless, my dating numbers did skew towards that subset of the population. I don't think it means I straight up "discriminate against" non military members.
There are other things like that in the data concerning my relationship history. Military vs civilian is not the only category I contemplated when thinking about this and concluding that you can, for example, date more of your own race without straight up being racist. But I chose that as an example in hopes that it is the least problematic example I can use.
I am assuming it makes you a heterosexual male. While it is possible to be heterosexual and not be homophobic, it is not possible to exclude people based on race and not be racist. That is a form of racism, albeit one we cannot legislate out of existence because whom one wishes to sleep with is very much a private matter. You are entitled to want only female sexual partners. It doesn't make you homophobic. You are equally entitled to only want sexual partners who are not black. However, if that is a preference, you are, in fact, racist.