It has racist roots. Like sissy and bimbo kinks have misogynist roots and orientation play has homophobic roots. None of these kinks are problematic. You are into what you are into and any way two adult consenting partners get each other off should be celebrated.

Much of kink is people playing with the things that feel heavy to them in ways that push their buttons.

Race and the dynamics around it are a heavy thing that we internalize as part of our social conditioning, and for some people they have a desire to play with it.

Personally I have no interest, and its important for people to remember that the heavy things they like to play with are difficult subjects and to treat them with care (often people do not adequately engage with why raceplay is so heavy, and then engage with others in a shitty way as a result. At which point it is not play, just racism). But as long as folks treat the subject with the appropriate respect and sensitivity until they've negotiated a dynamic and then stay within what's negotiated I see it as being similar to all the other ways folks like to play with the things that are heavy to them. Like consentual nonconsent, where people roleplay nonconsentual sex, or forced feminization as a way of playing with the harmful way men are measured against a metric of masculinity and punished for failing by comparing them to women as degradation.

But then, I'm white, so folks actually impacted by the heaviness of the subject may feel differently, and its important to listen to people actually impacted by something. In the kink community in my area it crops up as a point of contention periodically.

most taboo subject kinks revolve heavily around the fact that it just is taboo, and the actual taboo itself is more of a flavor (at least in healthy use cases)

I'm a part time professional dominatrix and have had two clients whose sessions involved race play. One where it was the main thing, and the other just part of it. For both of them I could tell they were deriving pleasure from the power exchange aspect, and the race thing was just the specific form it took for them

It makes sense that for a majority of people, it's going to be completely unsexy and seem strange and incomprehensible. If it weren't, it wouldn't be a kink

How's it any different from play involving any other physical attribute?

One observation I've made is that the people most obsessed with BBC type content: white men.

I can't say for certain, but it feels like some kind of victim complex type shit.

It's like they consider White / Asian women who have sex with black men to be "dirtier".

Sexual relations are the continuation of normal relations, making sexuality a mirror reflecting society. Findom reflects class relations, D/S reflects gender relations, SM reflects christianity, race play reflects racism, etc.

It’s just a kink and there are weirder kinks, way way weirder kinks.

I'm literally married to someone of another ethnicity and we've never wanted to do race play.

It's a kink just like anything else. Some people get off on being degraded I guess. I have done race play in the past, it's not really my thing but it is in the moment because it's their thing. Seeing them get off to it is the attractive part, not really the "how" if that makes sense?