
Nobody cares if you hit it off with an individual who happens to be of a different race, and you treat them like an individual. Where it becomes fetishization is when you project exoticism or racial stereotypes on a group of people, and constantly make reference to their ethnicity when you talk about them.
My old roommate in college was a white dude, and his girlfriend was Black. I never once thought “this dude fetishizes Black women” about him, because he never said any weird shit about her race. That was just his girlfriend. If that mf had been calling her his Nubian Queen or some shit, then yeah, I would’ve been like “man this dude is a weird ass race fetishizer” lmao