At one point in this thread, this person brought up ignorance vs plain racism and said that bts is racist and NOT ignorant. Im doing my senior thesis on cultural appropriation in kpop, and I’d like to say that Koreans aren’t educated abt other races and cultures in school...

That means that they are ignorant rather than racist. The term “multicultural education” wasn’t even introduce into Korean Education till 2007. Korea has a LONG way to go in that regard but the reason that kpop idols (bts in this example) have culturally appropriated in the past

Is BECAUSE of the lack of education regarding other cultures and races. Korea is a homologous society so it’s no surprise that bts, + other artists, have culturally appropriated the black community, it can’t be helped they really don’t know much better

Now that doesn’t excuse the past actions of kpop idols, but that doesn’t mean you can just shut them down and say they’re bad ppl. America is full of diversity while Korea only really has Koreans (+some other Asian ethnicities) so instead of saying that they’re bad ppl, we should

Do our part to try and educate Koreans and hope that the education system will change soon. There is SLIGHT progress being made, according to the authors of “The Immigration & Education Nexus-- A Focus on the Context & Consequences of Schooling”

So if you want more information regarding schooling in Korea and why these incidents have happened I HIGHLY recommend that you actually look into societal issues before saying that someone is a bad person. And let’s just try to educate our idols as best as we can

I’m not black, so I can’t speak on that experience but I do believe that kpop idols are just ignorant, not trying to be blatantly racist, if they are then someone tell me when they were saying they wanted to target the black community/culturally appropriate and I’ll stop stanning

I want to make sure my view was clear bc it IS WRONG that they’ve done that stuff but I don’t think they did it on purpose, they just lack the knowledge on other cultures and that’s more of Korea’s society’s fault rather than theirs