That K-Pop singer has way more beauty, talent, charm and success than you’ll ever be able to accomplish, Mr. Lederhosen.
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As for that other guy going for the Asian equivalent of Rachel Dolenzal, he’s a little messed up. I’m sure he and Dolenzal never intended to be bigots but what they’re doing is frowned upon doing to being a bizarre form of inappropriate cultural appropriation as well as “Blackface” and “Yellowface”.
It’s one thing to do it temporarily as a social experiment to try to get a glimpse at what it’s like from “their” point of view (like the Black Like Me guy) and learn extra empathy… but to pretend 24⁄7, co-opting someone else’s struggle and often embracing stereotypes to do it (sometimes without knowing) is seen as insulting.
Dolenzal, this guy pretending to be that BTS guy and the late Espirito “Iron Eyes Cody” DeCorti likely have / had their hearts in the right place (as in they don’t hate the groups they’re aping and Rachel & Espirito were both involved in pro-Black, pro-Indigeamerican and Environmental Activism) but they were still opportunists and inadvertently ethnicist in their own way.
It’s important that Allies realize that their role is more auxiliary and that they need to do their darndest to listen, learn, try to understand and change what they’ve been doing wrong. The allies’ role is to work with their peers and convince them and help… using their power as the privileged group… to help affect change on a legal level and with each other.
They need to be extra careful when doing stuff on their own or they’ll come up with something dumb like the movie Green Book, The Help or the Saved By The Bell episode “Running Zack” (meant to be pro-Indigenous American but involves weird stuff like the white, blond Zack Morris discovering a single Nez Pierce ancestor and doing his final report with a ‘moving speech’ about ‘his ancestors’ plight… while clad in full Plains Indians regalia and headdress. Weren’t the Nez Pierce from the Northwest?).
Sadly, even that great anti-ethnicism literary classic, To Kill A Mockingbird is now seen as somewhat questionable and it doesn’t help that Go Set A Watchman (the very contested sequel which was likely coerced out of an aging, senile Harper Lee) subverts the former and states that blacks are like children and Atticus Finch was more about “protecting a child” from the death penalty rather that ethnic equality (in other words, the idea that violent acts of hate against blacks is wrong but blacks are still lesser and whites play a ‘Parental’ role to these ‘lesser’ people).
Seeing that the “Sequel” started as the original manuscript of To Kill A Mockingbird it calls everything about Harper Lee into question and that it only became a classic due to Executive Meddling, rewrites and being more appealing to the Civil Rights Era set.
