FOR THE DREAMERS

the driver, a pink haired man, glances over at you and then double takes. you lower your sunglasses.

“you’re hot!” he calls across the lanes. “i’ve got to get to know you.”

smiling, you turn to lean out the window as much as the seatbelt will allow you. your bangles clink against each other.

“yeah? how you gonna get to know me?” you ask, smile on your lips.

“shit, any way i can,” he says with a smile. then, he grabs his phone out the console and pulls up his contact. “my name is yuuji! follow me to main street!”

he holds out his phone. “megs will hang with your friend!”

you laugh, and unbuckle. you lean out the car, giving this yuuji a good look down your low cut shirt. snapping a pic of his contact, you grin at him.

“megs?”

yuuji grins, “megumi!” he claps a hand on his friends shoulder. “drinks at bird on main for us! on me!”

you laugh. how summertime.

“i love megan thee stallion!” you call over the sound of both your friend and his music.

yuuji beams. “i love a bad bitch!”

I really don’t like seeing people go “finally the Black girl gets to be the cute/feminine/soft one/the one who falls in love/the one who gets to be carefree and cheerful and quirky!” and the character is a lightskin biracial woman, often half-white.

Like I’m sorry but I really can’t celebrate it as a “win” for Black female representation, when mixed Black women are always already treated as the feminine standard for Black women. They are already seen as the more acceptable and palatable version of a Black girl, and what Black girls are expected to look like in order to be considered beautiful or sympathetic or worthy of love. Mixed women were always the exception to Black women being deemed too masculine, too aggressive, too sexual, too ghetto, too vulgar, etc., so I just can’t and won’t accept it as a “win” for Black girls when they get to be seen as beautiful, innocent, sweet, the love interest, the princess, etc., because they are already the beauty standard for Black women because they’re closer to whiteness/less unambiguously Black; I’m not saying that it’s not nice to have these characters, or that I’m incapable of loving, connecting, or even relating to them, but I don’t see them as my “soft and girly Black girl” representation, because they don’t represent me and never will. Mixed race women will never experience the same level of masculinization, hypersexualization, and degradation that Black women do, and that’s a fact, so unless I see an unambiguously Black woman with darker skin who actually looks like me in these types of feminine roles, then I won’t force myself to feel represented by it or count it as a “win”, and I shouldn’t have to, either. Just because those characters are accepted doesn’t mean that Black women are accepted; they are the exception and not the rule.

The same is true even in real life as well. “I’m so glad that HYBE let the Black girl be the pretty girl of the group!” Bitch, tf is you talmbout, biracial women being the stand-in for pretty Black women because they’re seen as prettier than Black women is literally already the norm, not the fucking exception. It is not revolutionary and never has been. They would never give a fully Black, darker-skinned, unambiguously Black woman the “visual” role, because Black features are seen as ugly and masculine to them. To them, Manon is pretty because even though she is Black, she has enough adjacence to whiteness to be “safe” and pretty enough in a white person’s eyes. Again, biracial women are seen as the exception to the general rule that Black women are unattractive, rough, and unfeminine. The only “pretty” Black women are the ones who make up for it by being half-white or any other race. Biracial women being placed on a pedestal will not and never trickle down to Black women, and it is fucking clueless and naïve to think that it will. It only further reinforces the notion that Black women are only pretty as long as their Blackness is diluted in some way, because unambiguous Blackness is insufficient, ugly, and masculine. For God’s sake, Lara Raj is not even Black, and she receives the most hate from racists for being dark-skinned and looking “manly”(even by Indian men!!!), so imagine how much worse a fully Black, darkskin girl would be treated.

— a Black army closing the chapter on BTS

i've been an army since 2017/2018 but somewhere along the years i've lost the love of the game. the state of kpop as a whole has been degrading for a long, long time. although, even that is disingenuous to say because kpop has been problematic for longer than i've even been a fan. as a Black female "fan", the disrespect from kpop culture including the idols and fans towards Black culture specifically African American culture is completely unacceptable. when i first got into kpop specifically BTS, i was young and ignorant to how insidious the racism and appropriation really could be. i see no future of mine where i can know better, which i do now, and continue to support this behavior.

getting into my critiques of BTS is difficult because so much of their behavior is recurrent. i'm going to start with the blatant cultural appropriation regarding Black and African American culture:

BTS debuted in 2013 with a "hip-hop" aesthetic which is a shorthand way of saying they were *very* inspired by the rap scene at the time. both rm and suga were underground rappers for a time before BTS and remained rappers long after the group's debut. now there is nothing inherently wrong with being inspired by another culture or genre however, BTS has been ignorant since the beginning. there are multiple videos of members saying the n-word or dressing up in Black aesthetics from durags to fake fros or locs. in 2014, bts's american hustle life reality tv show had bts parading around compton hanging out with Black people and artists claiming to learn the realities of hip hop. are we deadass rn? the show actually opens with BTS getting fake kidnapped by two large Black men who then pretend to hold the hostage. how is this meant to be positive?

by the time i became an army, this era of theirs was long past with them moving on to the most beautiful moment in life and love yourself trilogies.

i wish i could say the ignorance ended there but that would be far from the truth. as recently as literally this year, BTS are once again on stage adopting Black aesthetics for their arirang tour.

as promotional material for their newest album, arirang, BTS dropped a video which animated the real life story of seven korean men who attended Howard University, the HBCU, in 1896 and recorded the first ever recording of the song arirang anywhere in the world. you would think with all the historical precedent set by the importance of HBCUs and Korean history that the animation would accurately represent that. you would be wrong because the majority of the people in the animation pictured above were white. explain to me how a university created with the sole purpose of creating a space for Black people to learn in an era where it was strictly prohibited would be represented by a majority white student body? people are quick to defend BTS saying "they didn't do the animation" or "it was their company's fault." i completely resent how little autonomy kpop fans allot their idols especially idols as prominent and global as BTS. what happened to them being "bigger than the program" or "paving the way"?

aside from that, the album itself is riddled with improper use of AAVE and cheap imitations of the sound that bts came up on which is coincidentally hip-hop and rap once again. though they employed Black producers and choreographers this time around, am i really supposed to celebrate bts paying Black people to create art that they then turn around and disrespect our culture to? seriously.

this section will be focused on my issues with hybe as a company. while yes, BTS is not their company, they are represented by it and hybe is not a good reflection on them at all. my biggest issue is really their silence and complacence towards the genocide taking place in Gaza as well as the company's hand in it all.

their collaborations with brands blatantly under boycott for being complicit in the genocide by supporting or funding israel such as coca cola and mcdonalds set an interesting precedent for a group that once spoke at the UN

not to mention, their own politics as individuals have been questionable for a while now, see: yoongi and jim jones or jungkook and japanese nationalism. both of these situations were written off as accidents which might be true but there is only so much ignorance i can really allow before coming to the realization that these thirty year old korean men simply do not care enough to be sensitive or outspoken about political issues.

i'm not even going to get into the treatment of manon during and after katseye but if you think a company who values black people would treat her like that then i don't know what to tell you

lastly, i will be sharing my opinions about BTS. i have saved my opinions for last because i genuinely wanted this post to be about the facts and objective truth regarding their continued ignorance. though i would be remiss to not share my opinions on my own blog.

arirang as an album is terrible. the album is overproduced and misses its own point by a mile. i saw someone say that the reason most armys don't like it is becaus it is "real hip hop" which armys aren't used to the sound anymore but this is BTS's roots. the concept of BTS's roots being a genre founded, popularized, and led by Black people is actually hilarious.

armys really will let anything slide especially non-Black armys like they don't give a fuck about potential racism or corrupt politics as long as the slop keeps coming 💀

BTS is clinging to nostalgia to keep from irrelevance or trying anything new and its really sad coming from a group that was once well known for being inventive and creative. wings era alone clears everything they've released since 2020.

maybe if a widely held sentiment within the fandom is that their old music was better, it might just be the truth!!

bonus!!!

if you lasted this long, congratulations your attention span is valued and i want to think that you've valued my opinions so far. this mini section is just me listing what i actually did like about BTS (once upon a time)/ what i miss

i first learned about BTS in middle school from a classmate of mine who was a huge koreaboo 😭 around when DNA first dropped

i was a casual listener up until boy with luv and then i became an official army following a death in my family

my mom still texts me whenever she sees anything BTS related because i took her with me to my first ever fancafe

my favorite eras of BTS are skool luv affair, wings, hyyh, and the love yourself trilogy

seeing any old picture of BTS pre-2020 is like seeing an ex. i am straight up mourning

i own the love yourself: tear album as well as BE and D-DAY

my original bias was taehyung (the blue hair really got to me) but i became a yoongi stan somewhere in the 2020s

BTS nostalgia still works on me because of the fond memories I had with them

i genuinely miss what BTS used to be (run BTS, bon voyage, in the soop, the VISUALS each new album) but i refuse to stand by and watch my culture get disrespected

thank you for reading.

further discussion: