lvmze replied to your post
im not korean, but i am mixed race (guatemalan+white) and white-passing, so i might be able to help a little bc i totally relate to vernon when it comes to how uncomfortable he is w/ being viewed as white. i dont think whitewashing is the correct term. that's more so for when you take a poc person and erase their ethnicity to make them white. however, the fact that his fc is mixed race is pretty important. there are struggles that come with being mixed race and making jamie fully korean erases those struggles that vernon faces. while i understand that you want to be respectful to how vernon views his ethnicity, making him fully korean doesn't help. at the end of the day vernon is still half white. i think a more respectful way to go about his ethnicity would be to show how the struggles that come with being mixed race.
i knew whitewashing wasn’t the right term, that’s why i said i was using it as a frame of reference but i know what you mean. i guess a better term would be some form of erasure, although it’s more like an erasure of experience rather than of race.
you’ve still given me the opinion i was looking for by confirming should match jamie to vernon’s background, so thank you. writing this out & getting a second opinion solidified this idea but i think you misunderstood me with how i got there.
the whole point of the post was me recognizing & acknowledging the fact that vernon struggled being mixed race, in whatever capacity that was, regardless of how i had been writing out jamie’s backstory so far. it wasn’t to be respectful of how vernon views his ethnicity ( which is extremely important but not for this post ), choosing for jamie to be 100% korean wasn’t honouring that, it’s the other way around ( if that makes any sense ). basically reaching this conclusion that i really should change jamie’s backstory is about making sure that i’m respecting vernon’s experience rather than having made jamie korean in order to do that exactly.
