Music Video Anatomy is something I’ve been considering for a few weeks now especially in the context of my ongoing project on anti/blackness in Korean pop and hip hop. I tweet a lot of music video links during the day and I wanted to collect some of my thoughts and music recs somewhere more organized than that site. Hence this new recurring feature. It won’t all be modern Korean pop/hip hop – I have been revisiting older pop and hip hop here in the US – but it’ll skew heavily towards that!
Title: Born Hater
Artist: Epik High featuring Beenzino, Verbal Jint, MINO (Winner), Bobby (iKON), and B.I
Over the last few months, a few friends and I have been meeting online semi-regularly to watch pre-recorded conference panels or academic talks. While this originally began as a system of mutual accountability around a seminar series, it’s since mutated into an actually enjoyable part of my downtime.
After years of struggle, the academic conference experience suddenly has room for joy again. It’s been a damn revelation to me!
Hey friends and assorted nerds, I come bearing some links to things that have held my attention since last time we did this! Go read, watch, or listen to them right away!
“I’m the only cast member who had their own unique experience of that franchise based on their race,” he says, holding my gaze. “Let’s just leave it like that. It makes you angry with a process like that. It makes you much more militant; it changes you. Because you realise, ‘I got given this opportunity but I’m in an industry that wasn’t even ready for me.’ Nobody else in the cast had people saying they were going to boycott the movie because [they were in it]. Nobody else had the uproar and death threats sent to their Instagram DMs and social media, saying, ‘Black this and black that and you shouldn’t be a Stormtrooper.’ Nobody else had that experience. But yet people are surprised that I’m this way. That’s my frustration.”
2020 has been a year where I have consistently been proven correct about things. Case in point? I knew that the Star Wars fandom’s unending racism absolutely was impacting how John moved throughout the world. I knew it was taking a toll on him across his time as Finn. And I mean, he confirmed it. He also talked about how antiblackness in the industry – from the people working around him and from casual oversights – left him essentially wounded. Star Wars should’ve been a positive and affirming nerd experience for John, but it really was not.
Did you know that on Twitter and Tumblr, there’s a thing folks do where they literally tag in another person of color to take over shouting at a person of color talking about race and racism in fandom or media?
Folks will see a fan of color say anything critical of a piece of media or in a particular fandom and if they disagree hard enough or they’re bored and want to start shit, they’ll tag a user they know disagrees publicly on Tumblr or Twitter, effectively turning them into an attack dog in the name of that specific thing.
And friends, I am here to tell you how that’s racist as hell.
Especially when it comes to minor to major antiblackness in media like the kind we constantly do see from Korean pop and hip-hop artists. If you don’t mean it when you apologize, why are you apologizing in the first place?
Images in the header are from an archived version of lelola.net, a site that fueled my journey as a teenaged weeb.
Who made this series?
While the first official piece of Weiss Kreuz media was the 1997 light novel “Weiß: Forever White”, the most well-known piece of media for the franchise is the 1998 anime series Weiss Kreuz. That initial and poorly animated series came from studio ufotable and was directed by Hitoyuki Matsui, produced by Jikenta Nishikawa an Hikaru Kondō, and was written in-house at ufotable.
Labeling the posts that fans of color make about racist fanworks (from accidental issues of representation to purposeful content created to harm) and racism from fans (again ranging from “I didn’t know this was an issue” moments to sustained targeted harassment) as “wank” or “drama” actually does contribute to people writing off what we’re talking about and experiencing. (Contrary to the “talking about racism in fandom makes it harder for folks to care about Real Racism” stance…)
If you don’t use “fandom wank” to refer to (for example) a fan creating really racist art of a Black character because they were accused of whitewashing them, but you do use it when talking about the people calling that out…
Well.
At the end of the day, if you use “fandom wank” or “drama” as your tags or terminology when you’re talking about folks talking about racism in fandom, you’re actively contributing to a culture of fandom that ignores that real harm is happening to fans of color in fandom because of the different levels of racism here.
It’s not something I expect to see change anytime soon because this is something I’ve seen done for at least a decade and folks do love their familiarity, but –
Consider that what’s wank and drama to you in conversations about racism in fandom – and why you tag and talk about it as such – is actually serious for many fans of color who are frustrated to see their experiences dismissed as “wank”.
Please understand how funny it is to see someone (who I don’t know and who certainly does not know me considering how much they’re lying about me in that tweet alone) publicly admit that the reason they don’t like my work is because they have decided my goal is to make them feel bad to be white.
Like that’s what scared her away from my work… the idea that I, a Black person growing up in a world that makes it clear that we do not matter no matter what we do and writing at a time in history where Black people are being maimed and killed by features of whyte supremacy at really high rates, might not love whiteness right about now.
September is all about placeholders, catching up, and hurricane prep.
It’s peak hurricane season from here until the end of October (November usually doesn’t have hurricanes like that but I’m prepared to be wrong) so there is a huge chance that I will be preoccupied with dealing with storms as the month crawls on.
So, I can’t promise any content beyond what I didn’t get to do in August for Patreon (because for once I did most of the stuff for my site) because I’m still trying to hustle and take care of my family since things are tough BUT I will do my best!
You’re not going to convince me that any white person who is super hostile at the mere idea that fandom is racist by default and design (especially the folks who just love to tone police fans of color and call us mean/bullies for being done with racism in fandom) is an ally or that they will be any actual help in the horrifying future we’re heading towards.
No one who frames fans of color talking about racism in fandom as bullies, ideological purists, haters, cops, antis, etc actually cares about people of color (outside of their sometimes treasured tokens).
People who think that harassing people because they talk about racism in fandom will NOT be using their privilege or visibility to fight racism online or offline.
Hello, Darlings, this is our first Stitch Talks Ish issue episode, my bad, since May or June. If you missed that episode, it was an episode about the way that non-black people — not just white people, this also includes non-black people of color — were utilizing the phrase “Black Lives Matter” while also being incredibly anti black in practice, and to specific black people, like myself. And it’s been several months since the start of widespread conversations about police brutality, fatal anti blackness, systemic oppression, and the universality of anti blackness; and the important thing to note is that it hasn’t gotten any better.
As I record this right now. There’s another… There are two black men who have been shot by police officers one, I don’t know where he’s from, I don’t think his hashtag is currently trending. But one was shot seven times in front of his children after getting into his car following breaking up a fight. Like dude was completely unarmed. He was basically shot for being a good samaritan and trying to stop shit. And as I write this, as I, as I talk to you guys, I’m very much aware of the fact that we are hurtling towards a time when the United States is not going to be safe at any level for any of us, and kind of especially black people. And the same people who have plastered Black Lives Matter across their… their social media, while publicly and privately slandering black people, who will accuse black people, like myself, of using Black Lives Matter to gain some sort of clout in a world that hates us, and does not care about us, are currently pretending they care about Black Lives Matter, Black people our very, very fucked up future that is looming or speeding towards us.
And so I suggest if you haven’t listened to that episode already, please listen to it; and please be better about who you, are what you do in fandom spaces in, your social spaces, if you have them. But this episode is supposed to be a lighter episode. So no more talk of that, I guess.
I haven’t shared a lists of links in a while, huh?
Well here’s some of what I’ve been reading, speaking on, and watching across the internet!
Roundtable of Legends of Korean Hip-Hop: The Quiett, Swings & Paloalto | THE VETERAN EP. 1
I’m doing this like intense and incredible speed-run through Korean hip hop across my project because I want to know and listen to everyone and out of nowhere (for me, a person who does not follow HipHopLE on social media and does not read Korean well enough that that’d make any difference anyway), here comes a casual conversation between three of the “greats” in Korean hip hop. Out of the three men here, I’m more familiar with The Quiett’s work but I’ve listened to them all and seen them in things.
One thing that stood out for me was how this understated “three dudes talk hip hop history and memories” was one of the things that felt really close to the things I grew up with in terms of Black rappers siting down and talking about their own histories. So it’s interesting and they touch on a lot of incredible memories and moments in their lives as rappers, producers, and dudes who ran (run?) their own labels or crews.
I knew I’d wind up writing about blackface before this project was done.
Early on in my research before I ever had the #StitchProcesses hashtag and back when I could pretend I wasn’t super invested (like yes, there was a time when I could “play it cool” about all of this), my youngest niece and I went on a binge of research on YouTube. One of the things that kept coming up during my early outlining was how so many of the lists of cultural appropriation taken to extremes involved blackface from idols as part of the problem.
Within minutes of scrolling through YouTube, we came across acts like the still active and (sort of) blackface-ing Bubble Sisters. We saw a (racist in its own right) documentary on blackface in Korea and Japan that showed a large number of blackface moments that left us both shaking. Some of the same incidents involving idols – like A Pink’s Bomi made up as Michol, the Bubble Sisters’ everything, and Super Junior’s Shindong and Yesung in two separate instances of Blackface and other members of the group supporting a performer in blackface – show up on those same lists about cultural appropriation.
The only problem with that is that blackface is not a form of cultural appropriation. It is minstrelsy and horrifically antiblack on top of that, but it’s not appropriation. They’re not appropriating anything, they’re insulting it.
No one likes feeling as if they’re under attack when they’re just trying to do their thing and vibe in a space that feels right.
Fandom is comprised of digital and physical spaces populated by people from various marginalized communities and with vulnerable backgrounds or traumatic pasts. We’re talking about people constantly under fire from someone, usually for something that they are or that they’ve gone through. In fandom, sometimes criticism at every single level is constantly taken as an attack and for the most part, I do understand the process behind rejecting critique that seems aimed to injure instead of educating others.
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