Did you read Part One?

Another issue in how cultural appropriation of Black culture and Blackness leads people to devalue the culture and people they’re copying: across my research for this essay series – and this installment in particular – one thing that keeps coming up is how little people care for Black members of the fandom spaces and for Black people in general.

One way that they do this is in the way they talk about hip hop and rap.

How many times have you seen people talk about how they didn’t actually like hip-hop or rap until they listened to it from a Korean artist because that version of the genre was so much purer?

I see it primarily with the rappers currently in idol groups, but I don’t doubt that hip-hop artists in Korea who are outside the idol industry get hyped up in a similar way.

Rap from Black USians is always associated with violence, poverty, grasping for unearned power, misogyny, etc.

The image of a rapper to Koreans and to many non-Black fans engaging with this music – especially outside of the US – is someone closer to Fetty Wap in “Trap Queen” or Snoop Dogg in the nineties than Jidenna in “Long Live the Chief” or Janelle Monae and Missy Elliot in uh… anything.

Like there’s no attempt to understand that there’s diversity in hip-hop in the US, that rappers and Black people come from all walks of life and are valid because of it.

“Ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied.

Edward Said, Orientalism

“Dressing up as “another culture”, is racist, and an act of privilege. Not only does it lead to offensive, inaccurate, and stereotypical portrayals of other people’s culture … but is also an act of appropriation in which someone who does not experience that oppression is able to “play”, temporarily, an “exotic” other, without experience any of the daily discriminations faced by other cultures.”

Kjerstin, Johnson, “Don’t Mess Up When You Dress Up: Cultural Appropriation and Costumes”

Near the end of January 2019, TK Park of “Ask A Korean” fame took to his site in order to talk about the response from (primarily) Black people to the article he and Youngdae Kim had written for New York Magazine/Vulture about the history of Korean hip hop.

In Park’s article “K-pop in the Age of Cultural Appropriation,” he argues that the idea of cultural appropriation is “inapposite” to K-pop because “K-pop is a product to imperialism by the West, and in particular the United States”.

Park unpacks this statement across the article to some various levels of success, but essentially his goal lies in removing the very potential of/responsibility for the appropriation of Black American culture from Koreans and Korean Americans. He does this, in part, by repeatedly bringing up the aftermath of the Korean War and the long arm of US imperialism as reasons why Black people “can’t” complain. (I’m legitimately Not Kidding about this shit.)

He makes it about privilege as he scolds the (presumed Black) audience for daring to have opinions about how Black music and culture are repackaged by many Korean hip-hop and pop artists and discussed by them and their fans.