This year is quickly teaching everyone that K-pop fans never miss a single beat. Not when promoting their favorite artists, or even when involving themselves in racial and political movements. Their weapon of choice is none other than the fancam: the 2020 stan’s most powerful — and potentially problematic — online tool for building K-pop’s […]
https://kultscene.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/fancams.jpg15002100Kushal Devhttps://kultscene.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/KULTSCENE-LOGO-2018-TRANSPARENT-RED.pngKushal Dev2020-07-02 07:56:192020-07-02 08:47:58K-pop activism must go further than fancams
The past few weeks have seen an increased interest in K-pop and the politics that surround it as U.S. fans implemented tactics used to promote their favorite acts to fight police brutality and racism. The emergence of K-pop fans as “unlikely allies” and “unsung heroes” for the Black Lives Matter movement received praise from celebrities, […]
https://kultscene.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/silence-of-black-fans.jpg15002100Nnehkai Agborhttps://kultscene.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/KULTSCENE-LOGO-2018-TRANSPARENT-RED.pngNnehkai Agbor2020-06-30 08:28:332020-06-30 08:28:35The erasure of Black K-pop fans in the wake of BLM & activism
This year is quickly teaching everyone that K-pop fans never miss a single beat. Not when promoting their favorite artists, or even when involving themselves in racial and political movements. Their weapon of choice is none other than the fancam: the 2020 stan’s most powerful — and potentially problematic — online tool for building K-pop’s […]
https://kultscene.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/fancams.jpg15002100Kushal Devhttps://kultscene.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/KULTSCENE-LOGO-2018-TRANSPARENT-RED.pngKushal Dev2020-07-02 07:56:192020-07-02 08:47:58K-pop activism must go further than fancams
The past few weeks have seen an increased interest in K-pop and the politics that surround it as U.S. fans implemented tactics used to promote their favorite acts to fight police brutality and racism. The emergence of K-pop fans as “unlikely allies” and “unsung heroes” for the Black Lives Matter movement received praise from celebrities, […]
https://kultscene.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/silence-of-black-fans.jpg15002100Nnehkai Agborhttps://kultscene.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/KULTSCENE-LOGO-2018-TRANSPARENT-RED.pngNnehkai Agbor2020-06-30 08:28:332020-06-30 08:28:35The erasure of Black K-pop fans in the wake of BLM & activism
This year is quickly teaching everyone that K-pop fans never miss a single beat. Not when promoting their favorite artists, or even when involving themselves in racial and political movements. Their weapon of choice is none other than the fancam: the 2020 stan’s most powerful — and potentially problematic — online tool for building K-pop’s visibility in a media landscape that often racializes and erases it.
American media has a long history of denying K-pop—and people of Asian diasporas more broadly — their place in U.S. pop culture. Articles about K-pop from the early 2010s, like John Seabrook’s “Factory Girls,” demonstrated that American media acknowledged K-pop’s existence, but diminished it as a fad of Korean absurdity instead of a legitimate musical production (only a handful of writers and outlets, including Billboard and the now-defunct MTV Iggy, gave K-pop any serious attention). It was only when BTS’ albums began topping the Billboard200 regularly that American entertainment publications, who knew differences in the facial structures of the Kardashian sisters down to DNA, suddenly scrambled to become relevant to the growing Stateside K-pop fanbase, even mixing up K-pop idols with Instagram models in the process.
Fancams, or short clips of K-pop idols performing their songs, have appeared all over the internet in recent months, from the replies on Trump tweets to those on entertainment news publications; South Korean media conglomerates regularly release fancams now in recognition of the trend’s impact. They serve as a further embodiment of K-pop’s increasing relevance to western pop culture. To some, however, K-pop stans’ trolling is ruining the internet as we know it. The relentless posting of fancams has earned considerable backlash in the form of online rant videos entitled “F*CK K-POP STANS” and the viral #fancamsareoverparty hashtag, alongside similar tags and statements that trend every few weeks. The sudden ubiquity of fancams has even been covered and analyzed by multiple outlets, including Mashable, members of the Cardiff University community, and Distractify.
At its core, K-pop fancam spam is a political practice, a deliberate repurposing of traditional methods of spamming and trolling for the sake of questioning the boundaries of politics and racialization. By posting under Trump rants and Fox News articles, as well as Ariana Grande tweets and Pop Crave reports, K-pop fandoms mounted the argument that their favorite artists deserve visibility in pop culture. And if EW or ClevverNews won’t post enough about it, then stans will. In this way, posting a fancam is a subversive callout of the racialized marginalization of Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and Thai artists in American and western media, even if fans themselves often engage in the practice only for promotional — and not overtly political — purposes. With the fancam, ARMYs, Orbits, BLINKs, and other K-pop fans assert that the cultural products of Asian artists cannot be reduced to a fad or moment. They instead create a constant virality that, for the American onlooker, is becoming harder and harder to ignore.
In recent weeks, we’ve seen the fan communities that post these clips mobilize and weaponize fancams for a related but different political purpose—the obstruction of anti-Black racism and policing. When Dallas police asked citizens to upload videos and images of protestors to their iWatch Dallas app, K-pop fans deliberately flooded the app with K-pop fancams, forcing the app to go down temporarily. K-pop fans similarly flooded the #CalminKirkland hashtag, which was used by the Kirkland Police Department to identify people involved in “rioting or looting,” with fancams of artists like BTS and ITZY. Most notably, K-pop fans and TikTok users banded together to sell out tickets to Trump’s 2020 campaign rally in Tulsa, only to leave those seats embarrassingly empty. Commentary in the MIT Technology Review as well as a tweet from Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have now acknowledged the political power of “K-pop allies.”
But the fancam may not be the perfect weapon of choice in the fight for racial equity, as there are critical flaws in this narrative of justice-seeking and AfroAsian solidarity among members of the K-pop fan community. While fancam spam might have been a form of subversive justice for underrated K-pop artists, it does not resolve anti-Blackness within K-pop audiovisual cultures and fan circles, let alone anti-Blackness in America and around the world.
Black fans on Twitter and in anumberofpublications and forums have commented on anti-Blackness in K-pop fan communities. K-pop groups have also carried out anti-Black racist behavior, from Blackface and singing the n-word, to rampant cultural appropriation of hairstyles and dress. Fans and commentators regularly point out that much of K-pop’s musical roots can be found in past and present Black American cultural productions. The global emergence of K-pop has made clear that, while there is justice attained in achieving greater visibility for Korean and other Asian artists, anti-Blackness might actually be amplified by K-pop fandoms in some ways, in spite of the recent rally around the Black Lives Matter movement among its global fan communities.
Overwhelming hashtags like #WhiteLivesMatter with fancams has been recognized and praised in some media circles, but the practice has actually been criticized by Black K-pop fans and followers. KultScene’s very own Nnehkai Agbor comments that while “co-option has been a beneficial tool for fans to gain control of or change narratives… fans who hijacked the tag did not consider the ramifications of trending the name of a dangerous group” whose name and goals are rooted in hate and anti-Blackness. Kpopcast co-host Stephanie Parker also found the practice of hijacking racist hashtags a disturbing and anti-Black rather than anti-racist. “Did you ask a single Black person if this was a good idea? No, I can answer that for you… no,” she said on an episode of the podcast titled “Listen to Black K-pop fans.” Clearly, what may feel like online activism and anti-racist collective action to non-Black K-pop fans might actually be nothing more than using moments of racial tension to promote your faves at the expense of Black fans and Black people.
A recent Reuters article brought these tensions to a front with the headline “Global K-pop fans emerge as a political force, but some in South Korea worry.” The article cites wariness from South Korean fans of popular K-pop groups, who are worried “that their favourite artists will be pulled into foreign partisan fights.” While the voices of South Korean fans should definitely be centered in narratives about K-pop and the Hallyu wave, we also need to question whether the fight against anti-Blackness is “foreign” to K-pop artists. Despite the fact that many K-pop stars come from South Korea (and often Japan, China, and Thailand among other countries as well), we must remember that K-pop artists often perform musical styles and genres that were first pioneered by Black Americans navigating the repercussions and realities of centuries of subjugation and oppression. Some K-pop stars like GOT7’s Mark Tuan and ITZY’s Lia have lived in the U.S. and Canada, respectively, which demonstrates that K-pop artists and K-pop music, at some level, may not be so “foreign” after all.
This is not to say that K-pop has no Korean roots — that would be an absurd and ignorant claim. Songs like “I Love You” by 2NE1 pull influence from trot, a genre of popular Korean music that was popular in the 1960s and ‘70s, and has connections to Korea’s own history with Japanese imperialism and colonialism. K-pop stars also regularly advertise Korean culture — products, food, tourism, sites, and history — in music videos, vlogs, and dramas. But to act as if many K-pop artists are simply unrelated to or “foreign” to the fight for Black liberation is equally ignorant of the genre’s musical roots. This is why a $1 million donation to Black Lives Matter from BTS — a group whose music largely draws from and is inspired by Black productions of hip-hop and rap — is not only a reflection of BTS’ choice to engage in American movements, but also a demonstration of the considerable stakes that K-pop and its fans have in justice for Black people and communities in the U.S. and around the world.
These complicated racial realities and tensions inherent in K-pop’s global emergence beg the question to fellow fans: Why are you posting fancams right now?
The mobilizing capacity of global K-pop fans has the political power to center more narratives than just those of our favorite idols. Wouldn’t it be better to trend hashtags about Oluwatoyin Salau, a young Black woman and activist who was sexually assaulted and murdered in the midst of fighting for Black lives and Black trans lives? Shouldn’t K-pop stans be using our collective power to center thinkers like Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who have imagined a world without police and prisons for decades and continue to inspire activism and organizing around the issues of police and prison abolition?
As BLINKs, ONCEs, ARMYs, Orbits, and fans of other K-pop acts, we have stakes in movements for Black liberation, too. We also know how to challenge online boundaries and find new avenues of representation and visibility through tweeting, spamming, and simply existing where we sometimes feel we aren’t supposed to. Let’s use this ground-shaking energy for efforts that go beyond symbols and tags—instead, let’s emphasize trending donation links, petitions, and Black-led protests and organizations that center Black people, their experiences, and their voices. Or else, we risk drowning out other voices in favor of our own, which seems a lot like what we were fighting against in the first place.
KultScene is a writer-driven website dedicated to creating a platform where diverse voices’ takes on K-pop can be heard. If you like this post and would like to see more by helping support KultScene’s writers fund, please email us for more details.
https://kultscene.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/fancams.jpg15002100Kushal Devhttps://kultscene.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/KULTSCENE-LOGO-2018-TRANSPARENT-RED.pngKushal Dev2020-07-02 07:56:192020-07-02 08:47:58K-pop activism must go further than fancams
The past few weeks have seen an increased interest in K-pop and the politics that surround it as U.S. fans implemented tactics used to promote their favorite acts to fight police brutality and racism. The emergence of K-pop fans as “unlikely allies” and “unsung heroes” for the Black Lives Matter movement received praise from celebrities, politicians, and the media for their allyship and activism. Their notoriety on social media was reimagined as they became viewed as vigilantes fighting the good fight. That notion was furthered when fans and TikTokers used their savviness to sabotage a Trump rally in Tulsa, OK, by reserving seats and not attending the event.
The mainstream coverage surrounding K-pop’s political activism centered around stereotypes and one-dimensional takes on the identity of K-pop’s fandoms. The surprise activism of assumed young, white women became the story but ignored the activism history of K-pop fans and the diversity of fans. While media outlets began to explore K-pop’s fandom in-depth, the erasure of Black fans from most conversations was a deafening reminder of history repeating itself. Black people – especially Black women – are left out of conversations that impact them. In fandom, the erasure of Black voices results from anti-Blackness and co-option.
Black fans served as the backbone of K-pop fans joining the Black Lives Matter movement. They rallied together laying the groundwork to bring attention to the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and police brutality within their fandoms and the K-pop industry. They used #BlackLivesMatter hashtags within their fandom spaces and tagged their favorite acts.
Initially, their efforts were met with pushback aimed to keep K-pop and politics separate from each other.
point is we shouldn’t be praising idols for doing something that we should not have had to beg for, FOR DAYS. we are not wrong for saying open your purse, bc donating can lead to others donating. we aren’t wrong for asking to spread info and links because it’s common sense.
Throughout K-pop’s legacy, it has not been able to remain completely apolitical. Artists have shown support for comfort women and been caught in the crossfires of foreign politics in Asia. When the #MeToo movement reached South Korean, girl group Girls’ Generation’s debut track “Into A New World” became a protest anthem for women fighting against sexual harassment and abuse. The attempts to not pressure K-pop idols into speaking about police brutality is a by-product of the anti-Blackness within the diverse communities that make up the fandom.
Anti-Blackness perpetuates a single-story about Black people and culture derived from European colonization and globalization. These stereotypes are passed within non-Black communities and find placement within K-pop fandom. While some non-Black fans may find themselves accepting of Black fans, the hostility that manifests suggests otherwise. The policing of hashtags that focus on representing Black fans and gaslighting conversations that address their mistreatment are examples of anti-Blackness at work. The most visible way anti-Blackness rears its head among K-pop fans is during conversations about appropriation.
Within K-pop’s fandom, the appropriation of Black culture and hip-hop is a constant conversation among its Black fans but often overlooked by their counterparts. They excuse appropriation as ignorance while dismissing or talking over the voices of their Black peers. For non-Black fans, the need to preserve the integrity of a K-pop idol often overshadows the need to provide Black fans the space to educate on why cultural appropriation is harmful. K-pop’s incorporation of hip-hop made the latter palatable for consumers who wanted to enjoy hip-hop without having to address its politics and legacies.
However, the politics of hip-hop is fighting for human rights for Black people. Some K-pop acts have taken initiative in acknowledging the impact of Black culture and music on the industry. Some donated to organizations supporting Black Lives Matter, while others advocated by posting petitions and sharing the stories of Floyd and Taylor. Rapper CL of former girl group 2NE1 and R&B singer Crush took to their Instagrams to show solidarity and share how Black culture influences the K-pop industry and their careers.
As seen with the hijacking of #whitelivesmatter, co-option has been a beneficial tool for fans to gain control of or change narratives. While they were able to drown out racist rhetoric and troll the hashtags enough to trend within Twitter’s K-pop category, the intent of showing solidarity with BLM became distorted.
White Lives Matter originated in the wake of Ferguson Protests as a means to preserve whiteness, according to The New York Times. Evolved from a meme, the hate group has become a fixture in opposing Black Lives Matter. Fans who hijacked the tag did not consider the ramifications of trending the name of a dangerous group. The ignorance in their actions furthered Black fans being second to fandom clout, as performing good deeds outweighed addressing microaggressions in and out of fandom and sharing resources to support their peers.
The Black experience is constantly having to choose an additional title –– doctor, lawyer, teacher, etc.–– to prove you are more than what society equates your Blackness to. One can be Black, but to truly survive in this world there must be an additional value. This idea translates into fandom spaces with the underlying expectation of Black fans setting aside their Blackness for the greater good of fandom.
Despite the negative aspects of stan culture, fans who experienced racism within BTS fandom created #BlackARMYsequality and #BlackARMYsMatter to call out racism within the fandom in 2018, according to Teen Vogue. Elismarie Ortiz started the #BlackArmyBeauty project to recognize and celebrate the beauty of Black fans within the fandom after seeing her peers getting harassed, as reported by Buzzfeed. From there, fans created #Blackout days for within their respective fandoms in which fans post selfies alongside the members of their favorite groups. #BlackoutBTS and the hashtags that accompany it display how fans could mobilize to bring awareness to anything. Black fans also fellowshipped with each through cookout and block party hashtags and #blackstantakeover to show community within their fandoms. Much like #Blackout days, fans shared selfies of themselves alongside members of their favorite groups. It may seem frivolous to some, but its ability to uplift and reestablish confidence within K-pop’s Black community is a reminder that Black people deserve to enjoy entertainment as much as their peers.
Sharing experiences and providing each other space to discuss fandom experience brought to light how K-pop is covered in western media. Presenting K-pop’s fandom as monolithic discounts its diversity. The push for wider representation when it comes to reflecting the demographics within K-pop’s many fandoms challenges media outlets to abandon their biases when reporting on K-pop and its fandom. The movers and shakers of modern political movements are left out of narratives until outlets are called out. That should not be the case. Media and fandoms have to actively work to include the Black voices they leave out, starting with listening.
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KultScene is a writer-driven website dedicated to creating a platform where diverse voices’ takes on K-pop can be heard. If you like this post and would like to see more by helping support KultScene’s writers fund, please email us for more details.
https://kultscene.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/silence-of-black-fans.jpg15002100Nnehkai Agborhttps://kultscene.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/KULTSCENE-LOGO-2018-TRANSPARENT-RED.pngNnehkai Agbor2020-06-30 08:28:332020-06-30 08:28:35The erasure of Black K-pop fans in the wake of BLM & activism
