- “I want to date a Korean.”
- “I want to marry a Korean.”
- “I want to have Korean babies.”
How do people say these things so matter-of-factly and not realize how perverse these statements are? They are fetishizing an entire population of people based on very limited and very skewed representations of what they’ve seen in mainstream Korean media.
South Korea isn’t all about K-Pop and K-Dramas. It’s not all cute and fun. It’s a nation of people struggling to get by because the vast majority are overworked and underpaid. It’s a nation of people trying their absolute hardest to find happiness and solidarity and peace of mind because the government has been horrendously failing its people. When people make dumbass comments about how badly they want to date/marry a Korean person just because they’ve listened to some catchy songs and watched some entertaining dramas, please realize that they are dehumanizing an entire nation of people.
Including their favorite idols, despite the fact that the media likes to portray things differently.
Note: Listening to K-pop, watching K-Dramas, etc. doesn’t make you a bad person. But something is to be said about someone who obsesses so intensely over one aspect of a people’s culture but they can’t be bothered to even look into other, not-so-positive aspects of that same culture. How much can you truly say you love a culture when you can’t even be bothered to, at the very least, research struggles the people face?
