Cultural Disrespect.

Recently, I’ve started following the news about people who have been disrespecting cultures in one of two ways. First are those who go to other countries to do things that totally disrespect their cultural icons. The other are those who decide to create social media entries where they either think themselves into another ethnicity, or they pretend to be some sort of AI character who is culturally or ethnically different than themselves.

Let’s look at the first group who have been making the news recently. These are the ones who go to another country like Japan and do something like yoga at a revered shrine, perform chin ups on a gate at another shrine, or even dance in the subways to elicite responses just to continue getting viewers.

In addition, there is the American Influencer who has gotten into trouble with the Korean government. Apparently, he made a name for himself in the United States for live streaming obnoxious behavior that earned him tons of views and he took this recipe with him overseas.

We are not talking yoga, chin-ups, or dancing. We are talking about behavior that is purposely offensive to the population. It is behavior that could be taken as racist, or hate-filled since it involves some very nasty comments.

He did it in Japan and ended up in trouble but with a proper apology, he left there and went to Israel where he tried it again. Israel wasn’t happy so he ended up in Korea pulling the same type of behavior but this time he managed to get the government involved.

You don’t sit there and rub oil all over your body and proceed to rub your body all over a statue of a woman who is a remembrance of what happened to Korean women back around World War II. Bottom line is that after his obnoxious behavior, he has been arrested and the police are looking at various charges.

In every country, he has been disrespecting the local culture in the hopes of making himself an even bigger sensation just as the others hoped. This is not the way to do it.

On the other hand, there is a group of people who seem to believe that they can either create new identities that make them of a different culture or they “think” themselves into being of a different culture.

As for creating a new cultural identity, there is a woman, Martina Big, who after enlarging her breasts decided to change her skin color. She went from being extremely pale to quite dark and decided she was actually “African”. Since then, she changed her name to a more African one and went to Kenya to learn to become African.

This would fall under cultural appropriation as there are multiple ethnic groups who are under the umbrella of African and it is as if she did it just to make herself more newsworthy. On the other hand, you have a woman who created a AI character to do an Asian lady, African lady, and others. She is definitely rather light but her AI character is more of a stereotypical creature and that isn’t good.

The final group is the group who believe that you can change your cultural identity by thinking yourself into being Asian or other group. This is considered problematic and ignores the fact that cultural identity is complex.

I consider all of the above examples as forms of cultural disrespect because the person is either trying to garner attention or further cultural stereotypes that groups are trying to get away from. I sincerely hope that people quit watching these tik toks or youtube videos as a way of signaling their displeasure with this behavior.

This is my opinion. Let me know what you think, I’d love to hear. Have a great day.