BTS at the White House: Let’s talk about it

Jun 16

Written By nicole

On May 31, the last day of Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander month, the k-pop boy group BTS was invited to the White House. There, during the press briefing, they addressed the rising anti-Asian hate crimes, the need for diverse representation, and the ways that music can help people overcome their differences. Then they were actually able to meet with President Joe Biden to have a discussion on how to solve the issue of Asian hate. Wow, good for them! Asian representation! right? WRONG.

Okay, okay, hear me out.

The fact that people can’t see the irony in BTS being invited to celebrate AANHPI month when they aren’t AA, NH, or PI is killing me. BTS are instead Korean in terms of nationality and descent. Which makes it weird when a big issue of Asian-hate in the first place is America’s apparent inability to distinguish between native Asians and the Asian diaspora.

This conflation is by no means a new thing.

In 1982 a man named Vincent Chin was beaten to death in a parking lot by auto workers who assumed that Chin was Japanese, and therefore contributing to America’s competition with Japan in the motor industry at the time. (Ironically, just two days later, Bladerunner came out, which was just proves how much of the time period was influenced by techno-Orientalism, but that’s a topic for another time.) This was obviously terrible on multiple accounts, but for now I’ll give two. Firstly, Chin was Chinese, not Japanese, and secondly, regardless of Chin’s race, he was an American who had nothing to do with the motor industry.

This is only one example of the alienation and othering of Asians in America, Asians who have been in this country for generations. The pandemic seems to have proved (to certain people) that not only are all Asian-Americans one and the same, but they are also the same as the 1.4 billion people living in China, who are also the same as every other East Asian country’s people, who are also the same as the Chinese Communist Party (evil, booo!). Hence, Asian hate.

Okay, Nicole. Maybe it’s not that deep. It was obviously mostly a publicity stunt, since none of the actual “discussion” with the president was aired. Besides, there were Asian Americans who were invited to the White House earlier in May. So maybe I shouldn’t be so critical of a discussion that was never really the point.

But even then, if we are only considering BTS’s fame and image, I still have an issue with this. What is concerning to me is how pointedly distasteful it was to invite BTS as the “main event” at this press conference, knowing how difficult it already is for people to appreciate Asian American artists, actors, stories, media, etc without conflating the two parts of their identity (don’t get me started on Shang-Chi). Even just within k-pop, so many American idols have explicitly talked about how they left America to promote in Korea, and were only able to come back as “American artists” once they reached a certain level of fame because only NOW is there a place for Asian AMERICANS in the media. And still, Mr. Biden over here is just ignoring all the Asians in his own country just to earn brownie points or something.

I understand that there were AANHPI activists, artists and others at the White House earlier. However, none of them were provided as big of a platform to speak as BTS (not to mention I can only find a single article that only listed four of the guests by name?? Am I not looking hard enough?).

We keep perpetuating this idea that Asian Americans cannot exist without being shoehorned into categories that don’t acknowledge their American identities. Asian Americans cannot be accurately represented Native Asians in the same way that Europeans cannot accurately represent white Americans. This is literally the epitome of the forever foreigner myth.

To be clear, this is not an attack on BTS. I know they’ve faced their fair share of discrimination and racism. I agree with many of the things they stand for. The need for “more diverse representation”—yes, totally. The whole “embracing differences” stuff—yeah sure love that. HOWEVER. We should be more aware of where those differences lie. Whoever chose to have BTS as the face of this “celebration of AANHPI” was a little thoughtless in my opinion. There ARE cultural differences between native Asians and Asian Americans! For one, (most) native Asians (including BTS) are not minorities in their own countries! On top of that, Asian Americans have very different relationships with their “native” countries, ranging from super traumatic to completely non-existent to otherwise very complex! Lumping us in with our “native” countries and overlooking these differences does nothing but to discredit the real experiences that have shaped the Asian American identity.

If it is only for the sake of “diverse representation,” then let’s talk about how for so long the only representation of Asians in western media was through a lens that constantly set Asians (American or not) as strange, foreign others. Let’s talk about how Minari was considered a “foreign-language film” and therefore held back from being considered for best-picture. In the 1930s, Anna May Wong (the dragon-lady star of the last blog post), the first Chinese American movie star only received roles as a foreigner and was only ever discussed as a “Chinese” actress despite being third generation American and having no connection to China as a country. It has been nearly a century and we are still erasing an entire part of this community’s identity.

I may be feeling too emotionally rather than thinking with my brain on this one, because this forever foreigner myth is something I’ve been grappling with for some time. Being Chinese American, as time goes on and tensions between China and America increase, the American part of me is demonized in China and the Chinese part of me is demonized in the US. For Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, the idea of “home” and how it has been taken away is very different from that of Asian Americans (which reveals some of the issue of lumping together such a diverse group of people). But for Asian Americans—or at least me—the question becomes what do we do when we can no longer return to our “homeland” to find acceptance? It’s hard to know what people mean when they say “Go back to your country” when I don’t know which country is mine to begin with.

To return to BTS, I guess my final question is this: Why waste the opportunity to uplift Asian American voices during Asian American Heritage month? Doesn’t that make the whole thing sound silly to you too?