To all those confused

If you live your whole life choosing not to forgive people for their honest mistakes, when they simply didn't know any better and didn't mean to cause any offense, you're going to have absolutely no friends and no one to look up to at all.

Being overly cynical doesn't get anyone anywhere except a constant cloud of misery. We're humans. We all make mistakes. Expecting people to be perfect all the time is just setting yourself up for disappointment. We've all done something that we didn't know could be perceived as offensive by others.

Making compromises and looking at context are very important parts of life. Choosing to distance yourself from people for a simple disagreement doesn't work in the real world because we all have different perspectives. That's lazy and immature; it's not an effective solution.

If we spend our whole lives surrounding ourselves with people who think exactly the same as we do, our minds can't grow. That's no fun.

Very people few in this world are truly evil. Cancel culture makes it seem like people are way worse than they really are when it's often an honest mistake and/or simply a different context than assumed.

Quote from ellenote

people act like we need to forgive everyone because "were all human and make mistakes" okay so every Tuesday you do something racist and bully someone, right? Because that's normal right. that's what it comes off like. I dont need to forgive anyone and nobody needs to forgive me depending on what I do.

The difference is intention. If someone clearly expresses hatred for another race by saying they hate a certain race, it's a whole lot different from covering a song that has the N-word in it.

Both are wrong, but the first is absolutely despicable because it comes from a place of hate while the second is a genuine mistake out of perspective and/or ignorance.

Lots of folks, especially younger ones, these days tend to equivocate both as being on the same level of "bad" when that's far from the truth. Some people say racially/culturally insensitive things, but it doesn't mean they're racist. It just means they didn't think what they said would be perceived offensive by others.

Quote from ellenote

I understand what you mean about the N-word and such but it goes deeper than that. It's not just that they are young and didn't know it stems a lot from anti blackness and being ignorant. I mean we barely get any apologies from companies. Its just tiring at this point to use the same excuse that cancel culture and what not is wrong when most of the time people know a idol isnt going to get kicked out of their company for doing something racist. It is just us showing what they did and why it was wrong and why racism and ignorance needs to be changed. I know not every country or person is going to know the history behind everything but they should at least apologize. if they did something worse like being racist (blackface, colorism) or cultural appropriation it is not something that can be easily forgiven just because people think that its justifiable because "we all make mistakes." Or "we all are human."

It is not that simple as much as people want to make it out to be. When you surround your self with people who forgive everything someone does the whole fight we have been fighting loses its importance.

Especially in K-pop where they want to market towards the west but do not even take the time of day to respect cultures. If you are not held accountable for what you did how will you grow? How will you learn?

Yeah, I get what you mean. There's a bigger problem behind it, and that has to do with companies not caring enough. My problem is with people blaming idols directly when, clearly, the companies are more at fault for not implementing cultural sensitivity training for all their employees, including trainees and idols. I think the accountability should be placed on both the company and the idol, but more so the company because these idols gave up an education for an idol life.

I'll say this, though. Compare the state of the industry today to how it was ten years ago. Things have changed a lot. We don't see nearly the same frequency of occurrences anymore. Unless you were a K-pop fan back then, you wouldn't notice that things have definitely changed. BTS used to do some insensitive things because they weren't aware, but now they have a squeaky clean image.

It's going to be a gradual change. K-pop only became global in recent years. It'll catch up eventually.

A lot of things take considering the perspective of other people. The rest of the world doesn't always think about race the same way we do. In the U.S., as minorities, we think about our race every single day. Other countries don't really have to worry about that.