In other words, both employer and employee issued the standard sorry if you were offended non-apology, placing the onus on fans. And what those fans found infuriating and hostile about Matuschik’s remarks is that he likened a group of Korean men to a deadly virus that has killed 2.5 million people worldwide — including nearly 69,000 people in Germany.
There’s an epidemic of hatred towards Asians, fueled by public figures like Matuschik, who almost always claim they didn’t mean it. Can’t you take a joke? I love Chinese food! This one example of racism against an extremely popular Korean group is part of an insidious context, one that has the dual effect of attempting to minimize BTS’s legacy while also laying the groundwork for violent rhetoric and hate crimes against Asian people.
Almost exactly a year ago, Sal Governale made a similar comment about BTS on The Howard Stern Show. “There’s no way those guys don’t have coronavirus,” Stern recalled him saying. Later, Governale tried to defend himself by describing what he saw when BTS arrived at SiriusXM’s New York headquarters.
“I walked into the lobby and it was like Chinatown, out of control, there were so many Asian people,” he remembered. “These people are traveling, they’re not locals, they’re going from country to country to country. It’s a dangerous situation. You got to look at it that way — they’re on airplanes; they’re in hotels.”
Chinatown. Asian people. Dangerous situation. These people. He was describing a South Korean band whose country has immaculate screening protocols for COVID-19, while he was living in a country that didn’t seem to know how to control the disease and dealt with it by ignoring its existence for much too long.
Racists view Asia as a monolith, rather than a continent comprised of more than 50 countries and territories. To them, all East Asians are the same – regardless of whether we were born in China, South Korea, the United States or Germany. We are a visible minority whose features make it difficult to blend in. We are judged as perpetual foreigners and, sometimes, as the enemy.
In June 1982, when America was experiencing a severe recession, two white men beat Vincent Chin to death in Detroit. They blamed the U.S.’s economic downfall on Japanese auto manufacturers and saw an easy target in Chin. It didn’t occur to them — or many other Americans at the time — that it was Americans who chose to buy Japanese cars, making U.S. cars less desirable. Rather than blaming the predominantly white Americans for buying foreign automobiles over those made in Detroit, they shifted the blame to Asian Americans, who they conflated as being the same as Japan’s population.
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