Recently, it was revealed that the profile of BLACKPINK’s Jennie on Namuwiki – Korea’s most popular Wikia site, was edited in a racially discriminatory way.
In particular, the real name of Jennie was changed to “Nguyen Cuong Phuc”, her birthplace to Hanoi, and nationality to Vietnamese. As the edit was made after Jennie’s recent indoor smoking controversy, it is likely that the editor was trying to mock Jennie.
To explain, there are many r*cist people in South Korea who compare others to Southeast Asian people, such as Vietnamese, as an insult. These people tend to think of Korea as “superior” compared to the Southeast Asia countries, whose people they thought of as poor and “uglier”.
As a result, some netizens found the edit extremely offensive and left scathing comments towards the editor. Below are some comments from netizens:
- Do people find this funny? Serious, Koreans are some of the most r*cist people out there
- Isn’t this really rude to Vietnamese people?
- We are always complaining about Westerners discriminating against Asians, but some people are acting just as r*cist towards Southeast Asians
- It’s true that Jennie did something wrong… but let’s not bring up Vietnam, which has nothing to do with this, and make fun of it
- Koreans are so funny: If a Westerner says “Nihao,” we’d be up in arms about how “racist” that is and all, but we discriminate against Southeast Asian and Chinese people