'Grande fishing'

By Jason Lim

Ariana Grande is one of the biggest names in show biz, and she wants to look Asian. She wants to look Asian because she wants to remain cutting-edge and relevant with the latest pop music trend, where K-pop is a hot name, with the likes of BTS and Blackpink.

This behavior is referred to as "Asian fishing," which I gather refers to the practice of non-Asians trying to look like Asians to profit off the image somehow. Supposedly, Grande has done the same before with Black women (Black fishing) and Latina women (Latina fishing).

An article in Paper Magazine quotes a sarcastic social media comment: "Ariana Grande rebranding (herself) as Asian makes perfect sense when you realize she got a tan at the height of the reggaeton and latin pop crossover and now K-pop is the new hotness."

From what I gather, this comment is the latest salvo of charges against Grande, based on a photo she posted on social media that has since been deleted. In that photo, she definitely looks Asian with the way she did her eye makeup. In fact, the makeup and dress would fit just right for a modern geisha or flight attendant on a fancy Asian airline.

Having said that, I am not sure what to be offended about. She isn't doing yellowface or blackface. She just did her makeup and hair to mimic a certain (and I assume fashionable) look that makes her look somewhat Northeast Asian. Is she not allowed to do that?

In my view, of course, she is. She can do what she wants with her own face and body, and her music. If she wants to sing in Hindustani on her next album, then more power to her. She is an artist. As such, she should be inspired by everything she sees, hears, smells and touches, becoming a cultural melting pot that gives rise to something new and amazing that will, in turn, inspire someone else to do something different.

So, Asian fishing is just another word for cultural appropriation and suffers the same intellectual laziness and outright hypocrisy that all accusations of cultural appropriation do. Worse, it seeks to pigeonhole the human spirit into the ethnocultural tribalism of our accidental birth without allowing for the possibility that human beings actually like to interface with, experiment with, and adapt to one another constantly.

Rather than depending on physical migration resulting in face-to-face interactions, today's social media just made this process happen at a dizzying pace, in real-time, glaringly transparent and much more wide-ranging.

In fact, Korea has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of such trends across all facets of society. Was Korea "democracy fishing" when thousands of young people hurled themselves against military dictatorships in the 1980s to bring about one of the most dynamic democracies in the world?

Was Korea "industrialization fishing" when it wrought the miracle of the Han River based on industry and the sacrifices of its laborers? Was Korea "Western eyelid fishing" when millions of young Korean men and women underwent double eyelid surgery to have their eyes look rounder and larger? Were Samsung and LG "technology fishing" when they developed the best consumer electronics in the world?

Was Korea "Christianity fishing" by being the fastest-converting nation to Christianity in the history of the world? Was Korea "Newton fishing" or "Einstein fishing" when learning European mathematics and physics? Was Psy "hiphop fishing" when he wrote Gangnam Style?

Or, as the self-appointed guardians of cultural appropriation would have it, should Koreans remain desperately backward and poor, eking out livings farming, wearing traditional hanbok, playing only gayageum (not that there is anything wrong with that instrument), and be held in sociopolitical bondage to the uncaring kings and yangban? Would that satisfy the average Korean's sense of cultural appropriateness and indigenous purity?

Therein lies the danger of these accusations of "fishing" with respect to culture. It's all about policing behavior based on one's sense of what should be acceptable or not. When that sense is derived from some type of a purity test, whether that's ethnic, ideological or cultural, then it becomes deadly because it's anti-human.

The 20th century is filled with deadly examples of such "ought tos." The Holocaust, Imperial Japan, the Cultural Revolution, the Khmer Rouge, Srebrenica, Rwanda, etc., just to name a few off the top of my head.

I know that some will find it a stretch to go from Ariana Grande's Asian fishing to the worst mass genocides in recent memory, but the underlying tendency isn't too different. It's the desire for one group of people to want to control what's acceptable based on an arbitrary and superficial standard, and to enforce the purity of that acceptability, whether that's through a social media comment or even guns. Ambiguity and messiness are key elements of the human condition. Some would rather kill to not have to deal with it because it's uncomfortable.

Jason Lim (jasonlim@msn.com) is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture.