American singer-songwriter Conan Gray was forced to apologise Conan for using the tan skin emoji in his social media posts.
Conan Gray cancelled? “I apologise to anyone who was hurt by my choice of emojis,” the former YouTuber publicly apologised for using tan skin emojis in his social media posts.
NEWS: K-pops fan want to ban Ghost of Tsushima because it appropriates Japanese culture.
The 21-year-old pop star is a shining example of the American dream come true. At the young age of 9 Conan created a YouTube channel where he would vlog about daily life in Texas, USA, and showcase his art and music.
In just four short years his channel amassed 25 million views and he was becoming a bit of self-made pop star. Since then his career as a singer-songwriter has taken off.
He is learning that with fame comes power, and with power comes responsibility. Conan Gray is now finding himself as the target of cancel culture and being called a racist for using a tan emoji on his social media posts.
Conan Gray cancelled and called racist by K-pop fans.
The K-pop fan community quickly caught on to the post and started pushing it on Twitter with the hashtag #ConanGrayIsOverParty.
The hashtag on Twitter is littered with K-pop fans using unrelated K-pop gifs calling him every kind of phobic under the sun and demanding Twitter to have him banned from Twitter and Instagram.
transphobic, enbyphobic, and lesbophobic? and he hasn’t addressed anything? what an asswipe #conangrayisoverparty pic.twitter.com/6fT7Y5jT9h
— ? ani ? (@lesbocore) July 23, 2020
His fans, on the other hand, are not at all bothered by him using the tan emoji in his posts and are accusing the K-pop community of “reaching.”
One of Gray’s fans responded to the hashtag on Twitter calling out K-pop fans for their manufactured outrage, saying, “yall are so bored and k-pop stans stop mf cancelling everyone like stop.”
Despite have millions of fans behind his back, Conan Gray felt it was necessary to apologise to anyone he might have offended with his use the tan emoji.
“Many of you have brought to my attention my use of tan emojis. I apologize to anybody who was hurt by my use of emojis that you believe are too dark for me to use,” Conan tweeted on July 24th.
He explained that as a mix raced person himself — Japanese/Irish — he used the emoji that he felt better represented him.
“I am mixed race and I chose to use the emojis that I felt best represented my skin tone,” he concluded while sharing pictures of his hand to compare his actual skin tone to his choice of emoji.
Conan Gray is not the only one to be targeted by the K-pop community; last last week K-pop fans petitioned to have the critically acclaimed open-world Samurai game, Ghost of Tsushima, banned for appropriating Japanese culture.
The best selling Sony PlayStation 4 exclusive is inspired by classic Japanese cinema yet, despite being well received in Japan, it is being called racist and problematic by K-pop fans because they falsely assumed that it was entirely developed by “racist white men.”
Conan Gray will be touring Australia later this year. You can catch him live at The Fortitude Music Hall in Brisbane, Queensland on September 23rd. Book your tickets today.