/https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/605271750ba92034fa2ff1cf/0x0.jpg "Topps Racist BTS Garbage Pail sticker from Topps would have been a terrible idea at any time")
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – FEBRUARY 21: (LR) Jimin, Jungkook, RM, J-Hope, V, Jin and K-pop SUGA … [+]
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Collectible card maker Topps was criticized on Tuesday when it unveiled its Grammy-themed sticker collection, Garbage Pail Kids, which included a violent portrayal of BTS that people widely condemned as racist and insensitive. Topps apologized for the sticker this morning and announced that it had removed the card from the set.
Launched in 1985, Garbage Pail Kids was originally designed to parody Cabbage Patch Kids dolls, with each character suffering from some kind of abnormality or being placed in a violent or vulgar setting. Since then, the series has expanded to address different topics in pop culture. The BTS sticker was set to be featured in the next “Shammy Awards” collection, which riffs on various artists who performed at Sunday’s ceremony. Taylor Swift is portrayed as a forest creature called “Tree-Swift”, Harry Styles is renamed “Harry Boa” and wears a rabid boa around his neck, and Megan Thee “Stunning Stallion” carries her Grammy award while riding a stallion across the beach.
The BTS sticker is much less flattering. The card, entitled “BTS Bruisers”, depicts all seven members of the Korean pop group as pieces in a Whack-a-Mole game, left bloody and bruised after being hit by a Grammy award. The card was supposed to mean contempt for BTS’s Grammy.
The reaction against the BTS Garbage Pail Kids sticker was swift and severe. Podcaster and YouTuber Jose Ochoa summoned Topps in a viral tweet, asking why BTS was the only artist in the Shammys collection to receive a violent description. The reaction generated hundreds of thousands of tweets condemning Topps and containing the hashtag #RacismIsNotComedy.
On Wednesday morning, Topps issued a two-sentence statement addressing the BTS sticker on Twitter. “We heard and understood our consumers who are upset about the BTS representation in our GPK Shammy Awards product and we apologize for including it,” wrote the company. “We removed the BTS sticker card from the set, we did not print any sticker card and it will not be available.”
Many people found the statement insufficient as it failed to solve any of the real problems with the BTS sticker, that is, it featured a racist caricature of the group and dehumanized them in a way that none of the other Shammy stickers did to their artists. It also helped to normalize and perpetuate an increasingly prevalent trend of violence against Asians – a point further illustrated by the shootings of the previous night in Atlanta, in which a 21-year-old white man killed eight people in three different spas, including six Asian- Americans.
However, even without a simultaneous shootout that caused victims mainly of Asian Americans, the Topps BTS sticker would still be blatantly racist and not at all funny. There were 3,795 anti-Asian hate incidents reported in the United States between March 2020 and February 2021, according to a report by the non-profit social organization Stop AAPI Hate. The Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism has also revealed that anti-Asian hate crimes in America’s largest cities have increased by 150% in 2020 compared to 2019. As many people on social media have noticed today, the use of phrases like “China virus” and “Kung flu” by former President Donald Trump to describe the coronavirus pandemic has further normalized anti-Asian hatred and further encouraged people to commit racist hate crimes. In this context, it is easy to see how the illustrators of the BTS Garbage Pail Kids sticker may have made such a careless and insensitive representation of the group.
This is also far from the first time that BTS members have been subjected to racist “jokes” and harassment. Last month, German broadcaster Matthias Matuschik compared the boy band to the coronavirus in his program and said they needed to be eradicated with a vaccine. He also said that they deserved to “vacation” in North Korea for the next 20 years for covering Coldplay’s “Fix You” on their MTV Unplugged Special. Last year, Howard Stern Show Salvatore “Sal” Governale also suggested that BTS and his team were carrying the coronavirus, calling their international trip “a dangerous situation”. And in June 2019, on the Australian TV show 20 for oneGuest comedian Jimmy Carr said of BTS: “When I first heard that something Korean had exploded in America, I was concerned, so I think it could have been worse, but not much worse.”
As I wrote during the Matuschik controversy, these statements and acrobatics do not exist in a vacuum. They perpetuate anti-Asian racism that explicitly results in physical violence and sometimes death. These are the real-life consequences of a racist and deaf feat like Topps’s BTS Garbage Pail Kids sticker. The company’s rash apology is hardly an adequate refund. Its creators should have understood why it was a terrible idea long before it became the public’s task to scold them.