"I Have No More White Friends"

I don't have any more white friends left. Let's talk about this. First, I gotta go run an errand up to Midtown, Hell's Kitchen, 50th Street. Roll with me. All right, so before any nice white people get mad, this was a post off of Reddit, a story about this 22-year-old Asian-American kid, Korean-American, who recently dropped their entire white circle of friends because they ultimately did not feel respected over the years. Let's talk about if I have any stories that relate to this, and is this common? What should you do about it? You know the train's coming when you feel that wind. I'm not trying to take anything away from ladies' fitness, but can we agree that her bicep looks photoshopped? I'm going to read through this comment. It goes, I'm a 22-year-old male with Korean parents, but I was raised in the Deep South, only speaking English. I am highly whitewashed. That's self-aware. And I am also guilty of making self-deprecating jokes about Asian people to fit in with white people. First of all, I'm going to stop you there. That's common, man. It's common to be around a group, whether it's white, black kids, usually it's white in America, where you end up making a lot of self-deprecating Asian jokes to fit in, to show people that you're down with their culture. I've even done it in the past, but actually, I've actually also done it around black people too, because I used to host this comedy show, and it happened to be mostly black in Seattle, and I would have to, at first, make a joke about being Asian because I'm one of the few Asian people in that crowd. Now, I think there's a way to do it tastefully, there's a way to do it once or twice, and there's also a way to go overboard and seem like you're pandering and you're basically selling out your own people. Yes, there is a tasteful way of doing it. However, there is a thin line, and that's always a learning process. This past year, I've been desperately trying to reconnect with my grandparents' culture. My grandparents did not escape a war-torn country, learn a foreign language, deal with multiple decades of disrespect in a foreign land, just so that their grandson could be called a chink and be disrespected at school, church, and the workplace. I taught myself how to read Korean with some basic phrases. I gave some basic cultural understanding. Finally, I realized I don't have to pretend to be a white person. I don't have to insult an entire continent's worth of people to be liked by people who see me as an exotic creature. Right. I grew a pair, and now I have no more white friends. I repeat, I grew a pair, and now I have no more white friends. I began to call out my friends who were constantly, would ridicule me about my family's heritage. I began to stand up for myself when the same boring and overused jokes were made to me. Yes, those jokes do get old, guys. Come on, if you're going to keep making fun of my culture, you got to come up with some new ones. As long as I deny my grandparents' culture, I will always be the kid who turns the other cheek when slurs are thrown at him. I will always be the child who makes jokes about his family so that he could have a sliver of sense of belonging. I will always be the kind of weak man who tolerates disrespect directly to his face. I feel so alone right now. I feel like I don't culturally fit in anywhere. I'm scared I will never be American enough because I am not white, and I'm scared I will never be Korean enough because I know nothing about the culture. But I know I'd rather be alone with self-respect than surrounded around people who see me as a fool. Wow. Heavy stuff. Very relatable to an extent. Maybe I relate to some of that sentiment, not on the extreme extent, but definitely a little bit of it. And let me know in the comments down below if you feel something similar has happened in your life. Think one, sir, by purging your friend group and clearing it all out. I think that's the best move. You can always make new friends. You can always move somewhere else. You can always move back to Korea. You can move to a city, or you can just move to a neighborhood in the South that actually has Koreans. I know in the Atlanta, Duluth area, plenty of Koreans, plenty Asians around there. I don't know if that's where you live. But I think that is the number one thing. At the end of the day, for example, and this is an analogy, if you're trying to lose weight and change your diet, you have to throw out all the bad snacks in your pantry because you're going to eat what's around you. Or let's say you're trying to change up your style, your clothing style. You have to literally remove the whack clothes out of your closet or else you're going to end up putting it on just like this. If your friends are whack and they don't respect you, then you got to clear them out first and you'll figure it out. And let me share with you something. It doesn't mean just because you cleared out your white circle of friends that you're going to replace them with all Asian. It doesn't have to be that way. It can actually just be a lot more nicer people. Not all white people are like that. There's plenty of nice white, black, Hispanic kids who want to be friends with you. Not just because you're Korean and they're not going to exorcise you and make you feel like you have to perform. You have to be a court jester. You have to dance for them. Obviously, any friend group that makes you feel that way constantly is not a good friend group. Another point I have is that yes, part of this journey is understanding and respecting your own culture first. If you don't even know your culture and you don't know how to respect it and you don't have confidence in it, it's going to make everything harder. And I will be honest, at a time in my life, I didn't fully understand Chinese culture. I didn't fully think about it so much. I would be making these jokes about it, being self-deprecating, fitting in with certain crowds, using that as a way to fit in with certain crowds. But I didn't fully understand it. And at a young age, I realized that. I got called out for it. And you know, you make changes and you learn. And now I'm very confident about who I am and what I know about being Asian. Obviously, we've done the work. And part of what me and David on the Fun Gross channel wanted to do for all these years was talk about being Asian in a way where someone like this, this kid, could watch our videos and hopefully at least understand himself better or feel that it's normal to talk about Asian culture in a normal way and in an analytical way and give it its proper due respect. To be honest, like they said, sometimes you even treat your own Asian culture as a joke because you don't fully respect it yet. You're not at that age or you weren't shown to respect it yet or you weren't forced to respect or you didn't learn to respect it yet. And that's a tough place to be because now not only do you feel like your friends took advantage of you, but you also felt like you yourself did not do a good job of representing. They ain't go nowhere. They just revved it. You feel like you forsaken your people. And I think that's a real feeling. I feel like that's what this person might be going through, multiple level of feelings where it's like betrayal and disrespect from that friend group that never understood them and never appreciated them. But also him being like, damn, I was really doing that to myself. I was doing that to Korean culture. Guys, I have a story time from high school. So first of all, I did have some Asian friends in high school, but they actually went to a different high school. The high school that I went to, which was further away from my home, was actually a lot more white and black. It was basically white and black athletes, which was my school. So anyways, at my school, there was two people within my circle of friends or people that I was spending time with at the time. Because still, even in high school, you're not really picking and choosing your friends. You're just like hanging out with who's around you. There's this guy named Kev, white guy, real white dude. He was the star quarterback, but he was also on the basketball team with me. And we would jot each other and joke with each other. And we would get racist and racist jokes. It's just something that all kids do at that time. And of course, me being the Asian kid, of course, I'm getting the Asian jokes, but I'm also throwing it back at him about being a corn fed white boy, farmer boy, whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah. Their C word cracker and stuff like that. And, you know, I know that because it felt like we were on the same team together and the same mission, and that I actually still felt respected the whole time. And I know that's going to be funny for me to say, but I actually hung out at his house a couple of times and I did feel like he legitimately supported me in what I was doing. I had like a few little YouTube things at that time, even in high school. And he, I think he legit thought it was cool and we would talk about it. And so that's why in a way I always felt it was actual respect from him. Those racist jokes, especially in the context of sports, when we're being bros training together, I'm not taking it very harshly, but there was this other guy in my circle of friends called, I'll call him Steph. We'll just call him Steph. And we would also make jokes about him being Italian. He'd make jokes about me being Asian, but there was always some other microaggression things that he did that I felt like showed that he wasn't really on my squad and that he wasn't, he didn't fully respect me. And that boiled over later in life when we were out of college and I had moved to LA to pursue YouTube. And then he was on like this national singing show and he got really popular. And then he hit me up four or five years later after high school and coming at me with the Asian jokes right off the bat in the DMs. And then he was also like, that's when Jeremy Lin was popping off. And he was like, Oh, why are you always tweeting about Jeremy Lin? Blah, blah, blah. And he's like, come on, man, let's meet up in LA. And then honestly, I just kind of went, ha ha. All right, man. Yeah. I'll hit you up. And I never hit him back because I thought about all those things that happened, all the little micro things that happen within our larger friend group. And I realized, I was like, I don't know if this guy, Steph, really respects me in that way. And then for him to come at me four or five years later, when I'm trying to pursue this career in media, and maybe he's feeling a little like hotshot from his status on a TV show, then he feels like we just back to being that buddy, buddy thing. But I was like, it wasn't really buddy, buddy. There were some things I really didn't like that he did. I never had that conversation with him, but I just never responded. Back to Kev, the white football player, quarterback on the basketball team with me. I just looked him up the other day, honestly, on Facebook, because I was like doing this video and I was curious. I was like, what's Kev up to? He married an Asian woman. I said, Kev, you're legit. You're legit. You're down. You're an open-minded, nice white dude. And it was legit. I added him all as a friend. I'm probably going to talk to him about it. His wife is very Asian. She's East Asian, either Chinese or Korean of some sort. Shout out to Kev. It was cool. I count that as a real dude. Anyway, sometimes it's okay to drop people. That's the point of the story. Some people are legit back then. Sometimes you feel that brotherly bond and that you can joke with each other, but you have to feel respected. If you are always the butt of the joke, butt of the group, if you feel like that the other group doesn't see you on the same level, like, oh, don't worry about him. He's our Asian friend. You never have to, he doesn't need to get any girls. No one's thinking about a date for him. No one's thinking about how happy he is. Nobody asks how you are doing. That's not respect. All right, everybody, I'm ending the video here at my favorite Mexican spot, Chipotle. But also on a little tangent, a lot of people say the whole bowl slop kind of concept of lunch with a sweet greens and Chipotle is dying and they've peaked. Now, maybe it's peaked, but let's see if this Chipotle bowl is still hanging in there. Obviously for New York prices, this was, this was almost $14 after tax. So at the end of the day, I get that there's a lot of feelings about feeling alone right now. And I think that's what videos like this and videos like all the videos we've ever made on the Fung Bros channel, hopefully can help you with, or that's what healthy Reddit threads are for. It's to find other people who are going through the same thing and let you know that you're not alone. Listen, a lot of people out there have had to change their friend group at some point. Now, if you're 22, you're still really young. You still have a whole life ahead of you. Maybe you could have dropped them at 18, but you know, everybody's on their own journey about finding their culture and realizing what that means to them. Not everybody understands what being Asian is to themselves until they're older. And sometimes it takes a breakthrough moment. Sometimes, you know, it's a video you watch or it's another friend you meet, or it's someone older telling you like, Hey, that's not how it's supposed to be. What I'm saying is like, don't feel bad. You're on a journey, but it's good. And, and people need to shed their friends for all different types of reasons. Not just because, Oh, they're all white and they disrespect your culture. I mean, sometimes your friends are just, they have a bad mindset. They have a self-defeating mindset. Sometimes they're not ambitious. Sometimes they're wrapped up in drugs, whatever it is, you got to dump your friends. So not to point out just white people, because it just so happens that in these cases, usually it's white because white people are the dominant group. And they're usually the ones who do like to tease about culture the most. It's true. It's true, man. But anyways, guys, let me know how you feel about this in the comments down below. Hopefully this video was helpful. And I'm sure a lot of people out there have gone through something similar on some level. You just have to feel respected, but sometimes that takes you respecting yourself first. And to respect yourself, you have to know yourself. So sometimes it takes knowing yourself to just respect yourself, to be confident so that other people can respect you. Yes, I know it's a tough cycle. Life is a journey, man. Anyways, let me know what you guys think in the comments down below. This Chipotle bowl is cool. It's a little salty, decent macros. All right. So next time I'm out. Peace.