Ethnicity is a fascinating question. I'd say a group is an ethnic group if it acts like an ethnic group or if it gets treated like an ethnic group, though "acts like an ethnic group" and "gets treated like an ethnic group" aren't self-explanatory terms. Jews in Poland in the 1930s were clearly an ethnic group, but Jews in Germany or in Austria or Italy weren't so clearly an ethnic group. (And the Nazis treated them as a racial group, which is a somewhat different concept. A Christian with four Jewish grandparents was marked for extermination.) Anyway, I won't argue with the notion that "Korean" is an ethnic group; but if we ask the question, "How did you find out and learn about kpop?," it's not obvious that "Because my ethnicity is Korean" or "Because I have a certain percentage of Korean DNA" actually answers the question.
Things are in such flux, but we don't know where the flux will lead. San Francisco, where I lived in the '80s and '90s, used to have sections of town that were identified as Irish and Italian, but it doesn't anymore. It does have a Chinatown, and concentrations of Southeast Asians in the Tenderloin. And it has a very noticeable gay neighborhood. And I'd say that, back in the '70s when I was in New York, in the East Village, along with the blacks and Hispanics and what was left of the old Jews and Poles and Ukrainians etc., there was a noticeable social group that didn't have a specific name ("bohemian" or "freak" or "punk" are too narrow to encompass the group), but was distinct, was as distant from the old eastern Europeans as the blacks and Hispanics were. Not that it makes sense to call gays and bohemians ethnicities. But I'm wondering — I hardly know — to what extent such groups will in the future supersede previous social groups.
I've never seen any mention of f(x)'s Amber's ethnicity on a YouTube comment thread, though maybe the comments not in English tell a different story. The issue of her "boyish" look drowns out everything else. Not that that one example necessarily proves anything. I'm just playing with ideas.
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Things are in such flux, but we don't know where the flux will lead. San Francisco, where I lived in the '80s and '90s, used to have sections of town that were identified as Irish and Italian, but it doesn't anymore. It does have a Chinatown, and concentrations of Southeast Asians in the Tenderloin. And it has a very noticeable gay neighborhood. And I'd say that, back in the '70s when I was in New York, in the East Village, along with the blacks and Hispanics and what was left of the old Jews and Poles and Ukrainians etc., there was a noticeable social group that didn't have a specific name ("bohemian" or "freak" or "punk" are too narrow to encompass the group), but was distinct, was as distant from the old eastern Europeans as the blacks and Hispanics were. Not that it makes sense to call gays and bohemians ethnicities. But I'm wondering — I hardly know — to what extent such groups will in the future supersede previous social groups.
I've never seen any mention of f(x)'s Amber's ethnicity on a YouTube comment thread, though maybe the comments not in English tell a different story. The issue of her "boyish" look drowns out everything else. Not that that one example necessarily proves anything. I'm just playing with ideas.