Reddit post by alleged half-Korean teen mistreated by family for being white-passing is removed

December 10, 2021

Moderators of the popular subreddit “r/AmItheA**hole” (AITA) have taken down a post by an alleged biracial Korean and German user who claimed to be mistreated by her family for passing as white.

What happened: In a since-deleted post on Wednesday, Reddit user Aggressive-Duty6000 asked her fellow forum members if she was an a*shole” for blaming her grandparents for why she turned her back on her Korean side.

The 16-year-old explained that her father married her mother during his rebellious phase in life. Her parents divorced when she was 2 years old, and her mother left her in her father’s care. She revealed that her mother was an addict who moved back to Germany.
After her parents’ divorce, the Redditor’s father married a Korean woman. Together, they had four children and moved in with Aggressive-Duty6000’s Korean grandparents.
“They blamed all my bad behavior on my white side. I always heard things like ‘we can’t expect the white kid to behave,’ ‘rude just like westerners’ etc,” she wrote. Whenever her siblings misbehaved, she was “blamed as I was ‘influencing them with my western values’ and ‘leading the nice Koreans astray.’”
She was also not allowed to celebrate Korean holidays such as Chuseok and was often told to stay in her room. The Redditor also tried to be “as Korean as possible” growing up. Even though she had dyed her blond hair brown and wore contact lenses to hide her blue eyes, she would still get bullied as she was the only white kid in the rural part of Korea where she grew up.
She also revealed that her father, who she described in one of her comments as 100% Korean, tried to stand up to his parents one time but never attempted to do so again.
“My dad did nothing to help me, one time he tried to stand up for me my grandparents said: ‘This (referring to me) is your fault, if you had married a nice girl we wouldn’t be dealing with this (pointing at me),’” she recalled. “That was the first and last time he tried to stand up for me.”
Her mother, who had eventually turned her life around and gotten clean, took her to Germany when she was 15 years old. She claims to have felt “more at home” there than in Korea.
After her 12-year-old sister died, her grandparents and father convinced her mother to send her back to Korea to visit. “I can’t say I’m sad about it, as all my siblings participated in my mistreatment so I never had a bond with them,” she said.
Her Korean side of the family was reportedly shocked when they saw her blond hair, blue eyes and piercings, believing she had turned her back on her culture after she refused to speak in Korean and only conversed in English and German.
“I exploded at them, cussing them out. I told them if they hadn’t bullied me my whole life maybe I would be closer to my Korean culture,” she wrote. “I said they don’t get a do-over because my sister died. I said a lot of nasty things to my dad as well. My grandparents started crying, and my dad had tears in his eyes. Which shocked me because I have never seen them so sad. I feel kinda bad.”

Mixed reactions: Although many Reddit users empathized with Aggressive-Duty6000’s experience growing up in Korea, others were more skeptical about some of the details in her story, which resulted in the removal of her post by one of the subreddit’s moderators.

Many users like confused_turnip, K-no-B and teddywestside_5, who all had the most upvoted comments, supported Aggressive-Duty6000 and say that she was mistreated by her family, and using her as a “backup granddaughter” and “replacement.”

Reddit users ScientistWild8221 and DNA-Expert argued that she could not have blue eyes and blond hair given that her father is 100% Korean. In her defense, Aggressive-Duty6000 said she looked like her Caucasian mother. She used singer-songwriter Halsey, whose father is Black, as an example of a person who looks white despite being mixed race.
Genes, primarily OCA2 and HERC2, play a crucial role in influencing a child’s eye color, Very Well Health explained. Each of these genes has two different versions, called alleles, which are then passed on to the child, with one allele coming from each parent. There is a 50% probability that a child will have blue eyes if one of the parents has brown eyes and the other has blue eyes. When both parents have brown eyes, there is a 19% chance their child might have blue eyes.

Featured Image via Cyprien Delaporte

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