Four Black men stand at a crosswalk in Seoul around midnight. When the light turns green, they move across the street in a tight, slightly hunched group. “Oh, I’m glad we’re holding Starbucks,” one of them jokes. “We don’t look dangerous now, do we?” The other three burst out laughing. Then one whips around toward the camera. “I saw you put gangster music over the last video when we were walking. Is that what we look like to you?” The scene from a YouTube video is a sort of content rarely seen in Korea. Race is not a subject that often enters casual public conversation, and humor built around skin color is rarer still. It might also help explain that the person behind the video is Jonathan Thona Yiombi, the Congolese-born television personality better known simply as Jonathan, because he may be one of the few people who can get away with making such jokes. He and his family settled in Korea when he was 8, and he spent the rest of his childhood in Gwangju, attending school there from elementary through high school. He first came to public attention through the KBS documentary s
