Kooleen is a Filipino “satirical” art tutorial content creator with over 3.5 million followers across her TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram accounts. Her content mostly comprises of “How to Draw [Insert Character/Thing Here]” videos with mediocre jokes throughout the process on TikTok and click bait-y videos on YouTube.
Sometimes viewers and fans will send in their art to be critiqued by Kooleen, and one of the pieces was a beautiful drawing of a Black woman in a side profile. When Kooleen, who hasn’t colored skin darker than a light tan and tends to draw in an anime or manhwa style, came around to critiquing the art, she made a wildly racist tutorial. She made a diagram image showing how she feels the side profiles should be structured, labeling the “wrong” side profile, similar to a lot of Black features, as “wtf” and “gorilla looking mf”.
In the video, she went to “fix” the side profile of the Black woman, pushing her features back and making the nose more pointy, essentially erasing all of the character’s Black features. While Kooleen likely wasn’t trying to be intentionally racist, this is not the only issue with her. She has also been shown “fixing art” by making the skin incredibly lighter or making comments that she doesn’t draw “ugly people” when others criticized her for not drawing darker-skinned people or her characters looking the same.
The original art before Kooleen's "fix".
When called out for this racist tutorial Kooleen continued to post to her socials, seemingly ignoring all the controversy. Then on July 28th, hidden behind a little doodle, she posted what she thinks is an apology on her Instagram. In the apology, she stated that her content is satirical and purposefully offensive. She states that she roasts everyone equally and she “…would NEVER aim any hate or discrimination towards a particular race or gender”. She goes on to state that she isn’t making the “apology” for the people who would continue to hate her after the situation dies down. She concludes by saying that her fans asked her to roast the art.
Kooleen's "apology".
In the end, it’s clear she isn’t sorry that she did it, only sorry that she’s being rightfully called out for her harmful biases and alleged comedy. Needless to say, having your art roasted is not an excuse to be hit with racist remarks, that are clearly directed at a specific group of people. She even made sure to hide the apology behind a doodle, so just scrolling through her Instagram, you would never be able to find it at first glance. On top of that, she only posted the apology to her Instagram where she has 469k followers, not her TikTok with 1.2 million followers, or YouTube with 2.07 million followers. So it’s very obvious that the response is from backlash than any actual remorse.
In the end, it goes back to the major problem of people teaching or being “experts” in their field; It is always with Black people as an afterthought. If you are supposed to be teaching others how to draw, even if your content is to be humorous, you must know how to draw all kinds of people. Additionally, making excuses is never an apology. Never.
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