The BTS Howard video is a useful reminder that money does not automatically buy taste.
This was a major release from one of the biggest entertainment machines in the world. Many people touched it. Many rounds of approval probably touched it too. And still, the teaser managed to depict Howard University — a historically Black university — with a crowd that read overwhelmingly white.
That is the part people still underestimate about taste. They think taste is decoration. A luxury good. A bonus layer you add after the serious work is done.
It isn’t.
Taste is what catches the problem before it becomes the final export.
Not because it is magical. Not because it is elitist. Because it is a form of judgment built from context. It is what lets someone look at a scene for two seconds and feel that something is wrong before they can fully explain why.
And that kind of knowing does not appear automatically just because the budget is high or the team is large.
In fact, large teams can make this worse. A blind spot shared by ten people does not become insight because you added fifteen more. It just becomes a smoother process for shipping the same mistake.
That seems to be what happened here. The creative team clearly knew enough to find the historical link: the seven Korean students at Howard in 1896, the connection to “Arirang,” the symbolic bridge between Korean history and a major American institution. That part was researched. The problem was the meaning of the setting itself. Howard was not just an old campus with an interesting Korea connection. It was, and is, a historically Black institution. Remove that from the image and you have not just made a factual mistake. You have changed the meaning of the tribute.
That is why this kind of error matters. It is not about catching people being imperfect. It is about seeing the exact point where competence stops.
The English can be fine. The references can be technically real. The production can be expensive. And still the work can reveal that nobody in the room actually understood what they were handling.
This is also why I keep returning to taste. Taste is not just preference. It is not “I like this font” or “this feels premium.” It is the difference between knowing a fact and understanding what that fact means when it lands in public.
A lot of global work fails at exactly that point. The team has information. The team has polish. The team may even have good intentions. What it does not have is the specific, internalized judgment that would make somebody stop the process and say: no, if you are going to use Howard, you do not get to make Blackness incidental in the frame.
You do not solve that with more budget alone. You solve it by having the right eyes in the room early enough for it to matter.
That is what taste is for.
The factual basis here is the March 2026 BTS Arirang teaser, Howard University’s public statement reaffirming its identity as a leading historically Black university, and The Dig’s criticism that the imagery misrepresented Howard’s Black student body and historical meaning.