The Study of Racialism

anonymouse · Wizard Joined: 09 Oct 2007 {Posts: 661 }

Hahm Ji-seon and her friend, Bonogit Hussain, were riding a bus near Seoul when insults were hurled at them.

By CHOE SANG-HUN
Published: November 1, 2009

SEOUL — On the evening of July 10, Bonogit Hussain, a 29-year-old Indian man, and Hahn Ji-seon, a female Korean friend, were riding a bus near Seoul when a man in the back began hurling racial and sexist slurs at them.

The situation would be a familiar one to many Korean women who have dated or even — as in Ms. Hahn’s case — simply traveled in the company of a foreign man.

What was different this time, however, was that, once it was reported in the South Korean media, prosecutors sprang into action, charging the man they have identified only as a 31-year-old Mr. Park with contempt, the first time such charges had been applied to an alleged racist offense. Spurred by the case, which is pending in court, rival political parties in Parliament have begun drafting legislation that for the first time would provide a detailed definition of discrimination by race and ethnicity and impose criminal penalties.

For Mr. Hussain, subtle discrimination has been part of daily life for the two and half years he has lived here as a student and then research professor at Sungkonghoe University in Seoul. He says that, even in crowded subways, people tend not sit next to him. In June, he said, he fell asleep on a bus and when it reached the terminal, the driver woke him up by poking him in the thigh with his foot, an extremely offensive gesture in South Korea.

“Things got worse for me this time, because I was with a Korean woman,” Mr. Hussain said in an interview. “Whenever I’ve walked with Ms. Hahn or other Korean women, most of the time I felt hostilities, especially from middle-aged men.”

South Korea, a country where until recently people were taught to take pride in their nation’s “ethnic homogeneity” and where the words “skin color” and “peach” are synonymous, is struggling to embrace a new reality. In just the past seven years, the number of foreign residents has doubled, to 1.2 million, even as the country’s population of 48.7 million is expected to drop sharply in coming decades because of its low birth rate.

Many of the foreigners come here to toil at sea or on farms or in factories, providing cheap labor in jobs shunned by South Koreans. Southeast Asian women marry rural farmers who cannot find South Korean brides. People from English-speaking countries find jobs teaching English in a society obsessed with learning the language from native speakers.

For most South Koreans, globalization has largely meant increasing exports or going abroad to study. But now that it is also bringing an influx of foreigners into a society where 42 percent of respondents in a 2008 survey said they had never once spoken with a foreigner, South Koreans are learning to adjust — often uncomfortably.

In a report issued Oct. 21, Amnesty International criticized discrimination in South Korea against migrant workers, who mostly are from poor Asian countries, citing sexual abuse, racial slurs, inadequate safety training and the mandatory disclosure of H.I.V. status, a requirement not imposed on South Koreans in the same jobs. Citing local news media and rights advocates, it said that following last year’s financial downturn, “incidents of xenophobia are on the rise.”

Ms. Hahn said, “Even a friend of mine confided to me that when he sees a Korean woman walking with a foreign man, he feels as if his own mother betrayed him.”

In South Korea, a country repeatedly invaded and subjugated by its bigger neighbors, people’s racial outlooks have been colored by “pure-blood” nationalism as well as traditional patriarchal mores, said Seol Dong-hoon, a sociologist at Chonbuk National University.

Centuries ago, when Korean women who had been taken to China as war prizes and forced into sexual slavery managed to return home, their communities ostracized them as tainted. In the last century, Korean “comfort women,” who worked as sex slaves for the Japanese Imperial Army, faced a similar stigma. Later, women who sold sex to American G.I.’s in the years following the 1950-53 Korean War were despised even more. Their children were shunned as “twigi,” a term once reserved for animal hybrids, said Bae Gee-cheol, 53, whose mother was expelled from her family after she gave birth to him following her rape by an American soldier.

Even today, the North Korean authorities often force abortion on women who return home pregnant after going to China to find food, according to defectors and human rights groups.

“When I travel with my husband, we avoid buses and subways,” said Jung Hye-sil, 42, who married a Pakistani man in 1994. “They glance at me as if I have done something incredible. There is a tendency here to control women and who they can date or marry, in the name of the nation.”

For many Koreans, the first encounter with non-Asians came during the Korean War, when American troops fought on the South Korean side. That experience has complicated South Koreans’ racial perceptions, Mr. Seol said. Today, the mix of envy and loathing of the West, especially of white Americans, is apparent in daily life.

The government and media obsess over each new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, to see how the country ranks against other developed economies. A hugely popular television program is “Chit Chat of Beautiful Ladies” — a show where young, attractive, mostly Caucasian women who are fluent in Korean discuss South Korea. Yet, when South Koreans refer to Americans in private conversations, they nearly always attach the same suffix as when they talk about the Japanese and Chinese, their historical masters: “nom,” which means “bastards.” Tammy Chu, 34, a Korean-born film director who was adopted by Americans and grew up in New York State, said she had been “scolded and yelled at” in Seoul subways for speaking in English and thus “not being Korean enough.” Then, she said, her applications for a job as an English teacher were rejected on the grounds that she was “not white enough.”

Ms. Hahn said that after the incident in the bus last July, her family was “turned upside down.” Her father and other relatives grilled her as to whether she was dating Mr. Hussain. But when a cousin recently married a German, “all my relatives envied her, as if her marriage was a boon to our family,” she said.

The Foreign Ministry supports an anti-discrimination law, said Kim Se-won, a ministry official. In 2007, the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination recommended that South Korea adopt such a law, deploring the widespread use of terms like “pure blood” and “mixed blood.” It urged public education to overcome the notion that South Korea was “ethnically homogenous,” which, it said, “no longer corresponds to the actual situation.”

But a recent forum to discuss proposed legislation against racial discrimination turned into a shouting match when several critics who had networked through the Internet showed up. They charged that such a law would only encourage even more migrant workers to come to South Korea, pushing native workers out of jobs and creating crime-infested slums. They also said it was too difficult to define what was racially or culturally offensive.

“Our ethnic homogeneity is a blessing,” said one of the critics, Lee Sung-bok, a bricklayer who said his job was threatened by migrant workers. “If they keep flooding in, who can guarantee our country won’t be torn apart by ethnic war as in Sri Lanka?”

Spiral · Posted: Mon 02 Nov 2009 18:57 Post subject:

Dragon Horse · Posted: Tue 03 Nov 2009 14:28 Post subject:

Spiral: actually maybe better than an Arab, but only if they think they are American blacks. Sad

When I say "better" I just mean a little better than this situation. haha

I had the same experience. I can only speak for myself but I've been to several Asian nations with my Japanese wife and Korea was the place we had the most issue. Japan we had the least issue. I think about the same number of Japanese think the way Koreans do but the difference is in expression. Showing negative feelings like this in public in Japan is frowned upon as "barbaric" they rarely show this kind of thing. People keep this to themselves. Most Japanese remain very hospitable. I've never heard of one foreigner in my time living in Japan or sense being attacked physically or verbally for having a Japanese wife or girlfriend.

When I was in China some people would say things, but most would just stare, make a joke, or pretend not to look. No one in Shanghai or Beijing ever became physically abusive or even verbally threatening to my face. I did know a woman who was half Chinese/Japanese, when people found out her father was Japanese they would tell her to her face her mother was a traitor or a whore. That situation is due to WWII though, many Chinese still hate Japan over some of the things that occurred. Actually the girls mother is from Taiwan (long story, why that is different).

Anyway, I've been to Vietnam, Cambodia, South Korea, Mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan with my wife.

In Vietnam it was similar to China as far as hostility. In Cambodia there was more curiosity and shock, but I didn't feel any hostility to speak of.

In South Korea, at night drunken Koreans would become threatening. They would nasty thing in Korean and English (because they thought my wife was a Korean with a black American soldier I was told). They would make nasty faces, even stalk us a few blocks...I was not really scared as much as annoyed. My wife swears she will never step foot in Korea again. Evil or Very Mad

My theory is this. If Koreans were not so nationalistic based on what I know of their history and their location between two much larger powers, that have constantly invaded them and inflicted serious casualties in the population, they would not exist. They would have been absorbed by China or Japan. The Korean ethnic identity is very strong for a reason.

I'm not excusing their behavior, it is more that I can understand their xenophobia.

Spiral · Posted: Tue 03 Nov 2009 15:18 Post subject:

Powell · Guru Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 2379 }

So what's the reaction to Korean men being in the company of non-Korean women? The article didn't address that.

Dragon Horse · Posted: Wed 04 Nov 2009 02:30 Post subject: Re: South Koreans and "Race"

anonymouse · Wizard Joined: 09 Oct 2007 {Posts: 661 }