For this assignment, you will research how race is viewed in a culture different from your own. In this case, the sources for your research may vary from traditional library research. Popular racial perceptions are often better encoded in music or art than in official histories or government documents. Anything from movies to music to online blogs can tell you how people perceive race.Share the findings of your research in the form of a brief written essay (or a collection of images, video etc.)in our online forum. How is race constructed in the culture you examined? What kind of research did you do, or what sources did you examine, to come to this conclusion? Finally, discuss how your findings and those of your classmates differ from Western perceptions of race.
Response to this classmate:
In an article by Katrin Park called “South Korea struggles to confront its own Racial Prejudices”
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for the Foreign Policy magazine, Park explains how following the global impact of the Black Lives Matter Movement in 2020, South Korea saw few levels of attention provided to the campaign, only having around 100 people in the country protesting against ‘racial’ inequality. Park attributes this to a longstanding Korean nationalist sentiment, which feeds “into regionwide racism and mixed with historical grievances and cultural ignorance caused by too much homogeneity” (Park, 2020). Indeed, as discussed in the 2006 book by Korean Sociologist Gi-Wook Shin titled “Ethnic Nationalism in Korea: Geneology, Politics, and Legacy
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“, a strong source of Korean pride and identity lies in its belief of it being an ‘ethnically homogeneous’ country that shares the same bloodline and ancestry. This is similarly echoed in The New York Times opinion piece by Se Woong-Ko in 2018, where he writes: “For decades, children, myself included, were taught to believe that this is a single-blooded nation — dubbed danil minjok in Korean. This myth of racial purity was promoted to foster national unity. Only after 2007, when the United Nations urged South Korea to stop promoting this racist notion, did the school curriculum change” (South Korea’s Enduring Racism
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, 2018).
This year, Gi-Wook Shi was interviewed by the Standford Freeman Spogli Institue where he once again took up the topic. When asked about how much the nationalist ideals of the country had changed since its high-rising multi-ethnicity and the government’s implementation of multi-cultural policies, Dr. Shi replied that “Not so much”, and that the country’s policies were more of an attempt at assimilation instead of multi-cultural integration. However, he also states that foreigners of Asian descent are regarded more poorly than of other countries due to the influences of Western Orientalism. (Gi-Wook Shin on Racism in South Korea
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, 2021)
With the creation of the government’s Ministry of Culture, Departement, and Tourism, the government has taken great strived towards the creation of a more multicultural society, whose efforts are mostly demonstrated in the ever-growing popularity of the K-pop Industry. According to the BBC article “BTS and Exo: The soft power roots of K-pop
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“, since its inception, K-pop has served as a means to disperse and expand Korea’s cultural influence (Christine Ro, 2021). The Korean Broadcasting System has also actively been promoting for a more inclusive Korean society, shown through some of its shows like “My Neighbor, Charles”, a show meant to showcase the daily lives of foreigners living in Korea, Abnormal Summit, which stars a panel of non-Korean men of different countries that discuss international matters from their own cultural perspective, and “Hello Counselor”, where both a man from Nigeria
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and a Muslim-Korean woman
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were invited on the show to discuss their personal struggles against prejudice in the country. Furthermore, dark-skinned entertainers such as Ghanian Sam Okyere and Nigerian-Korean model Han Hyun-Min have become popular with audiences over the last couple of years, starring on a large number of Korean TV shows and series.
For this assignment, I decided to do research on how race is viewed in South Korean culture. The reason I chose this country is actually quite a personal one, as I have been consuming its music and entertainment for 11 years now. Growing up, it was a major influence on my life, some of my fondest childhood memories are watching Korean tv shows, attending K-pop concerts, and fawning over Korean idols and actors with my friends. I eventually grew to love many aspects of its culture and I sincerely hope to fully learn the language one day. Yet, I think anyone who has been consuming its entertainment for this long cannot be ignorant of the prejudice against non-South Koreans in the country.
As evidenced from all of this research and my own experiences consuming its entertainment, it is fair to say that South Korean culture, as experienced in the country of South Korea, is just now coming to terms with the idea of ‘race’. Despite its reputation as a scientific and technological powerhouse, its conventions of ‘race’ and ethnicity go against anthropological and epigenetic conceptions of how human genetic coding and variation work. Its ‘ethnic homogeneity’ policy did not provide space for consideration about ‘racial’ and ethnic diversity, both in its country and outside of it. That being said, whether there are underlying political motives at play or not, the government’s efforts at promoting a more open-minded way of thinking and viewing ‘race’ have yielded results as more and more people, especially its youth
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, become used to living in a heterogeneous society.
