By Kapson Yim Lee
LOS ANGELES _ As we mark the 15th anniversary of the Los Angeles riots on April 29, my thoughts turn to the plight of Koreans and their difficult American journey. The riots were the most traumatic event in the 104-year history of people of Korean ancestry in the United States.
As an immigrant of more than three decades in Los Angeles, I have strong feelings about what happened: the riots were a glaring example of racial prejudice against Koreans.
Who victimized these first-generation immigrants? The culprit was the mainstream American news media. Their biased and shallow reporting usually began with the Los Angeles Times, which set the tone in the city. As always, wire services, television networks and radio outlets all followed the Times.
I observed the local news media focus on inner-city merchant-customer disputes as a racially charged conflict between African Americans and Korean Americans.
That reached a high point when Soon Ja Du, a Korean American shopkeeper, fatally shot an African American teenage shoplifter in the back of the head, after the girl had hit Du three times and knocked her to the ground. Du's case eventually led to a flash point of blacks' venting their frustrations about the Rodney King beating case on Koreans.
Had the media observed the basic rules of journalism _ refraining from racial labeling unless it is pertinent _ Du's case would not have turned into a racial case that inflamed blacks' anger toward Koreans.
From the beginning, the news stories called Du ``a Korean-born grocer’’ and prompted protests from African Americans, which were led by a self-serving community group called the Brotherhood Crusade. Although the case involved a Korean American grocer and a black customer, it was not a racially motivated case, the Los Angeles Police Department was quick to note.
Immediately after the incident, LAPD officials held a press conference and clarified their conclusion. The transcript of the trial of the Du case, which I read, did not mention race.
How then had it become a racial case? That responsibility squarely sits with mistakes by reporters, editors and producers of the mainstream news media. They violated the fairness doctrine by failing to report both sides. They allowed inflammatory quotes from members of the African American community to get into print or broadcast without giving members of the Korean American community a chance to respond.
The Korean immigrants' viewpoints were largely ignored. Koreans did not have a civil rights group such as the NAACP. Furthermore, not one mainstream news agency in Los Angeles in 1992 had a reporter who was fully bicultural and bilingual.
The prevailing attitude of the news media was that of a double standard. Usually the news media mentioned race only when an accused assailant was a Korean. For example, in 1993 there were 43 shooting cases in Los Angeles in which Koreans were victims. Nineteen Koreans died. All of the assailants were blacks or Hispanics.
Most of the cases were not reported in the mainstream news media. The only case that received wide publicity was that of a Korean bicycle shop owner Sam Woo in Monrovia, who was shot to death by a black teenager. But neither Woo nor the boy was identified by race.
Thankfully, that practice began to change four years after the riots. In early 1996, there was another incident involving a Korean-owned hat shop in South Central Los Angeles. A black customer claimed that he had experienced racial discrimination in the store.
The story had the potential to become a racially-charged dispute. Indeed, some members of the African American community tried to turn it into one by demonstrating against the store, alleging racial discrimination.
But it didn't get far, thanks to sensitive coverage by the Los Angeles Times. For the first time since 1973, when I began to subscribe to the paper, I saw the Times run two sides' stories side-by-side: the account of the Korean shop owner and that of the black customer. Because the account of store owner Mrs. In Sook Lee was fully told, there was little room for the two initiators of the dispute to achieve what they wanted.
The two troublemakers were the Rev. Lee May, pastor of the First AME Church in Pasadena, who claimed he was discriminated at the store, and the Brotherhood Crusade (of which May was also a member), the same questionable group which led the boycott of Soon Ja Du's market before the time of riots. What made the hat shop case different from Du's?
The Los Angeles Times dispatched its Korean-speaking reporter, K. Connie Kang to cover the story along with an African American colleague Andrea Ford. Ford was the reporter who had written most of the stories about the Du case before 1992.
The stories usually appeared under the joint bylines with a young Korean American reporter who spoke limited Korean. The result was shallow and slanted coverage of Du. In the hat shop story, however, reporter Kang, fluently bilingual and bicultural, took the lead on the stories. That made all the difference. Ford's byline did not appear after the second story, though Kang wrote five articles on the topic.
The hat shop stories helped avert a racial incident, but it cost the owner dearly. She had to give up her business and left Los Angeles because she had been exhausted emotionally and physically by Rev. May's stubborn insistence that he had been mistreated because of his race.
One time, she was forced to appear at a press conference along with May. The terrified Lee covered her face with a sheet of paper throughout the session. The last time I heard from Mrs. Lee, I learned that she had moved to a border town near Mexico where she was having a hard time adjusting.
It is fortunate that since the hat shop incident, I have not seen another conflict between Korean merchants and black customers which was reported as a racial issue. But I cannot get rid of my own anxiety over future conflicts in inter-ethnic relations. Fifteen years after the riots, Korean Americans still have no organization to protect their civil rights. And, I don't feel confident that the mainstream news media will not repeat its past mistakes.
Kapson Yim Lee, former editor of the English section of The Korea Times, Los Angeles, now writes for the Pacific News Service in San Francisco.