Korea doesn't see race the way you do
Courtesy of David Tizzard
“They’re kind of shocked when I tell them I’m not American. Then they’re really disappointed that I’m not French either, because they love French people,” a young woman explained to the room. “When I tell them I’m from Africa — I don’t say Gabon because that just makes things more confusing — they don’t know how to react. It’s like they have no frame of reference. Why am I not poor, for example. How can I be in Korea?”
I empathized deeply with the student. She wasn’t what Korean people expected her to be. My friend professor Zeljana Zmire has wonderfully described this as “nouveau riche nationalism” — the idea that for many Koreans, the gross domestic product of the country you are from will often have more influence on how you are treated than your actual skin color.
For years, I’ve had people asking, assuming or simply stating without fact that I’m American. “Migukin onda (An American is coming),” the kids would shout at me on the street. Nearby tables in busy pubs would make similar comments. These would be especially pronounced when I was dressed down in jeans and a baseball cap. The observations fade into the background when I am wearing a blazer, tie and Italian shoes. Then, it seems, I simply become “gentleman” – a man of no particular nation, but rather someone whose status is implied by his sartorial choices.
These rather silly and completely unscientific examples are just part of why I consider Korea to be, somewhat, a post-race society. That might seem an outrageous thing to say in what is still one of the most ethnically homogenous nations in the world despite the growing multiculturalism of the last two decades.
And yet, while much of North America and parts of Western Europe view people through the lens of skin color and ethnicity, nationality normally occupies a more prominent place in everyday encounters in Korea. A Korean person's first answer to the question of who they are is generally not “Asian” in the way that it might be on an American census form. More and more, people from Korea find it abhorrent if they are referred to as someone from Beijing or it is suggested that they wear kimonos.
There are, of course, complex historical and political reasons for all of this. The rise of nationalism in Northeast Asia was a response to colonialism, imperialism and the arrival of foreigners on ships determined to plant their flags and line their pockets. Korean national identity tends to be stronger and more socially salient than a broad pan-Asian identity.
Pan-Asianism became deeply entangled with Japanese imperialism. Japan's claim to be the leader of an Asian order ultimately became inseparable from the violence of empire. It’s that dreadful rising sun flag that generates such negative feeling in the region; the famines in Indonesia, the rape of Nanjing, the forced labor and comfort women in Korea and beyond. Politically, it’s the Ilchinhoe here in Korea that tried to merge Seoul and Tokyo into one ethnic body as a response to the arrival and peril of the “white man.”
But none of this worked. The nationalism that runs so strongly through Asia today is a response to all of that colonialism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The imperialist behavior of Britain, France, Russia and then Japan, as well as the resulting wars and conflicts, produced a strong sense of identity in this region that found hope and identity in the nation. Dreams of freedom were written under a flag and a song rather than a skin color.
By the same token, the focus on race in the West might also be argued to be a product of colonialism but from a different perspective. There, race became important because the colonialists were trying to incorporate and integrate people from the colonies into their societies. Race was repeatedly transformed into a technology of division: a way of sorting human beings into categories that could then be governed, exploited, excluded or privileged. Colonialism made particularly powerful use of this system.
We can even take a step back and say that race and nationalism itself are products of this time. While race undoubtedly has very real effects today, it is, nevertheless, a social construct. Sounds unbelievable considering how deeply people believe in it, but then one only has to remember all the wars and deaths caused by religion to remember how committed people can be to ideas that came from people’s heads.
This is not to say nationalism is any better. Benedict Anderson famously described the nation as an “imagined community”: a group whose members will never know most of one another, yet nevertheless imagine themselves as belonging to the same collective. After all, as well as World Cups and Olympics, nationalism also gave us the borders, bloodbaths and bureaucratic flags that defined the bloodiest century in human history. Yet somehow, we swapped divine right for national destiny and called it progress.
And before nationalism, religion often provided the more powerful answer to the question of who belonged. A person could be Christian, Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist before they were French, Egyptian, Indian or Korean in the modern national sense. This has hardly disappeared. In parts of the world today, religious identity remains more important than the passport someone carries.
Human beings have always needed ways of imagining their connection to people they will never meet. Religion once provided one of the great frameworks for doing so. Nationalism later became another. Today, race, nationality, religion and ethnicity overlap in complicated ways, depending on where we happen to live. We seem to have an almost irresistible need to divide the enormous complexity of humanity into smaller groups: believers and unbelievers, us and them, citizens and foreigners, white and Black, Korean and Japanese. The categories change, but the impulse remains.
Korea isn't necessarily post-race. It is differently racialized. Korea demonstrates what happens when nationality rather than race becomes the dominant grammar through which difference is understood.
When Western observers project their racialized frameworks onto East Asia, they commit a double error. They fail to see the particular historical development of racial categories in their own societies, while simultaneously misreading the potent, fiercely territorial nationalisms that animate much of the region. By flattening complex national identities into a homogenized “Asian” box, they reveal more about their own domestic anxieties than the reality on the ground. Until we recognize that both race and nation, despite their very real effects, are nonetheless just ghost stories we tell ourselves about who belongs, we will keep exporting our categories of division and wondering why they don't fit.
Of course, that doesn’t help us understand the terrifyingly dizzying realization that if neither nationalism nor race are actually real, what the hell are we? As humans?
Perhaps the answer is that we are creatures who keep inventing categories large enough to make strangers feel like family. And I hope you can feel like that here, too. If a bit of knowledge helps some people navigate their time here in Korea a little more easily, that’s a good thing. And if your experiences are different from mine or my students, they should be heard too. It might even save Karina some flak online, and perhaps the next Korean celebrity who falls foul of the ethnocentrism of assuming that the categories that make perfect sense at home make sense everywhere else.