The New Cool Is Black

By Deauwand Myers

Being black has been at times problematic in my daily Korean life. Some Koreans believe what they have seen on Western TV and in movies: that black people are sexually pliant, ensconced in criminality, dangerous, uneducated, lazy, dirty, ugly and generally undesirable.

Recently, one of my professor colleagues, a Cuban-American, was asked by a summer camp recruiting agency, ``Are you black? Because we are not hiring blacks for any positions this year."

I witnessed this on the phone in my office and was shocked, but not surprised. I'm filing a complaint with the Ministry of Labor in this regard.

Hagwon (English academies) are particularly susceptible to the desires of their customers. If many Korean parents find blacks unacceptable as educators, hagwon have a real financial incentive not to hire any.

This kind of rank racism is obviously disheartening, but also unveils something more sinister: Racial prejudice is not an isolated affair in Korean society, but ubiquitous, systemic, and reified by the very codes of educational institutions.

That very same day, a Korean-American professor read a simple Internet advertisement for Korean summer work, which read, in part: ``if you are a Caucasian, and are from an English-speaking country, please apply..."

So, for some Koreans, not even another Korean will do. Racism works on a hierarchical structure. In my view, for some, and far too many, Koreans, all foreigners present a problem, but on the racial strata, whites are at the top, and the scale descends according to how dark you are ... As such, ``colored" people are especially considered ``the Other." Why?

Race, a conscription of optical prejudgment, psychologically links all peoples with the master signifier: whiteness. Put simply, whiteness is the (silent and unconscious) contrast by which all skin colors are measured. This is why white means white and ``colored" means everyone else.

At a very famous English village a few summers ago, I drank a delicious strawberry smoothie everyday after work or for lunch. The owners, a husband and wife, were very kind to me and on the last day, gave me a free smoothie for patronizing them so faithfully.

He asked me where I was from. I told him ``America." He said, ``No, Africa!" This went on for about a minute. I angrily relayed this story to the wife, and she said many Korean children think that all black people come from Africa. But her husband was over 50.

He thought, as some do, that the normative, representative state of an American is a white person.

Aretha Franklin? Toni Morrison? Dr. W.E.B. Dubois? Bill Cosby? Michael Jackson? (Pre-plastic surgery, please.)

The hypocrisy of this is doubly disheartening. Rain, Big Bang, BoA, TVSQ, Mighty Mouth, Dynamic Duo, and a very large majority of Korean pop music's brightest stars liberally borrow and copy African-American music styles right down to the fashion. If some variants of black culture are so desirable for mass Korean consumption, why aren't black people equally engaged as, at the very least, human, on a fair and individual basis?

Being foreign in Korea already presents challenges, regardless of complexion: getting a cell phone, credit card, one's own apartment and even certain bank services can be unnecessarily difficult because of one's citizenship. Being of color need not and should not be an added burden.

Some Koreans, and I say some because I have been treated quite nicely by a great and many people, should ``critically think" about their racial presumptions and prejudices. Where's the simpatico? The histories and experiences of Koreans and the African Diaspora are unique but not dissimilar, as both struggled and died to gain freedom and demand human dignity from brutal imperialist forces.

And I don't like hip-hop. OK, maybe a little.

The writer holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory and is currently an English professor at Shingu University. He can be reached at deauwand@gmail.com.