By Jason Lim
Almost 20 years ago, I watched Margaret Cho on TV perform her first standup comedy routine, the one that made her famous. She stood out so much just because she was an Asian female standup comedian.
And she was funny. She was truly a pioneer who smashed the glass ceiling of standup comedy in all ways possible.
I still remember the opening line. She would set it up by coming on the stage nonchalantly, so obviously Korean from her looks, and letting the audience examine her for a while.
``I'm Korean,'' she would muse, pausing. ``But I don't own a store or anything.'' This would be followed by a thunderous laughter.
Of course, the laughter was based on a universal understanding that equated Koreans to small store owners, mostly vegetable and fruit stands, delis, and drycleaners.
Our parents embraced this stereotype with a vengeance, often working hard for 12 hours a day to lay the financial foundation upon which their children could succeed in schools and dive headlong into successful careers in mainstream corporate America.
And this we did, in droves. And got promptly stuck swimming upstream.
Many of us 1.5 and 2nd generation Korean Americans soon realized that there is a filtering mechanism at work when promoting minority candidates to senior executive positions. Although not explicitly racist, it is pervasive.
There is a definite culture in senior leadership circles across industries that constrains the full expression and recognition of leadership skills by minority candidates who don't necessarily fit into the white male norm.
A DiversityInc.com article by Yoji Cole cites a study done by economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett who, along with Princeton Prof. Cornel West, surveyed more than 1,600 executives of color and found that women executives of color felt ``excluded and constrained by style compliance [and a] need to blend into a corporate culture dominated by white men. More than a third of minority men feel the same way.''
In fact, according to Forbes, there are only five Asians who are the CEO's of Fortune 500 companies. Out of the five, only Andrea Jung of Avon is a non-Indian Asian. She is a Korean American.
But this column is not about racism in America. Obviously racism does exist in America in all circles. But there is also a healthy awareness that racism exists.
Such awareness engages everyday people in difficult but transparent public debates about their own prejudices and preconceptions, forcing Americans to look deep inside and judge for themselves what kind of a society they want for their children.
Although this process is often tortuous and filled with injustice, Americans have moved resolutely forward towards a society in which people are judged by the contents of their character and not by the color of their skin.
But what about Korean racism?
Koreans have always been taught that we are the ethnically homogenous descendents of Dangun. In fact, identity as Korean people has been forged upon the supposed ethnic purity of our blood.
Perhaps such race-based identity worked to keep Korea intact as a people and nation as it weathered through countless foreign invasions in the last 2,000 years. But in today's globalized world, such focus on ethnic homogeneity can lead to misguided sense of ethnic superiority that can result in racism.
Almost as a warning signal, the committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination of the U.N. officially recommended Korea to recognize the multi-ethnic character of contemporary Korean society.
It's obvious that racism exists among Koreans. It isn't unusual to hear horribly racist comments on African or Hispanic Americans in otherwise polite Korean society.
Further, there is a widespread belief that the Jews supposedly control the world through shadowy governments and institutions, fanned by best-selling books and exposes.
And of course, anything pro-Japanese sounding will immediately get you disbarred from society, as the singer Cho Young-nam found out recently.
But now we have more than a million foreign nationals living in Korea. One out of every seven marriages in Korea today is an interracial marriage.
It remains to be seen how Koreans will embrace or reject these ethnic changes to their society. Rejection will lead to the danger of recreating the Hermit Kingdom of old in which a fear-based parochial world view will act to limit Korea's potential.
But embracing such changes will require Koreans to ask difficult questions about who they want to be in a global world.
Are Koreans equally ready to engage in looking deep inside themselves and seeing the ugliness of racism there? Are we ready to overcome their fear and fight it?
As Americans know, the fight against racism is a long and vigilant fight against our baser nature. But it can be won and will always begin with a question: Am I a racist?
Or in this case, ``Am I a Korean racist?"
Jason Lim is a research fellow at the Harvard Korea Institute, researching Asian leadership models. He can be reached at jasonlim@post.harvard.edu.