A black man named Eddie Murphy

By Jason Lim

When I recently heard about the Duke History professor who replied to an editorial in the New York Times by complaining that "virtually every black has a strange new name that symbolizes their lack of desire for integration," my thoughts flashed to an old Eddie Murphy interview. In a way that was at once incisive, uncomfortable, and funny when he was at his best, Murphy said that he sometimes found himself wandering how a black man like himself ended up with an Irish name.

You'd think a Duke History professor would know the answer better than most. Rather than a black man named DeAndre, Diallo, or even KuntaKinte, perhaps a black man named Eddie Murphy is what's truly strange.

But maybe not as strange as black man who shares the same last name as Robert E. Lee, the commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia in the American Civil War: Shelton Jackson Lee, otherwise known as Spike.

He might be better remembered as the tiny guy yelling, "Do you know, do you know, do you know?" in vintage Nike commercials with Michael Jordan, but Spike Lee provided one of the most seminal moments of my youth growing up in New York City. His movie, "Do the Right Thing," drove home, for the first time in my life, a dawning awareness that there were tensions among the various ethnic communities in the melting pot. No, it was more fundamental than that. It made me realize that there was more to the world than my family and school friends. That there were other people around me who were invisible to me until then.

I still remember cringing in my seat as Sonny, the Korean grocer in "Do the Right Thing" tried to hold off the angry mob with a broom by shouting in a quivering voice, "I no white! I black! You, me, same! We same!" The mob backed off in the movie, more out of pity than anything else. I cringed then because even I didn't believe Sonny when he said that "I black. You, me, same!" I knew that I certainly wasn't white, but, then again, I wasn't black either. And I both respected and resented the movie because it made me uncomfortable.

The real life mob didn't back off in the 1992 LA Riots. Nor did they in Baltimore 23 years later, making us realize once again that "You, me" was not same. We were occupying the same space, but there was no sameness about us, only bitterness. We lived side by side, but we were not neighbors.

For some in the Korean American community, the ultimate lesson of the LA Riots was that being a part of America's multi-ethnic quilt meant that you had to be interwoven into the fabric along with other, various colored threads. You couldn't create a quilt by yourself, in isolation. What the Korean community did ― whether it was running a dry cleaner, car wash, or liquor store ― was not done in the middle of a vacuum but had a real impact on real people in the community. Living and achieving the American dream was not only about our immediate families. It was about the community. Otherwise, it would not be sustainable and invite a backlash. America was not just a place to make a living. American had to be a place to make a life. This meant reaching out and getting involved.

This lesson was heard loud and clear. After 1992, members of the Korean American community reached out and engaged with the African American community to collaborate on rebuilding shared spaces, creating common bonds, deepening mutual understandings, and other activities intended to make us true neighbors. And the political self-empowerment that began soon after the LA riots continue to this day with Korean Americans elected to multiple national and local offices.

Unfortunately, as Baltimore showed, more needs to be done. If the Korean American community wants to make sure that LA and Baltimore don't happen again, it needs to reach out and become engaged even more deeply. But the engagement shouldn't be motivated by fear ― then the outreach becomes nothing more than a series of superficial gestures that we hope will act as a proactive hedge against future potential damages. Worse, it's not effective.

Instead, engagement should come out of a deeper understanding of what it really means to be a part of a community in which the future wellbeing of its members is organically intertwined. As Martin Luther King said, "Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality."

This means the Korean American community making common cause against the cultural and socioeconomic injustices that brewed the toxic mixture of disempowerment, despair, and anger that fundamentally drove both LA and Baltimore riots. It means reframing the engagement question from, "If I don't stop to help this man today, what will happen to me tomorrow?" to "If I do not stop to help this man now, what will happen to us in the future?"

Jason Lim is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture. He has been writing for The Korea Times since 2006. He can be reached at jasonlim@msn.com, facebook. com/jasonlimkoreatimes and @jasonlim2012.

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