Reckoning

By Deauwand Myers

I lived through the national travesty of the impeachment and imprisonment of ex-President Park Geun-hye. Massive marches throughout the capital, Seoul, and the nation's protests blotted out all other news.

I was surprised at the uproar. Korea's conservative party, called by many names, had been in power for a while, and enjoyed a comfortable majority, particularly among its older voting bloc.

Yet, the apparent lack of decency and decorum, coupled with the obvious incompetency, graft and rank corruption within the Park administration galvanized the people. Protests shut down whole swaths of Seoul for days and days. Of course, as the first female head of state in South Korea, President Park's impeachment made international headlines.

A country with little more than 30 years of true democracy was able to peacefully remove, indict and convict a sitting president. Juxtapose that to the oldest democracy on Earth, the United States, which cannot find the political will to remove its own corrupt and lethally incompetent president, even after being impeached, and you can see why so many Americans are distraught.

Trump is not the problem, but a symptom of the rot festering at the very core of America. COVID-19, and the abject failure of the American government to competently combat it as other advanced democracies have (Korea, Japan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, most of Europe, etc.), lays bare the inadequate, immoral and inhumane social safety net and welfare system that has been operating in my native country for generations.

The confluence of the pandemic and an economic recession were fertile grounds for a social upheaval. I, having seen so many public lynchings of black people by the state in the garb of law enforcement, did not see the excruciating, slow-motion murder of George Floyd as anything other than horrific. That is, I expected nothing would be done about it.

I was mistaken. All across America and the world, marches and protests, despite the pandemic, swelled and persisted. Even as I write this, protests are occurring. Not just America, but the world is finally recognizing the cruelty done to black folks is untenable and shameful.

Everyone wants to be black. No one wants to be black. The world loves black culture. Music. Hairstyles. Literature. Even styles of walking and talking. Yet, no one wants to confront the casual brutality black people face on a daily basis.

Anti-blackness and white supremacy make it easy to deny black folks jobs and opportunity. Even now, Korean jobs post specific requirements for only white applicants. And in China, hospitals hire white men to pose as fake doctors (room, board and flight included), because the very presence of whiteness legitimizes the medical conference in question.

The lie of white supremacy and the great harm it does to people of color, especially and uniquely to black people, is finally being exposed for the evil it always was. I think, too, the world feels guilty for its complicity in the destruction of black bodies. The long history of genocide and slavery and deprivation of wealth and resources somehow has come to the fore.

I'm still surprised people are surprised how bad it can be to be black and in America. Google is free, and the amount of scholarly writing done on racism, African American history and topics attendant to these could fill a museum (and there's one of those as well, that anyone can visit).

And here's the other thing. People need to grow up. People need to be emotionally mature. When I was 17, I didn't have any Jewish friends. Yet, I knew anti-Semitism was wrong, and that the Holocaust was one of the most evil events in human history.

I didn't have Native American friends when I was 17, but I knew the genocidal land theft committed against indigenous peoples of the world was wrong. I didn't have friends who were sexual minorities when I was 17, but I knew they should be treated humanely. In short, we should see the humanity in others by default, not demand.

It should not take the incessant, viral videos of black people being brutalized and/or murdered by law enforcement, or regular white folks accosting black people and people of color for just existing or speaking their native language, to see the grotesque and foul nature of white supremacy.

Yet, it did. That all these evils had to be televised and disseminated for America and the world to finally scrutinize white supremacy and anti-blackness tells us how devalued black people really are. This time, with the firings and indictments of policemen, the removal of confederate images, the advertiser boycott of Facebook, the defunding of police departments and many other proceedings, is different.

I didn't know; I had no idea change would come so rapidly. But then, as my maternal grandmother would say, "what you don't know could make a world." The reckoning is upon us.

Deauwand Myers (deauwand@hotmail.com) holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory, and is an English professor outside Seoul. The views expressed in the above article are the author's own and do not reflect the editorial direction of The Korea Times.