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Opinion

Columnists

Double standards

Recently, I wrote on Jay Park about his controversial music video: displaying guns, tattoos, and the usual tropes and stereotypes too many people associate with being a black American. I argued that the bigger problem was not cultural appropriation, as much as a reductive, narrow, boring, uncreative imagining of black American life.

2021-09-27 17:03

Black labor's role in US politics

“To be a Negro in this country [America] and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost, almost all of the time - and in one's work…it's what's happening all around you and…in the face of the most extraordinary and criminal indifference, indifference of most white people in this country, and their ignorance.” - James Baldwin, from a radio interview, 1961

2021-08-30 17:00

Knowledge as virtue

My maternal grandmother had a sharp wit. At age eight, we were watching a nature program on PBS, where I learned that ants are so complex, they actually display altruism, have universal healthcare and can even sense when it will rain. I exclaimed to her, “I didn't know that.” She replied, “What you don't know could make a world.”

2021-08-02 17:05

K-pop after George Floyd

Rarely have I gotten into a Facebook discussion on some sociopolitical issue. But I did recently tell a Korean friend, one who always pronounces my name wrong, that the brouhaha over Jay Park's remixed video and calls of racism and discrimination from fans and foes alike was odd, and probably wrong.

2021-07-05 17:00

How democracy dies

Many Americans think democracy is durable; that the United States, bloody and genocidal in its past, has been expanding the franchise to women and people of color and sexual minorities throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

2021-06-07 17:22

Biden in the Asia Pacific

The terms of Korean presidents are an oddity in advanced democracies. To curb the faux-presidential dictatorships of past presidents - like Park Chung-hee - the Korean Constitution only allows for one five-year fixed term.

2021-05-10 17:38

Democrats deliver

“A great democracy has got to be progressive or it will soon cease to be great or a democracy,” is a prescient excerpt from the “New Nationalism Speech” by Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States.

2021-04-12 17:15

Moon and his neighbors

Literally, for centuries, Korea has been geographically and geopolitically stuck between implacable nation-states: adversarial and powerful. Whether it be the Mongolians, the Chinese, the Japanese or more recently North Korea, Korean society has endured being rolled over by wars and the rumor of wars for most of its existence.

2021-03-15 16:52

Biden-Harris and race

On Jan. 6, the world witnessed a shocking scene unfold at America's Capitol. The building, which stood through the Civil War and two World Wars unscathed, was ransacked by a horde of white domestic terrorists, fueled by the big lie Donald Trump had loudly and consistently pushed in speeches and online for months prior to the presidential election: his electoral defeat was a fraud; he lost the election due to a vast conspiracy to change, add, or delete votes and steal his rightful victory.

2021-02-28 16:34

Dark winter

“I can taste the tin of the sky - the real tin thing. / Winter dawn is the color of metal, / The trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves. / All night I have dreamed of destruction, annihilations - / An assembly-line of cut throats…” -from “Waking in Winter,” by Sylvia Plath

2020-12-02 16:40

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