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www.groovekorea.com / February 2014 34 Edited by Elaine Ramirez (elaine@groovekorea.com) InsIGhT ‘Raised’ racist Many Koreans themselves say they were raised to believe that black people were not the kinds of people they wanted in Korea. Those interviewed by Groove Korea asked that their full name not be used. Ahn, 39, a businessman in Seoul, says he was raised with very little exposure to foreign- ers. He admits that when he and his family did see non-Koreans, they had very different re- actions toward them based on their skin color. “When we saw black people, my parents and everybody said ‘dirty,’” he says. “Maybe they look like monkeys in the zoo, because they’re rare to see. We were very scared of them, like a phobia.” But when it came to white people, Ahn says it was the opposite. “My parents (and people their age) said white people are good. They’re clean, they’re reliable, because they’re white — they’re American. They helped us.” Ahn says American movies and music in- fluenced Koreans to see blacks as dirty, poor, violent slum-dwellers. “The U.S. way of look- ing at black people came to Korea,” Ahn says. “So Korean people looked at black people just like Americans did.” Lee, a business owner in Paju, Gyeonggi Province, says she was also raised to see black people as inferior to whites. “I thought black people weren’t as smart or wealthy as non-black people,” she says. “It was the com- mon thinking among me and my peers. They were always presented this way on TV. TV and movies often showed bad neighborhoods with black people. So it was just the way we thought.” For many, attitudes changed over time with the media and contact. Today, Ahn feels there is little racism toward black people, though the animosity has shifted to Chinese and South- east Asian workers. Young people in Korea, he says, think “black is good, black is cool, because they look at movies and YouTube, and they see black is not poor or dirty any- more, but they’re cool, with hip-hop, movies, music, sports, Michael Jordan.” Kim, a small business owner in Ilsan, Gyeo- nggi Province, once believed blacks were poor, dumb, lazy and violent. But when she went on a three-week trip to Tanzania, every- thing changed. She said she was particularly struck with Tanzanians’ zeal for education and how hard they worked, two qualities also high- ly valued in Korean society. Perceptions changed for Ahn and his family when his father brought a black business col- league home for dinner. “My mother had never seen a black person before. And at that time, my mother thought black people were dirty, dangerous, lived in slums,” Ahn says. But af- ter the man came home and ate with them, Ahn’s mother changed her mind. Ahn feels that Koreans fear what they don’t know. “But once they meet a friend, they don’t care anymore.” But how bad is it? Despite any discrimination they face, almost every black source Groove Korea interviewed said they either liked or loved Korea. Many were quick to point out that not everyone in Korea was racist — indeed, most Koreans they knew weren’t and were perfectly accom- modating to them. Several sources indicated never having experienced any discrimination in Korea at all. “Korea — there’s racism here?” answered three Liberians in Itaewon when asked about racism. They all insisted that they had never experienced any racism in Korea, and that if there was any, it paled in comparison to other countries such as Thailand and Russia. Shams el-Din Rogers, 44 and from Detroit, visited Korea on vacation for two weeks and liked it so much she came back to live. “I have not at all felt discriminated against in Korea. If people are discrimination against me, they’re hiding it really well,” Rogers says. Rogers, who teaches on Geoje Island, says that within her first three days here, she was going with a bride to choose her bridal han- bok. When she toured around Korea, she had invitations from strangers to stay in their homes (which she declined), and everything was “very comfortable.” Samantha Coerbell, 42, from Queens, New York, says she has never felt discriminated against here. Before she left, white people had told her she would never be hired for a job. “That turned out to be insanely untrue,” she says. At Coerbell’s first hagwon job, her boss stuck up for her when some parents ex- pressed concern at having a black teacher. “He said he wanted to expose his students to America — all of America, not just one kind of America,” Coerbell says. “When he had concerns from parents about there being a black teacher, he stood up for me and told them about my qualifications and how I was with the kids.” Since then, things have only been positive, and the only racism she has encountered is actually from white Americans, she says. Jessica Womack, 25 and from Florida, notes a number of similarities between Kore- an and black American culture, from the food to the music. She has also never felt discrim- inated against. “I feel that a lot of people are more com- fortable with me,” Womack says. She finds strangers are always happy to talk to her. “One girl who came up to me, she said, ‘Whenever I say hi to a white person, they don’t say hi back to me. But when I say hi to a black per- son, they always say hi back to me.’” Womack says that issues of discrimination don’t necessarily have to do with color, but simply non-Koreanness. “If you’re not Korean, you’re just not Korean, period.” Many point out that Korea’s tensions with the Chinese and other Asians have run lon- ger and deeper than its discrimination against black people, whom they have only been ex- posed to in the past six decades. Professor Kim of Ewha believes Korea is moving in a positive direction, away from blackface and bad jokes. She points to Park Jin-young’s past collaborations with a host of black American artists including Will Smith, R. Kelly and Mase. And the students she sees now are not the same as they were even a few years ago. “You can see over a very short period of time that things are changing very rapidly,” Kim says. “I do hope we’re in a trajectory to- wards a more open, diverse, multicultural so- ciety. We’re not there yet. But the U.S. is not there yet either.” Many blacks find white foreigners just as racist as Koreans, if not more so. Teacher Jamian Bailey, 29, says a white South African in his town is forever “coming up to me and other black people, and saying, ‘Hey home- boys, y’all done any drive-by shootings lately?’ It’s ignorant.” Motley caught a white American teacher telling a Korean guy she was dating to “never date black people” because of how “unedu- cated” they are. “I hate this girl. She is always behaving like a nigger,” the white woman tex- ted about her. Corey Scott, 44, of Virginia, did experience discrimination from Koreans and admitted it was difficult raising two black children in Ko- rea. But he also points out, “I would say this very clearly: The Koreans are a very tolerant and peaceful people. They have their quirks, like all cultures do, but the level of racism there can be handled.” This, he says, is a contrast to Saudi Arabia, where he now lives and where he says racism is completely blatant. “The racism (in Saudi Arabia) is on a completely different level,” he says. In the Middle East, “it’s just right out in the open.”