The Study of Racialism

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From Asia Times

'Mixed blood' Korean heroes
By Donald Kirk

SEOUL - In a land of contradictions and contrasts, Hines Ward of the Pittsburgh Steelers football team epitomizes the yin and yang of the South Korean flag.

He's African-Korean-American - the offspring of a black American GI and a Korean bar hostess, a child of war and postwar suffering, a potential outcast viewed with shame and contempt among Koreans. Yet today, as Koreans greet him this week in a triumphant homecoming, he's a hero among a people to whom ethnic and racial origin defines nationality regardless of proof of citizenship.

Ward's ascent to hero status dramatizes the aphorism that nothing succeeds like success, for he did not become a figure of great respect in Korea until his proclamation as "the most valuable player" of Super Bowl XL in which the Steelers defeated the Seattle Seahawks 21-10 on February 5. Few Koreans understand American football, but by now just about everyone has seen a replay of Ward finishing off the scoring in storybook style with a touchdown on a 43-yard pass play. The failed marriage of a poor bargirl to a GI with an open wallet and false heart and his mother's desperate struggle to raise their son alone in the US would have made just another tawdry little tale of shame, stereotypical of thousands of such affairs, had Ward been less than a superstar success.

While reveling in Ward's glory, however, South Koreans are wallowing in a round of soul-searching about their innate prejudices, their "homogeneous" society and centuries of resistance to foreign intruders. Such introspection raises questions and issues that go beyond memories of raucous soldiers in the glittering bars that line the streets outside US bases. Foreigners coming here for whatever reason, artistic, social or commercial, face barriers that signify an innate need to defend the national turf against exploiters.

The fact that South Koreans are often divided among themselves hardly diminishes the sense of unity against interlopers eager to undermine and destroy the legacy of 5,000 years of history. This fear of foreigners has an obvious basis in a tradition of tragedy and suffering. The most dangerous invaders were the Japanese, who enslaved hundreds of thousands of Koreans, stole their land and ransacked the countryside.

It's more difficult, however, to figure the foreigners who rescued the country first from Japanese rule, next from other Koreans pouring down from the North, and then from the Chinese who in turn rescued North Korea for the communists. Shame over the need for foreign troops to have fought here at all fosters a desire to get rid of them except for the nagging sense that South Korea might again be exposed to invasion without them. The foreign troops themselves are often true to image, loud-talking, aggressive, occasionally violent and contemptuous of the Koreans whom they're here to defend. Racial and ethnic prejudice cuts all ways.

Over the years, the clash of cultures and civilizations has created a sense of confusion, of shifting values and standards that defy analysis. Outside Camp Casey, in Tongducheon, "TDC" to the hordes from the 2nd Infantry Division who've swarmed the town after grueling exercises on historic battlegrounds south of the line with North Korea, black soldiers for years flocked to what were regarded as their own bars. Overt segregation is rare these days, but Koreans, more so than the Americans, instinctively place blacks in a category below that of others of mixed blood. Offspring of Koreans and black GIs have a much tougher time over here, in school, on the job or on the streets, than do those of mixed "Caucasian" - the politically correct term for "white" - and Korean blood. Ward may have broken down prejudices, but the outlook runs deep in the Korean psyche.

The sense of shame extends, moreover, to ethnic Koreans adopted by foreigners, whether American or European. The specter of putting babies up for adoption grew out of the poverty of the Korean War, but Koreans now ask why Korean babies are still falling into foreign hands when the country now ranks among the world's dozen or so wealthiest. Here too recent athletic success has aroused feelings of pride in the ability of Koreans to compete abroad while provoking questions about Korean pride and prejudices.

Toby Dawson, left on a doorstep in the port city of Busan at the age of three and adopted by ski-instructor parents from the US state of Colorado, made headlines in Korea for winning the bronze in the men's freestyle skiing moguls in the Winter Olympics in Italy. A man in Busan says he's "sure" Dawson is his son, and others are vying for the honor of proving him as their own. For Dawson, the publicity was so embarrassing that he canceled plans to return to Korea at about the same time as Ward was getting a hero's welcome.

For Koreans, the unsettling question is why any Korean parents surrendered their flesh and blood - and what kind of life would either Ward or Dawson have led had they grown up here.

Such sensitivities, though, hardly tell the whole story in a culture where foreigners are relegated to second-class status at South Korean companies and universities, paid less than their Korean colleagues and shunted off to teach English or edit or rewrite English reports with no chance of competing for real jobs. Nor do they explain why foreigners, regardless of qualification, need not apply for most professional positions or why foreigners, while investing heavily in the local market, are denied more than token board slots, or why the streets are jammed with Korean-made cars, trucks and buses while foreign cars remain the toys of the rich. Under such circumstances, one suspects that a driving factor in outbursts of anti-Americanism is plain old xenophobia, the deep-seated desire to cleanse the country of those seen as standing in the way of pan-Korean nationhood.

Yet South Koreans need foreigners, not only for defense and business but for ideas. South Koreans compete to attend foreign institutions; they crowd planes overseas; they copy-cat invention. From this milieu spring Korea's own products and ideas, bursting on the world in manufactured and cultural exports, on screen, on television and in K-pop music. The hero-worship of Ward and Dawson will have worked if it helps to explode myths and phobias that inhibit Koreans from accepting the foreigners themselves.

Journalist Donald Kirk has been in and out of Korea since 1972.

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