BlacKorean Conflict
Last fall I thought I might do a human interest piece on these two Korean church ladies who come from the ‘burbs once a month to feed Korean food to innercity children. My best friend Vee gave me the idea for the story. It’s her church they congregate in on that weekday night. I thought the story would make a great human relations piece and illustrated that although Black/Korean relations might be strained in other cities it wasn’t the deal with mine.
So I went down and interviewed them yet ended up putting the story aside. A few months later I offered the notes to my husband, J, so he could finish up his thesis on (what else?) Black/Korean relations in the United States. He has read virtually every book and every article ever written on the subject but needed a local slant to add new material. Although he is Korean every Korean business that he entered that primarily had a black clientele didn’t want to talk to him. One business owner cited his “bad English” and offered his niece to talk to J instead. The niece happened to be blasian (half black and half Korean) and gave J some of the information he was looking for but wouldn’t fully open up.
When J got my notes he decided to go down and check out the Korean dinner hour for himself. Armed with his camera he took pictures of the women serving the children and got quotes from everyone. But as we were leaving he noticed the same thing with one of the Korean women.
“She wouldn’t answer my questions,” he said on the car ride home. He was speaking of one of the ladies who owned a black hair store. The other woman, who was a professor, was very forthcoming but the hair store owner steered away from questions on race, preferring to talk about her community work.
Maybe things aren’t as easy going as I thought.
But if they have been watching the news I can see how they might find it best to stay mum on race relations in the states. Every so often discord between African American and Korean American communities flare up and when it does the media has a front row seat. Blogger Wendi Muse over on Racialicious discusses how a video that was popular last year on youtube was akin to scapegoating. Richard Fruto, former reporter for Korea Times Weekly, blames the media for the stereotypes of Korean merchants during the 1992 LA riots. “They often played into the hands of street agitators and boiled it down to a problem blamed on rude merchants,” Fruto said.
The true nature of the conflict can’t completely be laid at the feet of overzealous reporters, although they do often give it a spin most people can relate to. When judge Roy Pearson decided to sue a small dry cleaners for losing his slacks most people just chalked it up to this being a litigious society with a judge who wants to rake in a few bucks. But once discovered that Pearson is black it gives a whole different spin on it, locally and nationally. Once Pearson’s race was discovered many African Americans wrote to Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher to complain about bad run-ins they’ve had with Korean merchants. A black business owner said she appreciated Pearson, “appreciate his suing on my behalf. Obviously $60+ million is ‘over the top.’ And I understand that Korean-Americans have made efforts to be ‘nicer’ to their Afro-American clientele, but I think these cases are examples of their needing to be more sensitive.”
Minority vs minority conficts come into play when the subgroups vie for the limited resources in the area. One hundred years ago it was the Irish, Italians and blacks all fighting one another. In the new century its blacks, poor whites, Asians, and Latinos with different match ups at different times. One group believes that another group is getting special privileges that are unobtainable to their particular subset. Lies are believed and rumored about one another. Words are said and either fists are flying or someone is running to court.
So this is nothing new and it won’t be the last. Until something else comes along to replace minorities there will always be interracial conflict unless the goods are distributed more fairly.
