From the English Chosun (HT to the Nomad):
Meanwhile, Gwangmyeong Mayor Lee Hyo-seon has invited censure again with offensive remarks about African-Americans. Lee was forced to give up his membership in the Grand National Party after he made derogatory remarks about Jeolla Province last July. On Monday, Lee made the faux pas at a luncheon with a visiting delegation from the Washington branch of the presidential Advisory Council on Democratic and Peaceful Unification. “When I visited Washington D.C., I saw niggers swarm all around the city," he said. "How can you live in such a scary place? I was so afraid that I didn’t come out of my hotel at night.”
Well, I'm obviously not too surprised at this and how it found expression, since the most virulent expressions of Korean-on-Black racism seem to find their most fiery fuel in the Korean AMERICAN community and bounce back across the water to visiting Koreans, who take this as the gospel of people "who would know."
In 1996, in my second year of working as an ETA middle school teacher on Cheju Island, my co-teacher had been applying to a program that picked schoolteachers from each province to attend a nine-month, all-expenses paid language enrichment program at Florida State University.
Then suddenly, out of the blue, there was the creaton of a superficially "fair" new rule that the Cheju Board of Education had made up that suddenly stipulated 10 years of teaching experience as a requirement to apply, which all teachers on the very conservative Cheju Island knew meant "no women."
You see, it was a commonly-known fact, as well as oft-used technique to "disinvite" unpopular coworkers, that if you didn't give a married woman at least a day's notice about a department event or other after work/after school get-together, that she couldn't go. On Chejudo – which was so conservative that it made Seoul at the time look positively libertarian by comparison (it was controversial at the time to even marry a non-Cheju person) – even being away from the house and husband for a day meant cooking and preparing everything in advance and leaving portions in well-marked containers.
Leaving the island for the better part of a year, for any teacher who would have been around 34 years old at the youngest (what with the new 10-year teaching requirement and all), was socially impossible. And since the program was designed to help develop English skills in the provinces, where there were few foreign teachers living and working at the time, the assumption was that fresh, young teachers would go and get great English skills, and then come back to improve English education back in the boonies.
Well, for the Cheju Board of Education, it turned into a 9-month paid vacation exclusively for older male teachers. The excuse had been that two young female teachers from the year before had gotten "too friendly" with the natives and there were even rumors – brace yourselves – that they had even had American boyfriends. Oh, the horror!
So they went to America, socialized primarily with Americans, and perhaps even get romantically involved with the "외국인" there. Oh, the shame, the shame!
Hey – at least they were getting out there and whatever they were doing, I'm sure their English improved. Even if these girls were getting their respective freaks on doing the reverse cowgirl atop blonde surfer dudes in the back room of the bar while chugging Hennesey straight out the bottle – shit, at least their English was certainly improving. Which is kind of the frickin' point, right?
Know what happened the year it became a gentlemen-only club? It was reported back to me that the teachers had been told by their Korean guides and connections in the local Korean community there to "never, under any circumstances approach a Black person" and that going outside after 8 PM meant risking very likely getting shot.
The teachers had even been told to sleep on the floor instead of the beds, since it was Korean style, anyway and the bonus was that it further decreased the risk of getting hit by collateral fire from drive-by shootings.
It's not that these teachers were living in the hood in some gang-infested neighborhood in Miami or whatever; they were all put up in very nice university facilities on the campus, I hear, paid for with Korean taxpayer dollars.
So the Cheju people, who had discriminated out anyone who might have had the verve – nay, common sense – to take what they were being told by their America-based Korean tour guides, restauranteurs, and other interested parties with a few pounds of salt, were all sitting back in Korea, pissed and frustrated, and definitely not learning any English.
And their Chejudo superiors, mostly less linguistically capable men in their 40's (all the Fulbrights at the time used to joke that the person who spoke English the worst in their school departments were the department heads, who were invariably older, male, and couldn't speak a lick of English to save their life – my department head avoided me in school and never came to the meetings because I was never, ever able to decipher a word he was saying and we had to revert to my elementary Korean or another English teacher to translate for us) didn't learn much more, actually.
The "betters" of the female applicants left behind on Chejudo spent most of their time working hard not to meet any Americans (since the "spics" were surely not faring any better than the "niggers" in the Korean rumor mill) in their nine months in Florida, they did their best to never leave the house in the evening, and never went anywhere without a Korean tour company leading the way in insulated, isolated, pre-packaged tours.
So the people from the provinces all stayed in the same houses, and I heard that the Cheju group ate exclusively Korean food, stayed indoors, and the only departure from classes were guided tours and Korean events.
The sheer display of cultural ignorance, blatant display of gender discrimination, and total waste of time that this became for the Cheju people (I don't know about how the other provinces fared and can't speak to that) left a level of rage that I could only get a taste of, when I was watching my co-teacher and other colleagues pull their figurative hair out.
Or, you could take the only time I actually saw or heard someone be called the word "nigger" in Korea – in English – it turned out, after the police came when my female friend slapped the shit out of him after he got in her face with absolutely no provocation and commanded her to "Go back to America, nigger!" – our crime had been walking back to the Fulbright yeogwan from the convenience store after getting some ice cream – that guy turned out to have spent 10 years in LA, world capital of racial "understanding."
Knowing how the rumor mill works here, especially when it comes to representing foreign or racial "Others", it's no surprise at all to hear that a visiting Korean mayor didn't know what was Korean "inside speak" and "public speak" – his main crime was just that he echoed the likely "깜둥이들은 위험해" sentiments in a too-public forum; had it just been at the dinner table after the main event, I'm sure conversation would have carried on without a hitch, and certainly without having been outed in the newspaper.
And after all, that's what his Korean American guide had been telling him; who is he to go against the conventional wisdom?
While there may be people who resist this way of thinking, they are still in the minority in the overseas Korean community; so, to me, the words of this mayor, to anyone who knows their overseas Korean communities, certainly isn't "news."
