Observations on Race, Racism, Ethnicity and Racial/Ethnic Identity

Having recently returned from South Korea, I would like to say for the record that that county is, in my opinion, one that has never gotten over the idea that diversity is something to be cherished rather than avoided. Most of the population is Asian, and most of that population is most definitely Korean. The only difference seen is what can be chalked up to the "foreigner" element. Foreigners are present in the country mainly for business, and every now and then that foreign element marries into the Korean population. And that's kind of where things start to get really murky.

First off, I'd like to focus on the foreigner population that is there for business as its main purpose. Twenty or so years ago, a foreigner in Korea was seen as a cherished encounter. Little kids would run up to the "wayguk" and follow him or her, often touching the person over and over, much to the befuddlement of the foreigner himself or herself. Strangers would walk up to that foreigner and attempt to speak English, to show that the language was learned at some time in the past. Other old timers would smile and speak Korean to the foreigner, often trying to engage in some kind of hand gestures that indicated that there was some comraderie that might exist between them.

Fast-forward a couple of decades, and you'll find some of those artifacts still in the Korean repertoire, but you'll also find a segment of the population that has grown tired of foreigners, often picking fights with foreigners and then blaming those foreigners for "not understanding Korean culture". Quite a few legal cases here in Korea are decided against foreigners based on that factor alone. Not too long ago, a Samsung crane barge collided with a Hong Kong cargo ship the Heibi Spirit, causing a massive oil spill. The Samsung crane barge was the initiator of the disaster, but a Korean court decided that Samsung was not the guilty party, and the blame was laid on the victims of the actual accident. Subsequent responses to the court case were met with several accusations of "not understanding Korean culture."

Another one of those misunderstandings: Women. Apparently, foreigners don't understand Korean customs either. Quite often, a Korean male will become lustful towards a foreign female and do innocent little things like invade her home and try to have sex with her without her permission. When that woman goes to the police, she is often told that she just doesn't understand Korean custom. Well, they're right because recently there have been a few major cases where a woman has been sued by a major company because she breached her contract by having the crap beaten out of her by her boyfriend. This happened just a few days ago to an actress who committed suicide because she was upset over some insignificant little thing; apparently her representation management felt that she needed to sleep with every man they set her up with because that's part of Korean entertainment culture. To add insult to injury, the company that hired her as spokesperson sued her and won when they discovered she was seriously beaten by her estranged boyfriend. See, even the Korean women don't understand Korean culture.

But I could talk bad about Korea all day, and believe it or not, that's not what this post is about Instead, I wanted to talk about race itself. And it has very little to do with Korea. Korea just opened my eyes to focus on this sort of thing.

When I returned home last week, I started focusing a lot more on the differences between people. To start, I moved to Oakland, and in case you grew up in a cave, in Michigan, you can't go two feet in Oakland without realizing that this is a place that is a powder keg just waiting to go off. Oh, people deny that and go on with their daily lives, while walking quickly down some streets and running down others, knowing not to make eye contact with the regulars.

There's a huge racial and ethnic divide in Oakland and surrounding areas that seems really sad, mainly because most of us here all have the shared identity as Americans, or US residents/citizens. You would think that would mean something, but it only really means anything when you're faced with the dichotomy outside of the US environment. It's really bizarre when you think about it.

Let me explain. When I was in the service, the people who served with me represented all demographics that exist in the USA. Blacks, Caucasians, Asians, Hispanics, and any other ethnicity that comes to mind all served together as part of a bigger picture. Sure, in some units there were problems when the commanders didn't understand that they needed to teach that the unit was more important than shared other identities. I can tell you a couple of stories of a couple of infantry and engineer units I was in where it felt more like a prison population with separations of skinheads, African-Americans and Latinos meaning more than anything else. And then in other units, the idea of race and ethnicity meant nothing to anyone but an afterthought. Quite often, the leadership made the difference in how people perceived themselves. People never really figure these sorts of things out.

It's no different here in Oakland. Really. The leadership here is what makes the differences what they are. Whenever a person runs on a platform of race or ethnicity, that automatically sets up a dynamic that is going to transpose itself on the population itself. I'm reminded of the TV show, The Wire, where a white politician decides to run for mayor of Baltimore against an incumbent black mayor. He does it by pitting another African-American against him and ends up splitting the black vote. Although the show is fiction, it is a strong representation of some of the forces that really do work in politics in this country. There are places in this country where no white person can ever run for office and other places where no one of any ethnicity but white can ever achieve an elected position. And that's just sad.

As I've been taking the bus around town a lot these days, I find myself within the same company of a lot of people who don't look or sound like me. And unfortunately, this is not what the founding fathers wanted when they were hoping for a melting pot. What you discover in this kind of situation is that people who identify as something other than you tend to avoid you or see you as an adversary. Taking the bus in Oakland is interesting in the very idea that someone who may be open to race and ethnicity may also be taking his or her life into his own hands because not everyone else feels the same way. I was in a McDonald's yesterday reading the newspaper when I turned to a group of older black gentlemen behind me and asked them if they wanted my newspaper as I was leaving. This led to a friendly conversation between me and the four of them that stretched on for about five or ten minutes. We parted in a friendly manner, and as I was leaving, a younger black man who was sitting at the next table wandered over to them and said to the other men in an almost challenging way, "Who was that asshole?"

This is part of the problem I think that has plagued most forward thinkers. For those of us who have done higher education and the graduate school route, when you encounter someone from a marginalized demographic that you would not normally encounter in daily life there is no problem seeing that person as another equal person who contributes to the educational discourse. But outside of that environment, you're constantly encountering people who never learned to "play well with others" and when you end up trying to treat someone in a fair, friendly way, that doesn't always achieve positive results. In some cases, it can get you killed.

And that's the problem with where we are with race and ethnicity in the 21st century. The bigger part of the problem is that we're trained to not acknowledge it. We put things into categorical boxes like partisan behavior and pretend that these sorts of things don't happen. The Democratic Party is a good example of this. They are the party that incorporates the most of the previously marginalized, disenfranchised voters, but at the same time that party doesn't do a very good job of bringing people up to a common ground but instead takes great pains to contribute to the separate but equal placement we maintain between these entities. Again, we don't acknowledge this, but like in Lani Guinere's Tyranny of the Majority, she points out that a different kind of perspective is needed to move the races and ethnicities forward, but unfortunately the people who benefit from these differences, like old style Civil Rights leaders, also benefit from keeping those differences present. That's a problem that the Martin Luther King, Jr's never envisioned: What do you do with the civil rights organizations when you start to achieve equality, and even more important, how do you keep the identity of difference from overwhelming the organization so that it doesn't become a badge of honor rather than a bridge to cross? And that's the real problem. As long as someone has something to gain from separating races and ethnicities, what chance do we have of those same people casting off the cloak of power that their organizing brought about? It's similar to the whole communism in reality argument. Sure, communism sounds like a great idea, but how do you strip the state from the skeleton once you achieve the destruction of capitalism? You can't because those who put all their marbles in that game aren't capable of taking their marbles and claiming victory.

So, having returned home, I find myself in the middle of so many different people, and I want to stand up and shout how happy I am that I can embrace the idea of diversity with so many people. But I'm afraid to do so because if I make that much noise, someone's going to see me and probably kill me for speaking out in public in the middle of a crowd of people who are different than me.

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