Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Newbie]

Lately many people are complaining about racism on Dave's. I just don't see it that much. Off the top of my head I can think of 2 such statements: "Koreans are lower than scum and don't deserve to live" and "I will never hire Koreans when I go back to North America" (slightly misquoted, but you get the idea). Yes, these statements are disgusting and nasty and they should not be allowed here. I'm all for banning such posts and getting rid of whomever posts that crap

Aside from them, what in particular do you find so offensive? I see a lot of mocking, but not much hating. I don't know, I guess I'm just not very sensitive. I've always been of the "Seinfeld" school of thought. People who are strange and different are there to give us a laugh. And really, what's wrong with laughing at other people?

[crazy_arcade]

I remember one time I read a post that said (and this not a direct quotation but rather a paraphrahse)

Korean woman are hot....all korean men look like frogs to me.

There's racism here, there, and everywhere. Anonymity leads to a-s-s-h-o.........s

[RACETRAITOR]

Most of the "Why do all Koreans...?" threads are racist, whether or not they're harmless.

[mj roach]

how about all the 'whitey' 'white boy' crap?

[Bramble]

A lot of people on these boards regularly stereotype Koreans. Also, you can do a search for "seoulshock" and look up his/her remarks in the anti-PC thread to see some serious racism against black people. I can't think of any other recent examples off the top of my head ... but I recall Junior/Rapier having been pretty offensive at times.

[migooknom]

the amount of racist/ignorant statements on these boards are ridiculous...

[Newbie]

[Newbie]

[Bramble]

[RACETRAITOR]

[Newbie]

[RACETRAITOR]

[Jizzo T. Clown]

Desperation has been known to be racist (or maybe just clueless) on occasion.

[kimchi story]

[pharflung]

It's sort of touching to see that it is difficult for a Canadian to fully understand the concept of racism. While Canada isn't perfect, and has had some problems with prejudice, as far as I know those are for the most part long past, by a half-century of more.

America, on the other hand, has had centuries of practice at racism of all sorts. My guess is there are only two other countries in the world with more experience in perfecting the art of racism: South Africa and Nazi Germany.

Racism is so thoroughly, deeply embedded in the American psyche that most racists are totally bewildered when someone points out their prejudices -- that, or they are proud of them.

Now, I want to make it clear that institutionalized, legalized racism is, of course, extinct in the United States. And for the most part, racism is no longer fashionable. The vast majority of Americans no longer are racists towards Blacks. That long, horrible nightmare is almost over, thank God. Why did it have to take so long?

But the racist mentality, the proclivity to make mindless generalizations about whole groups of people, persists in the United States.

Racism doesn't have to be marked by hate. Many racists would say, in the bad old days, "I don't hate negroes," or whatever word they used at the time. And often they didn't. They might even have worked with them, but they didn't want their children going to school with them or marrying them.

Their racist attitudes, no matter how benign, lent support to the racists who did hate. My mother was a racist from the South. She would never have put a gun to the head of a Black person and pulled the trigger. But the attitudes of people like her, and the silence of others, allowed some to feel perfectly comfortable lynching Black men, women and children.

It was this culture of racism that allowed those who were filled with hate to put a bomb under the bedroom of Harry T. Moore and his wife Harriette -- on Christmas night 1951. Never heard of Harry T. Moore? He was a civil rights leader before it became fashionable. Read "Before His Time," by Ben Green.

Americans don't generally realize just how obscene our country's history is on this issue. Moore lived in Florida, not far from Orlando. Ever hear of the movie "Rosewood?" It is about a Black town in Florida that was wiped off the face of the earth by Whites. It turns out there were two such massacres in Florida in the 1920s; Rosewood, I believe, was the second.

Racists only began to shut up and stop killing people when it became unfashionable. It was still fashionable as late as the 1960s. Just read John Steinbeck's "Travels with Charlie," specifically, his visit to New Orleans. It turned his stomach.

Racists can't see people as individuals. That's the essential problem. They are blinded by their own prejudices, not only towards others but towards themselves. Those prejudices can take all sorts of forms. Racists generalize from a limited number of individuals to impose general characteristics upon an entire group. Those generalizations become the reality, and they simply don't see the exceptions to the rule.

Such a need for absolute certainty is not solely the province of Americans. All people tend to generalize; John Dewey called it "The Quest for Certainty." But Americans, sadly, do seem to have more practice in making irrational generalizations about groups of people.

Awhile back I was living in a pleasant Southern town, one with a tree-lined town square surrounded by beautiful old homes. I was attending a church event and remarked to an acquaintance that it was odd there were no blacks there; after all, it was open to the public and publicized in the paper. He didn't see anything odd about this, and it was just fine with him, too. He was a college graduate working in the computer field; he even had been a high level manager at Apple Computers.

Yet he was a racist, though he would have denied it. He wanted to keep his distance from Blacks, but he thought this was based on reason, not prejudice. He tried to explain his reasoning to me: "If you were walking down a street at night, and a Black person were walking down the street behind you, wouldn't you be afraid of being robbed, and want to avoid him?"

I said "No more than a White person. You can be robbed these days just as easily be a White person as a Black person; it depends upon the sort of person and neighborhood whether I would be nervous." And you can't really tell in the dark, can you?

He was not swayed by this answer.

When someone makes a generalization about one group, I find it helpful to substitute another dissimilar group in the description. This is why when someone on this forum makes a generalization about Koreans I like to see how well that description would apply to Americans, by which I usually mean people from North America or Westerners in general.

If Koreans have a fault in some way, it does not excuse it by saying that some Americans also have this fault. But it helps put it in perspective, and perhaps deflate the broad generalization about one group. Perhaps the problem is not with Koreans or Americans, but with human beings in general, or at least some of them.

Yes, I believe there are people who could be described as racists using this forum. I guess it is only natural; they are trying to make sense of a bewildering new world. And sometimes they are angry about some experience with Koreans. But they lack training in reaching conclusions about a foreign culture. Perhaps one cure for such racism would be the disciplined reasoning gained through a good course in anthropology or sociology.

I think it is important for posters on this board to not tolerate racism, because it hurts the image of all expat English teachers. But after some thought, I believe it should be done in a courteous manner, without hatred or anger. Martin Luther King and Gandhi are good people to remember in this regard. We are all human beings and all imperfect. I suspect they understood that.