Description

Students of South Korean multiculturalism have laudably given voice to the many non-Koreans who live in a proudly single-blood nation and have extensively criticized the state for its self-interested multicultural project. Without critiquing these claims, I argue in this critical review essay that the multicultural scholarship has omitted at least one important group who diversifies South Korea: the part-Black children of military couplings. This dearth of works on Korean-Black children in particular is unexpected in light of Superbowl XL MVP Hines Ward’s 2006 visit being widely seen as the opening salvo on a multicultural South Korea. Yet, because scholars are guided by the lens of the state on who the “multicultural citizens” are and because we typically opt for the conceptual language of ethnicity and ethnic nationalism over that of race and (ethno)racism, Black-descent populations tend to be overlooked. By doing so, I argue, we as scholars inadvertently reify the country’s belief that Blacks are the most biologically and culturally different from them as well as the country’s opposite perception of diasporic Koreans, of Asians from the Pacific region, and of lighter-skinned people. We also enable the state and like-minded adherents to promote policies of cultural assimilation of minorities that, in reality, deny pluralistic equality on the related basis of biological (racial) criteria. The essay briefly concludes with the consequences of inadvertently reifying state hegemonic projects.

Nadia Y. Kim is Associate Professor of Sociology at Loyola Marymount University. She received a doctorate in sociology at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in 2003 and was a faculty member at Brandeis University (Sociology and Women’s & Gender Studies) from 2004-07. Her research interests are ‘race’/ethnicity, nation, citizenship, immigration, transnationalism/diaspora, gender and intersectionality, community politics, Environmental Justice, Asian American Studies, Asian Studies, and Women’s Studies. Her book, Imperial Citizens: Koreans and Race from Seoul to L.A. (2008, Stanford University Press) won two awards from the American Sociological Association (ASA) in 2009: the Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award from the Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities and the Book of the Year Award from the Section on Asia and Asian America. Her current project examines the gendered processes in fights for clean air among low-income immigrant women of color, namely Latino and Asian American (many of whom are undocumented). She has published in numerous scholarly journals such as Social Problems, Critical Sociology, the Du Bois Review, and Amerasia Journal, won two ASA Early Career Awards and research paper awards, has been an ASA Minority Fellow, and a selected Social Science Research Council Summer Institute participant.