Mixed Race Studies

Demographic Shifts Redefine What It Means to Be Korean

The New York Times
2012-11-29

Choe Sang-Hun

SEOUL, South Korea — Jasmine Lee realizes just how Korean she’s become when she breaks out in the language, forgetting that her Filipino mother on the other end of the phone can’t understand her. But she is reminded of the limits of assimilation when Koreans, impressed by her fluency, comment: “You sound more Korean than Koreans do.”

Ms. Lee, 35, who was born Jasmine Bacurnay in the Philippines, made history in April when she became the first naturalized citizen — and the first non-ethnic Korean — to win a seat in South Korea’s National Assembly. Her election reflected one of the most significant demographic shifts in the country’s modern history, a change Ms. Lee says “Koreans understand with their brain, but have yet to embrace with their heart.”

Only a decade ago, school textbooks still urged South Koreans to take pride in being of “one blood” and ethnically homogeneous. Now, the country is facing the prospect of becoming a multiethnic society. While the foreign-born population is still small compared with countries with a tradition of immigration, it’s enough to challenge how South Koreans see themselves.

“It’s time to redefine a Korean,” said Kim Yi-seon, chief researcher on multiculturalism at the government-financed Korean Women’s Development Institute. “Traditionally, a Korean meant someone born to Korean parents in Korea, who speaks Korean and has Korean looks and nationality. People don’t think someone is a Korean just because he has a Korean citizenship.”…

…One of every 10 marriages in South Korea now involves a foreign spouse. Although overall numbers of schoolchildren in South Korea have been declining — to 6.7 million this year from 7.7 million in 2007 — as a result of one of the world’s lowest birth rates, the number of multiethnic students has been climbing by 6,000 a year in the same period.

“A multicultural society is not just coming; it’s already here,” Ms. Lee, a member of the governing Saenuri Party, said in an interview at her office in the National Assembly…

…“They bring religious and ethnic strife to our country, where we had none before,” said Kim Ky-baek, publisher of the nationalist Web site Minjokcorea and a critic of the government’s policy of admitting and providing social benefits to foreign-born brides and migrant workers. “They create an obstacle to national unification. North Korea adheres to pure-blood nationalism, while the South is turning into a hodgepodge of mixed blood.”

The challenge for South Korea is whether it can “redefine the nation, embracing people who do not share the same blood into a broader Koreanness,” said Chung Ki-seon, senior researcher at the IOM Migration Research and Training Center…

…And this year, for the first time, South Korea began accepting multiethnic Korean citizens into its armed forces. Previously, the military had maintained that a different skin color would make them stand out and hurt unity…

Read the entire article here.

Being Amerasian in South Korea: Purebloodness, Multiculturalism, and Living Alongside the U.S. Military Empire

The Ohio State University
June 2012
96 pages

Yuri W. Doolan

Honors Research Thesis Presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with Honors Research Distinction in History in the undergraduate colleges of The Ohio State University

This thesis focuses on the history of U.S. neo-colonialism in South Korea through the lens of mixed race Amerasians—a population generally regarded and understood to have been produced through the liaisons between South Korean camptown women and American military personnel. In this project, I discuss the historical and contemporary status and identity of mixed race individuals in South Korea as the country’s national ideology evolved from an embrace of purebloodedness to multiculturalism. My analysis is chronologically framed around intercountry adoption policies in the years immediately following the Korean War (formed to excise the presence of mixed race GI babies from South Korea) and state-sponsored multicultural policy initiatives beginning in 2005. I research the production of Amerasian subjectivity and identity in South Korea over the past six decades through an analysis of pureblooded constructions of Koreanness, U.S. militarism and camptowns, androcentric Nationality and Family Laws, contemporary multicultural policy formations, and the popular culture and lived experiences of Amerasians in South Korea.

I also offer a comparative analysis of a new mixed race group in South Korea called Kosian (Korean/Asian). I critique multiculturalism in South Korea, which targets this emerging Kosian demographic, arguing that multicultural policy is primarily one of assimilation rather than a recognition of cultural and racial differences. I suggest that the marginal status of mixed race Amerasians has not changed much since the Korean War and is linked to South Korea’s persistent status as a neo-colony of the United States—a history of national shame and subjugation that Amerasians have come to symbolize. Primary sources for this study include legal and government documents, popular media representations, interviews with pureblooded Koreans, as well as oral histories of Amerasians that I conducted in South Korea during the summer of 2011.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• A Note on Terminology
• Chapter One
  • Introduction
  • Pureblooded Constructions of Race
  • The G.I. Baby and Camptowns
  • Intercountry Adoption
  • Gendered Citizenship and Korean Family Law
  • Conclusion
• Chapter Two
  • Introduction
  • A “Multicultural” Era
  • White Privilege in Contemporary South Korean Society
  • Conclusion
• Conclusion
• Bibliography

Read the entire thesis here.

Army to appoint first mixed-race officers

Korea Herald
2012-06-11

Yonhap News

The South Korean Army said Monday that two of its cadets with multicultural backgrounds are soon to become non-commissioned officers, the first such cases since the Army’s foundation.

Cadet officers Bae Jun-hyeong, 22, and Han Ki-yeop, 21, will undergo a 12-week training course next month before being appointed as NCOs, Army officials said.

The two cadets said that they will work hard to become respected members of the military and set a good example for the other soldiers.

Both are from multicultural families: Bae’s mother is of Vietnamese origin and Han’s mother is from Japan. This is the first time for anyone from such households to join the ranks of non-commissioned officers in the South Korean military, officials said.

There are currently 179 soldiers from multicultural backgrounds serving in the Army, while there are nine in the Navy and five in the Air Force, according to Army officials…

Read the entire article here.

Multicultural children’s baseball team founded

The Korea Times
2012-04-20

Kim Bo-eun

Former baseball player Heo Koo-youn, 61, will found a baseball team for children of interracial families in Korea, Monday.

The team will be called Heo Koo-youn Rainbow Little.

The initiation ceremony will be held at the National Baseball Center in Goyang, north of Seoul.
 
The junior team will be comprised of about 20 children from interracial and underprivileged families residing in Goyang…

…“The team is designed to help resolve the problems troubling interracial families through sports,” Heo said in a phone interview with The Korea Times Friday…

Read the entire article here.

Multi-ethnic Koreans find help with assimilation through MACK Foundation

The Korea Times
2012-04-25

A “typical Korean” probably wouldn’t call Yang Chan-wook a typical Korean, but he wants to be seen that way. The 37-year-old is a multi-ethnic Korean, part Korean from his mother’s side and part African-American from his father’s side. And he’s working towards better understanding of multi-ethnic Koreans in Korean society with his foundation, the Movement for the Advancement of the Cultural-Diversity of Koreans, also known as MACK.

The MACK Foundation president was born in Korea, but moved around between the U.S., Germany and Korea when he was young. Yang says he really started to come to terms with his dual ethnicities after his parents divorced.

“It was around 10 or 11 when I started to identify myself with the different cultural aspects of my own life that either contradicted or fit into the environment that I was in,” says Yang. Until that point, Yang continues, “my ethnicity wasn’t really on my mind until I moved to my father’s side of the family in an all African-American community.” It was there in Chicago where Yang says that his dual-ethnicities were actually being pointed out to him and he had to start thinking about what that meant.

After that, Yang decided to dedicate his life towards helping others with similar backgrounds. He moved back to Korea in 2003. It was here in 2009 where he took the reins of MACK.

“We’re different from other multi-cultural foundations because we’re focused on Koreans accepting the diversity of its own people,” says Yang…

…Shin Hei-soo, a U.N. Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights expert, says that Korea still has many issues accepting a multi-ethnic as well as a multi-cultural society. It’s because “Koreans have long historical roots of the family tree,” Shin explains. In her hometown area in Gyeonggi Province, where they can count back to 11 generations of the family name Shin, she says even Koreans with a different last name than Shin are still treated as outsiders.

Rural and older generations might have a more conservative view about accepting mixed-race Koreans into society, says Lee Kyu-jae, a recent Hanyang University graduate. “In my opinion, mixed-race Koreans are also our citizens so we shouldn’t consider them as foreign or someone who is different.” The 26-year-old continues, “because Korea is a single-race nation, most Koreans cannot help having a sense of difference about them. So, they sometimes suffer from hardship due to this unique Korean perspective.”…

Read the entire article here.

[Daniel Fiedler] Segregating children is wrong

The Korea Herald
2012-03-13

Daniel Fiedler, Professor of Law
Wonkwang University

This year under the guidance of the Seoul Office of Education a new elementary school and a new high school were opened in the Seoul area. While generally the opening of new schools would not be cause for comment, in this case the new schools are specifically for children who come from “multicultural” backgrounds. The high school is designed to educate “multicultural” teenagers who have dropped out of regular public high schools, while the elementary school will operate as a regular school but with special emphasis on teaching Korean culture and language. The Seoul Office of Education argues that this is a necessary and progressive approach to assist in the education of these children; however, segregating these students from their Korean peers is neither appropriate nor desirable for the future of South Korea. And the use of the term “multicultural” to describe these children is a thinly disguised euphemism for mixed-race or mixed-descent, a concept that has no place in 21st century discourse.

For a comparison one only has to look to the failed experience of the United States in segregating the races during the first half of the 20th century. In the United States the euphemism used was “separate but equal” and the idea was to have schools only for black children and schools only for white children. The United States then extended it to separate cars on trains, to separate public bathrooms and even to separate drinking fountains and soda shops. However, after almost 60 years it became apparent that the “separate but equal” approach was an abject failure and, in 1954 the United States Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional. Since that time integration and equality have been driving forces behind affirmative action programs in education, employment and everyday life in the United States. Nonetheless, the United States still struggles with the impact of that half century of segregation as reflected in the racist attitudes that still exist among the less educated and provincial members of American society…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed-race children face new obstacles

Korea Joongang Daily
2012-02-16

Yim Seung-hye

Abandonment and abuse put them at disadvantage from the start

It was around 5 a.m. on the morning of March 20, 2010, when a woman surnamed Park from Bangbae-dong, southern Seoul, heard a baby crying and ran to her door. On her doorstep was a dark-skinned newborn in a box with a note that said, “Please take good care of my baby. His name in English is Jeromy. I don’t have enough money to support him. I really love him. He was born at home on March 19, 2010, at 10:15 a.m.”

Park called the police, and Jeromy was transferred to the Seoul Child Welfare Center, which found a permanent home for him at Eden I Ville, an infants’ home in Seongdong District, eastern Seoul.

“We predict Jeromy was born of a Korean father and a Filipino mother,” said Lee So-young, the director of Eden I Ville. “As we want all children who were abandoned to be adopted and find a family, we wanted Jeromy to be adopted as well, but because he differs in appearance from other Korean children, most of the Korean couples who have visited our center have been reluctant to consider him.”

Read the entire article here.

Intimate encounters, Racial Frontiers: Stateless GI babies in South Korea and the United States, 1953-1965

University of Minnesota
June 2010
239 pages

Bongsoo Park

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

This dissertation explores the policy implications of statelessness by examining G.I. babies, born of non-marital sexual relations between U.S. soldiers in South Korea and Korean women between 1953 and 1965. Using English and Korean language documents about adoption and immigration of stateless GI babies, my work shows that statelessness reveals a racially exclusionary vision of national belonging that shaped citizenship policies of both nations. The GI babies’ presence challenged the myth of racial purity and confounded racial categories in both nations. The dissertation seeks to elucidate some limits of Cold War racial liberalism informed by humanitarian concerns for abandoned Korean war orphans but helped maintain racially exclusionary strategies on citizenship conferral that made the children stateless.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Ties That Bind: Making of the Origin of Korean Race
• 2. Technologies of Imperial Rule: The Nationality Act of 1940 in the Age of American Expansionism
• 3. Pitied But Not Entitled: Redemptive Adoption and Limits of Cold War Liberalism
• 4. Making of a National Hero: Alchemy of Race, Blood, and Memory
• Epilogue
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.

Mixed-race Koreans urge identity rethink

The Korea Herald
2011-12-07

Kirsty Taylor

Things have come a long way since the 1970s when mixed-race Koreans here were spat upon and beaten up for being different.

The kids of that time, whose fathers were often foreign soldiers who first came here during the Korean War, used to find it hard to walk down the street for fear of discrimination.

These days, the Korean government and charities are investing heavily in programs to support multicultural families and overt discrimination against Amerasians is rare.

But African-American Korean Yang Chan-wook, who goes by his Korean name here rather than his western name of Gregory Diggs, said that small daily occurrences remind him that this society does not yet fully accept him.

“In the 1970s these kids could not go to school, but even now, mixed-race Koreans going into public schools have a pretty high dropout rate,” he said.

“Sometimes when I am on the bus people will look at me and if they think that I am not Korean they will not sit next to me or they will move when I sit down. This kind of thing is still existent. Also, it can be difficult to get people to stop speaking English with me. Even if I have been speaking in Korean with them for 20 minutes they will still try to speak in English as if they thought I could not understand…

…After living with this prejudice, Yang started the M.A.C.K. Foundation (Movement for the Advancement of the Cultural diversity of Koreans) upon returning in 2003, basing it on a similar mission started in Chicago in 1995…

Read the entire article here.

“A new American comes ‘home’”: Race, nation, and the immigration of Korean War adoptees, “GI babies,” and brides

Yale University
May 2010
355 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3395980
ISBN: 9781109588873

Susie Woo

A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Yale University
in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Between 1950 and 1965, an estimated 2000 Korean children, 3500 mixed-race “GI babies,” and 7700 military brides entered the United States as the sons, daughters and wives of predominantly white, middle-class families. Together, they signaled the corporeal return of U.S. neocolonial endeavors in South Korea stateside, and embodied the possibilities and limits of Cold War liberalism. Through analysis of U.S. and South Korean government records, archival documents, mainstream and minority press, and interviews with Korean wartime orphanage employees, this dissertation focuses on the living legacies of a “forgotten war.” It traces the roots and routes of Korean and mixed-race adoptee and war bride immigration that were intimately shaped by ordinary Americans at work in South Korea between 1950 and 1965, and the complex political, social, and legal effects that this gendered and raced immigrant group had upon both countries.

This dissertation argues that the U.S. servicemen, missionaries, social workers, and voluntary aid workers, the latter three that flooded South Korea to spearhead the postwar recovery campaign, advocated for the legal and binding formation of mixed Korean/American families and brought empire home. Ironically, by adhering to its government’s cultural policy of integration intended to bolster U.S. expansionist and Cold War efforts, enthusiastic internationalist citizens tethered Americans at home to South Koreans in sentimental, material, and, eventually, familial ways that unraveled the government’s ability to contain its neocolonial objectives “over there.” Thus, by being American, U.S. citizens profoundly affected both sides of the Pacific—they forever changed the lives of thousands of Korean women and children, permanently shaped South Korea’s child welfare system, and unexpectedly forced openings in U.S. national and familial borders subsequently challenging Americans at home to broaden their conceptions of race, kinship, gender, sexuality, and national belonging during the tumultuous Cold War/civil rights era.

Table of Contents

• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION: On Being American
• CHAPTER ONE: Wartime Sentiment: American GI’s and the Militarization of Korean Women and Children
• CHAPTER TWO: Picturing the Korean “Waif: American Campaigns of Rescue
• CHAPTER THREE: Private Matters of Public Concern: U.S. Social and Legal Management of Korean Adoptee Immigrants
• CHAPTER FOUR: A “Pre”-History of Korean War Adoptions: Racial and Institutional Legacies of Neocolonial Care in South Korea
• CHAPTER FIVE: Model Minority or Miscegenation Threat?: The Cultural Domestication of Korean War Immigrants
• CONCLUSION: Mixed Kin: U.S. Neocolonial Legacies at Home and Abroad
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

Purchase the dissertation here.