Look Korea, I’m rooting for you. I’m your friend. But this tendency to make things about you, this desperate thirsty shit needs to stop.
Black people are being killed and an authoritarian steak salesman is threatening to point US military guns towards US citizens, and yet you find time and resources to figure out which properties damaged were owned by Koreans? That’s messed up.
Koreans sometimes need to calm down and stop trying to find the Korean angle or trying to assert Korean-ness in things too much. I get it. There’s patriotism. There’s love of country and fellow country men. Canadians tend to be overly assertive in finding the Canadian angle in things, too. But sometimes Korean media just seems a tad too thirsty. Korea has arrived on the world stage. Most people can now differentiate between Japanese and Koreans. Korean media doesn’t have to weed through every miniscule detail in things to find out if there’s anything Korean in order to blow it up as if it’s a triumph or that Koreans are somehow victims.
I see this in local media a lot. “Oh, let’s send out a food truck in Washington, DC and film it for our reality show. People will learn about Korean food.” Yeah, great idea if most people don’t already know about Korean food, especially in Washington, DC. “Did you see that one ‘kimchi’ comment by one of the characters in Birdman? Don’t you think it’s racist?” Maybe? But it’s a super minor comment in a prestige film that not many people will see!
“Do you know about Dokdo? It’s Korea’s Hawaii!” It’s not. Not even most Koreans think it’s Korea’s Hawaii.
Things like this can range from annoying to mildly amusing. But when a major international event happens and I see headlines like the one above, not only is it disappointing, it just reeks of being blind to the issue at hand. The writer, as well as the editor and everyone else involved in having the dumb article posted on the paper, seem to be unaware to the tense history between black Americans and Korean Americans, particularly the LA riots and Koreatown. Heck, officer Tou Thau, a Hmong American who was one of the officers who allowed the murder of George Floyd to happen, kinda symbolized the complicity of Asian Americans (the model minority) to the violence against black communities. Simply put, this is not the time to worry about property. Black people are dying!
In Minneapolis, the city where George Floyd was murdered by cops, Gandhi Mahal, an Indian family restaurant was burned to the ground due to the protests. The restaurant was started during the recession and became a local community hub. During the protests, it became a shelter for protesters, especially to those who were injured. And when it burned down, instead of being concerned over his loss, the owner was quoted as saying, “Let my building burn. Justice needs to be served. Put those officers in jail.”
Forget property. Forget who owns what. The headline should be “Racist Cops are Out of Control.” Sure, you could mention that seventy-nine Korean businesses were damaged or looted in the process, but if you’re not focusing on the racism, death, and authoritarianism in the US, then you’re missing the racist forest for the Korean trees.
The Weekly 