Category: essays
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RE: Permission to translate White Nationalism and the Multiracial Left
From: Yongho Kim
To: Kil-Ja Kim, Kenyon Farrow, Mellon Minority Fellows Undegraduate Fellowship at Macalester
Date: Mon Dec 6, 2004 9:15 am
Subject: RE: Fwd: Permission to translate White Nationalism and the Multiracial LeftMs. Kim and Mr. Farrow,
thanks for letting me post your article “White Nationalism and the Multiracial Left” on the web. It’s up now at
http://mediamob.co.kr/aboutnews/aboutnewsview.asp?pkid=5723(now deleted)
http://b.yokim.net/293/and, I’m sure you got interesting reactions back in the summer, but wanted to share responses I’ve got on the posting over there with you. I’m adding our current email communication (only this last message I’m sending out to you) to the entry so that readers a the site have an idea of what I am doing with their comments.
Also, let me know if you start getting too much spam (so that I take down your email addresses from the site) South Korean sites are quite a hotspot for that.
I wanted to share your article in both directions at this south korean blog site, because my impression is that there is a large ideological gap between discussions surrounding race in south korea and the united states. Reactions, and the language they are carried on from the progressive camp in south korea about race is quite disturbing, especially now that “illegal immigrants” from Indonesia, Phillippines and the rest of Southeast Asia have started flocking to south korea (reaching 1% of the population was the last I heard), and these “illegal immigrants” are quite different from the old “illegal immigrants” which were made up of white american troops of the occupying army forces (which included blacks but were conceptualized as part of the white masse). It’s even more disturbing to learn that at south korea sources of how race is dealt with in the U.S. comes from labor unions and indy media centers, which we may agree don’t have the most subversive strategy in dealing with race.
As for the online reactions to your articles, they do mostly focus on the first half of your article, arguing that you 1) caricaturize Moore and 2) you can’t really merge different movements into one big chunk. I think they are missing your criticism of how in-between groups such as immigrants are trying to step on black peoples’ discrimination to merely reap the benefits of not being black, which was your central argument (right?). I failed to get the concept of “black death” across, I think, and none of the reactions seem to deal with the second half (maybe it didn’t make sense?). The language and terminology barrier (we don’t have two words for “African-American” and “black” in the korean language, for example) If you decide to get out a response, you could just email them to me and I will try posting them in the original english along with translations, time permitting. Please feel free to check out the web itself.
I’m also cc’ing this to the Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellows mailing list at Macalester, at which we discussed your article in august.
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The Defects and Imperfections of my School
English Work
Name: Yongho Kim
Grade: 1M C
Exercise-type: Brainstorming
Theme: my school
Title_name:=(’The Defects and Imperfections of my School’);Ok. Telling it from the beginning, it’s a disaster. Top to down, there’s no good-working things in this school! :)
Let’s begin with two most elemental needs: food (input and output). Well, at least up to last year, the food input was relatively good. Sometimes there it was faulty and and un-responsible, but that was no matter. Now, simply look. Prices rised up to 25%! Ya, school prices got higher, but that’s comprehensible. But prices for hot-dogs, hamburgers, dishes, and even soft drinks grew up astronomically! Of course, people with round things can easily buy lunch for them., but… the poor students (like us), must resign with a piece of bread? Fortunately we can drink water as much as we wish, but water is not everything -as someone said- for life (and study). Oh, and -I almost forgot- we sometimes receive hot-dogs for lunch. What’s this – selling food costing $500 at $700? And there’s more; chicken from school is really bad – it makes us remember the prehistoric times, when people had to eat dry food because they didn’t more.
Finishing comments about feeding (in this school is feeding) at this point, you might think I’ll criticize our food output system. Nice try. I’m not doing it just because bathrooms are better since last year’s repairs.
So-let’s continue describing the educational system. Really, it seems the well-known educational reform were only bla-bla – there’s no change! Oh, if there is, I prefer not to imagine how was it before (do you understand, right?). So is the problem the the way we receive education can be described very simple: read the text book, teacher dictates the same thing appearing at book, we receive a list of thing entering to the test (the same as the book’s contents), and do the test with the same sentence appearing on book, but the affirmative form changed to interrogative. Result? students studying and (consequently) thinking mechanically. They never try to do something out of the “grates”, simply because noone ordered them to do it. Just to probe what I’m saying, ask to a normal student anything learned from school. If fortunately he remembers, ask the same to other student, and note how many words are different between their answers. Why? when you FELL a TREE, it GOES DOWN.
Ah, and the tests! The test is the perfect harmony between mechanical learning and mechanical answering. The use of any method (torpedoes) for destroying the target (low mark) and copying between students is absolutely normal. I personally listen from two to five requests asking for the answer during a test. The teachers, I suppose, know it but leave them doing that because in case of having a strong vigilance and there’s no copies, the marks will be incredible.
Why the yield is always so low – because students are always just think in parties. We always want to have “a good time” and are real masters in cutting off class’s precious time. We use before-lunch, before-recess, between-classes, and many other times to have free time at school. To my knowledge, the wasted time in school is approx. 2 hours per week. (more, more, more….)
Well, aside all this facts of my school revealed up to now, I’d like to tell you more; but after all, we don’t want absent students for going hospitals-so we’ll cut here.
end.