Category: race

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 Left

Ms. 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.