South Korean Views on Race Linked to Economics

Pedestrians are seen at the Seoul Railway Station, South Korea.

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Recent controversies in South Korea over apparent racial discrimination have turned a spotlight on how Koreans view people from other cultures.

Experts say that discrimination in South Korea tends to stem from perceptions about economic hierarchies and targets people from less wealthy Asian nations.

In a country where only 3% of the population is foreign, non-Korean faces are conspicuous, and racial insensitiveness has been known to play out in sometimes outlandish ways.

Foreign baseball players have been at the receiving end of crass remarks about their skin color, such as a comment about a Lotte Giants player’s dark skin making pitches difficult to see. A huge online backlash among the foreign community ensued after a bar owner in Itaewon, an Seoul district popular with expats, put up a sign recently barring “Africans at the moment” because of the Ebola outbreak. The bar owner later apologized and replaced the sign.

Family lineage is considered culturally sacred by many, so much so that following the Korean War, the mixed-race children of US soldiers and Korean women were sent out of the country for adoption.

Modern-day discrimination arguably comes from this post-war period. A byproduct of South Korea’s intense post-war economic development was the awareness of other nations’ economic standing and the country therefore started to stratify other countries accordingly, Professor Kim Hyun-mee from Yonsei University told The Korea Herald.

The US and the UK were upheld as model nations, and exposure to American culture and its depictions of minorities further instilled stereotypes, said Ms. Kim.

Today, the government’s policies towards immigration are tougher towards nationals from countries like Uzbekistan, Vietnam, China or the Philippines and multiculturalism policies promote “assimilation rather than supporting diversity,” according to an Asan Institute for Policy Studies report.

Women from countries like China or the Philippines, for instance, who are marrying Koreans can only get a spouse visa only once they’ve fulfilled certain educational training requirements.

Immigration policies favor Western countries because relationships with these countries are deemed to be more valuable, said Han Kukyom of the Korea Women Migrants’ Human Rights Center.

This kind of discrimination, she said, is based on economic criteria, more so than the idea of ethnic homogeneity.

However, there are signs that South Korea is increasingly becoming more multicultural, which could benefit the country, not least because with its severely low birth rate the country might soon be addressing the question of how to expand its labor force.

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