I have black friends who don’t like Koreans.
“I’m not prejudiced,” one told me quite frankly. “I just don’t like Koreans.”
He meant that he didn’t like the Korean-American merchants who have opened up stores “all over” his neighborhood over the past couple of decades.
Someday, we black Americans will learn to pool our seed money and start more of our own businesses the way Koreans and other immigrant groups, including many Africans and West Indians, do.
Until then, we will picket, boycott and complain about how others “disrespect” us.
At the same time, I know Asian-Americans who don’t like black people, either.
They, too, will tell you of some bad experience they have had or of some bad experience they have been told about.
For example, a Wall Street Journal story last week described the reluctance of many immigrant entrepreneurs to hire blacks, even when their clientele is black. One Chinese-American owner of a Los Angeles toy company sounded like my friend. He “says he isn’t prejudiced,” but nevertheless expects to fill his next job opening with a Mexican immigrant, probably recruited by his workers, because blacks have a “negative image” and “don’t mix well with workers of other backgrounds.”
Not prejudiced? Right. As much as the word “racist” has been devalued by overuse–along with the equally overripe epithet “Uncle Tom”–so is the phrase “I’m not prejudiced.”
Yet, in the midst of this cycle of dislike, distrust and resentment, I found a bright little ray of hope in a girl her friends call “Sookie.”
Close your eyes and she sounds like any one of a million other suburban American teenaged girls.
But Hyun Sook Cho has a story of unusual, unspeakable horror to tell.
Two years ago, when she was 14, her father was one of nine Asian-American merchants who were murdered, plus one who was paralyzed, in a series of cold-blooded hate-related robbery-killings in the District of Columbia.
The two suspects were black, a fact that generated a particularly ugly anger in her family, she said, an anger she tried mightily to rise above.
“I wasn’t angry,” she said. “I knew being angry would not bring my father back. I was just . . . mad! Not at the whole African-American community, just at the two who killed him.”
I met “Sookie” Cho, a sophomore at W.T. Woodson High School in suburban Fairfax, Va., along with 17 other black, Hispanic and Korean-American teens from the Washington and New York City areas who had visited Korea this spring with “Kids to Korea,” a 10-day, all-expenses-paid trip organized by the New York-based Korea Society for teens from Atlanta, Washington, D.C., New York and Los Angeles.
Intended to help improve relations between blacks and Koreans after the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Kids to Korea, attracted Cho as a way to “help me work through the sorrow,” she said.
Throughout the various stages of anger, denial, depression and acceptance that she endured, she said, her religious faith had kept her going, holding on to the belief that perhaps she could give her father’s death some higher purpose.
As it turned out, Kids to Korea gave her something of which she had not had much before: Black friends.
One was Kibwei McKinney, a sophomore at Benjamin Banneker High School in Washington, D.C., a magnet for high-achievers but located in a poor black neighborhood. He surprised neighborhood Korean-American merchants by speaking to them, quite literally, in their own language.
He raised eyebrows the first time he said “Hello” and “Thank you” in Korean, but his photo album has helped him sew instant friendships with merchants who once were just faces.
“My school is surrounded by Korean markets,” he said, and “there are lots of confrontations. But now I can explain to my friends that the merchants aren’t there to cause trouble or disrespect. They’re just trying to earn a living like anyone else.”
Sometimes you have to go halfway around the world to discover your own country. These kids are fortunate to have a chance to discover it while they are still young.
As do-good programs go, Kids to Korea is a painfully small slap at a mammoth problem. But, in the mighty battle against the cancer of prejudice in America’s next generation of leaders, it is, at least, a start.
“If we were all keys,” said Cho, “We could open doors to different worlds.”
Yes, we could. I am glad she is.
