When do immigrants to the United States learn about race relations and how do racial attitudes affect their lives in their adopted country? A new book by Nadia Kim, assistant professor of sociology at LMU, that examines those questions as they relate to Korean American community has won three prestigious awards for research.
The American Sociological Association awarded Imperial Citizens: Koreans and Race from Seoul to L.A. the 2009 Oliver Cromwell Cox Award and the Early Career award from the association’s Race and Ethnic Minorities section, and the 2009 Book Award from the Asia and Asian America section.
Kim is surprised by all the praise and awards her book has received.
“Sometimes, you think it’s a long shot. You’re happy your book is nominated, but you know it’s going to be competitive,” Kim said. “My project was very hard because I had to speak two languages relatively fluently, I had to live in another country for a long period of time, and navigate all the logistical difficulties of doing that. It feels really great to be recognized for a research project that was so hard to do.”
Kim’s book focuses on how Koreans both in their home country and after immigrating to the United States absorb the prevailing attitudes toward race relations that exist in this country. That approach goes beyond the typical focus on how immigrants deal with racism here, Kim said. Such study usually starts the clock with the arrival on U.S. soil, while her work begins much earlier.
“If you look at the American military presence abroad, for example, there are a lot of immigrants who come here who have already dealt with American racial issues before they come here,” she said.
Many Koreans who lived near U.S. military outposts in their home country or participated in the Korean War saw how black and white servicemembers kept apart, first through segregation and later through the informal separation by race that followed, Kim said. They also learned what it meant to feel foreign in one’s own country.
“They realize their country is seen as foreign by the American troops, who represent this powerful outside nation,” Kim said. For many Korean immigrants, that feeling persists after moving here. “Even though America is in their country, and has been there since 1945, they feel invisible in terms of the Korean and Asian presence in the United States.”
Though combat ended decades ago, those feelings resonate into the present day. Kim pointed to the civil unrest in Los Angeles in 1992, when Korean immigrants were often portrayed in the news media as outsiders who spoke little to no English and were not integrated into the community. That feeling of invisibility, especially when police were slow to respond to reports of looting, contributed to the widely reported decisions by some shop owners to gather on rooftops with rifles to defend their stores, Kim said.
Kim’s book dovetails with her broader study of immigration and race relations, in which she tries to recast the usual debate in more nuanced terms. “We need to understand the ways in which immigrants of color such as Latinos and Asians are part of the picture, and not simply view race through the white-black lens,” she said.
