Addition to the Sidebar Links

I just added "HumanRightsKorea.org" to the links on the sidebar.

It's a site I like, for posts like this, just in the last week, reporting on the Asian Human Rights Commission's criticism of Korea's National Human Rights Commission's leadership and evaluation criteria. Or this one, arguing children shouldn't be taught TOEFL or TOEIC in school.

I first noticed the blog and put it into my "big blog list," "All The Korea Blogs," which tries to be as comprehensive as possible.

From there, it impressed me quite a bit with its reporting, so here it is, linked on the main blog.

North Korea. Lankov. Royal Asiatic Society. YouTube. Wow.

This is just one of the best ideas I've come across, and I have to share it.

The Royal Asiatic Society, Korea Branch is a group I like a lot, whose events I wish I could attend more often.

Andrei Lankov is one of the North Korea experts whose word I respect the most.

YouTube is a place where you can watch videos for free.

If you put them together, you get this:
A Youtube lecture of Andrei Lankov on the topic "What does China Want with North Korea and What Can be Done About It?" --this is a fantastic topic that's intrigued me for a while. The lecture's a bit over an hour, so square away some free time to watch it, if you're interested in this topic. If the Royal Asiatic Society is going to do this more often, they might want to look into finding ways to improve the sound quality of the speaker's voice - it sounds like they're using the camera microphone, so there's a bit of ambient noise and the speaker's voice doesn't come across beautifully. However... I DO think it's a GREAT idea for the Royal Asiatic Society to put their lectures - or at least a few of their lectures - online.

Anyway... watch it! And maybe join the Royal Asiatic Society.

Groove Magazine on MBC stuff

Groove Magazine has a multi-page spread response to the MBC racist video thingy. It's a pretty great set. You can also spot an article I contributed to it.

Open publication - Free publishing - More concerts

I was talking with a friend the other day about this magazine thingy, and she was cynical about it all. "Like the Groove piece is going to change anything."

And she's right. But she's also wrong.

See, if my Korea life time horizon is two years (longer than the average English teacher's stay), then no, this isn't going to change everything. It'll make me feel vindicated, and that's nice, but that's about it. But responses like this to race-baiting media? On a two-year time horizon, no change will likely be observable. So my friend is totally right.

But my friend is also totally wrong, because that isn't -- can't be -- why we launch responses like this, on the blogs, with youtube videos, on the it's not a blog it's totally different I swear's, and elsewhere. The reason we put forward a response like this isn't because racism in Korea can be fixed in one single media news cycle. Of course not. After all, the latest Oscar opening ceremony STILL got dinged for making a blackface joke, at least two generations after American people of color started saying "hey. We actually don't like it when you do this."

The reason we do this is because we are here, and we have a voice, and this is part of how we demonstrate to the homogeneous part of Korean society that we aren't going anywhere, and that we ARE stakeholders, and that it MATTERS to us, and to Korea at large, how the "other" is treated in Korea, in the long run. So has this changed anything? Nah. No change that'll be observable from the way things were in 2011 to the way things will be in 2013. But the game we're playing has to be a long game, not a short one. And we have to be ready next time (hopefully a little more ready than this time) and we have to have resources ready to activate (hopefully more, and more easily activated than this time) and we have to have allies among Korea's own citizenry (hopefully more, better connected, and more vocal than this time), because social change isn't like flicking a light switch, and some watershed moment happens, and then everybody pats each other on the back for fixing Korean racism. It's a slow, ongoing, frustrating conversation, where a new idea, or a new identity, or a new group, or a new version of what it means to be Korean, starts on the far outside fringe of mainstream thought, and slowly slowly, the mainstream first becomes aware of it at all, then decides it's not quite so bad as they initially thought, then decides it'd be OK to coexist with it -for other people to hold those values or be that way, but not me - before they finally decide it's time to embrace it.

There are other conversations going on -- let's remember among ourselves that...

1. the cure for racism isn't more racism (Korean men made this video because of their tiny penises and because some whitey stole their girlfriend; Korean women choose western men because western men are just superior in some way)
2. the cure for racism isn't sexism (we made this video because Korean women are out of control!)
3. the cure for racism isn't racism PLUS sexism (Korean women can't resist foreign men because we don't hit them or make them quit their jobs to make babies)
4. it isn't just about Korean women and western men. And the more western women's voices, and Korean men's voices, are welcomed into these conversations, the more useful this conversation will become.
I'm sure there are more of these, but for now, I'm going to hit "publish" now.

fin

I finished my finals and my papers last week, including a mammoth sit-in to finish my final paper. I'm 95% proud of one, 90% proud of the next, and 75-80% proud of my all-nighter paper -- I'd done the reading and planning beforehand, but then typing it ended up being more time consuming than I'd expected.

Partly because, over the last two months, my computer had been slowly getting slower and slower, until by the time of my all-nighter paper blusterschlutz, it was running somewhere around 20% of its normal speed, and I had to switch between the internetz, where I was searching places like the CIA factbook, the OECD library, KOCIS and NationMaster, for comparative statistics on Korea's performance in various metrics like educational achievement and Gender Inequality Measure (I can't accurately remember what it's called right now -- the old one, the "gender empowerment measure" was easier to remember). I can't be arsed to look it up right now either, because flipping around on an ipad is a little more of a pain than flipping around on a laptop. Funny thing about them is that Korea went from 68th in the world on the Gender Empowerment Measure (which had more emphasis on women reaching elite positions like CEO-type and government representative type roles), Korea took a leap to 15th in the Gender Inequality Thingy, which has more emphasis on access to education and adequate health care. I'm not sure how reproductive freedom measures in, given that it just became possible to get morning-after pills without a prescription in Korea...but at the cost of birth control pills being prescription now... which would be OK, maybe, if we didn't still hear stories about doctors lecturing women on the choices they make with their bodies...

So while a Facebook friend kindly offered to help me out with my computer's failure to restart after I reformatted it (Thanks, David. I appreciate your offer, and I'll buy you a beer sometime even though I didn't take you up on it), I brought it into the authorized service people at Yongsan Electronics Market, because I'm hoping they can see to it that the little bastard is running at 1000% speed again by the time I get it back, and that's a little more touchy than the boot record thingy. And if you need service done on your maccy stuff, the authorized service people are not in the main iPark building, but the older market area behind it, where you can find a cinema that ALWAYS has tickets available, and better prices on electronics than anywhere else in Seoul. If memory serves, the Macbook Air there was around 200 000 won cheaper than it was at the Frisbee store in Myeongdong... but memory might not serve. I might be comparing the slow model and the fast model or something, so don't quote me on that, and then get back to me with angry butthurt "you led me on a bum steer" type comments. But I WILL be buying my next mac product at the Daihwan Computer Shop in the Yongsan market, next door to Twosome Place in the Jeonja Land building.

Anyway, Mac also has a new macbook pro coming out with a fancy high-definition screen, but after carrying a 15 inch macbook pro around in my backpack for a whole semester, I'm leaning toward an air (I played around with one at the store, and I think I have a technology crush) for my out-and-aboutsies, and a desktoppy thing (maybe a mini-mac) for home and video editing and that kind of business.

Blogging with an i-pad and a (nifty) wireless keyboard is a bit of a hassle compared to laptoppy work, so expect mostly bits and pieces until it's easier for me to cut and paste things, and embed things, and return to the full glory of blogoseyo... I owe some people an apology and a retraction for the "Gendered Spaces" post, in which I stepped in it, big time... and that deserves a proper write up. Once I have MacBookOseyo back.

but I'm back, in a sense... and I'm glad to be.

Later!

A tad More on the MBC Video

I got linked in the Wall Street Journal's Korea blog, Korea Real Time. And at The Marmot's Hole. And Three Wise Monkeys (in a piece written by The Bobster, one of my favorite writers who contributes to that site). And Scroozle and Expat Abundance and a handful of others. So that's all cool. Thanks, all. Now that I'm famous and all, it's time for a change in style.

because that's how I heard teh famousz people dress. all of them. (source)

Seriously, though, if you're interested in a little heavier reading, here are two things you should read -- I've been researching multiculturalism and racist scapegoating for a few papers, and these two papers are very interesting, especially in light of the MBC video, and the xenophobia and sexism therein.

1. "The Political Economy Of Hatred" by Edward Glaeser (warning: links open to a .pdf download of the working paper) - Hate does not appear out of a vacuum. Hatred of a minority appears in a society when there are strategic incentives for political contenders to promote hate, and conditions which incentivize the population to accept messages of hate. Edward Glaeser breaks down the conditions that make it more or less likely that messages of hate will be generated, and accepted, by political players and populations. I'll be writing more about this one later, because I think it's important.

2. "Popularizing Purity" Full title "Popularizing Purity: Gender, Sexuality and Nationalism in HIV/AIDS Prevention for South Korean Youths" by Sealing Cheng (Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 46.1, April  2005, p 7-20) -- turns out, this conflation of HIV with teh furriners, has been connected with activating nationalist emotions about "purity" and "corrupting foreign  influences" at least since the 90s, and probably earlier. Did you know some Koreans wanted to test every visitor to the 1988 Seoul Olympics for HIV? Didn't happen, but some were pushing for it. The article also highlights how misogyny/sexism has been part of the "foreign corruption" "cultural purity" and "HIV threat" narratives in Korea pretty much since the beginning, as women shouldered most of the blame/responsibility to carry the flag of Korean cultural purity and moral virtue in the old "Purity" campaigns, just as women are blamed for being "open minded" (euphemism for other openings) to foreigners now.

Click. Read.