hankyoreh

Cho Jeong-rae
Eendowed chair, Dongguk University

From early on, human beings have held freedom, equality and peace as the three ideals to which humanity should aspire. Everyone enjoys freedom, all states and people enjoy equality, and the whole earth is a better place to be when it exists without discord and fighting and everyone lives in peace. How noble and beautiful are such ideals!

However, there are three ills that will forever keep those ideals from becoming a reality: racism, prejudice based on bloodline and religious factionalism. The world has been noisy with slogans about internationalization, the era of the global village and globalization, and yet these three ills wield the same strength as they always have. It is tempting to think that humanity will never free itself from them, because human narrowness and selfishness are so ingrained in our human nature that human reason cannot overcome them.

The same United Nations organization that called Japan’s forced mobilization of “comfort women” a crime against humanity, has criticized Korea’s belief that it is a “single race” (danil minjok). Along with the word “mixed blood” (honhyeol), the UN says that the term emphasizes purity of bloodline and, not only does it go against the global trend toward multiracial societies, the thinking itself should be corrected because it can also lead to discrimination.

This is something we already knew but have never really tried to do anything about. The UN is right to cite us for it and we should feel ashamed of the fact that we neglected the problem to the point that we had to be called on it. This “one race consciousness” is, in different terms, “bloodline-ism” (hyeoltongjuui) and “pure blood-ism” (sunhyeoljuui). Stress the importance of purity of blood and it only follows that you will have ethnic exclusivism and enclosedness, in addition to discrimination and inhumane behavior. It is an ill of humanity that must be corrected.

Is the belief that we are of one Korean race, something we have long taken for granted, really our unique cultural tradition and a value to take pride in? Looking at how it came to be popularized, that would seem to not have been the case.

It was because of the power of post-Liberation school textbooks that we came to be obsessed with this idea. This means that the history of the belief that we are all of one race is not all that long. Think about what was needed so urgently in all the confusion and the state of anxiety that came when we were suddenly Liberated. Intellectuals who had refused to submit to the Japanese, like Jeong In-bo and Yi Hui-seung, figured that we needed to build up our pride by building up our ethnic identity, and unify the people through that kind of consciousness. So we emphasized that we were one people, glorified our history by saying we never invaded another country, and promoted civility and perseverance as our greatest virtues. We memorized these things and answered questions about them on tests. Once it was learned by one generation, to the next it was the stuff of mass hypnosis, and eventually we were so confused we saw it as a holy and absolute value.

Korean society is undergoing a second revolution right now when it comes to the issue of bloodline. The first revolution came with the Korean War, and it was the “era of the mixed-blood child.” Later, industrialization would make urban life more comfortable and desirable, and the unmarried women of this land began neglecting our farm country bachelors. It is not as if the bachelor farmers who were left behind by the maidens of the country’s agricultural regions were going to be able to create a new religion called “Korean Farm Country-ism” and live their lives free of wives. Out of desperation they married women from Southeast Asian nations that are poorer than South Korea. In this second revolution, foreign women have come to account for half of the region’s daughters-in-law. Furthermore, there is no end to the inflow of foreign workers who come here embracing the South Korean Dream. How rusty and dated a value is the belief in “one race” and “pure blood-ism”?

Setting right the way we perceive such things is more urgent a need than losing ourselves in the English-learning craze and spending more than 10 trillion won a year on private, extracurricular tutoring. The government needs to be proactive about arranging the laws and organizing itself for a new era of change.