All men and women were supposed to be created equal, but our skin color has become a vile metaphor of how much we all cost if we were to be sold. “All men are created equal, they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”, is written on the Declaration of Independence but rather is something that is has been the biggest problem and will be for a long time.
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| Rodney King |
Then two weeks later the murder of Latasha Harlins on March 16, 1991 was the string between a battle between Koreans and African Americans. Latasha Harlins was a 15-year old Black young woman. She entered a liquor store on Figueroa on
March 16, 1991 to buy some orange juice. She picked up the juice and put it in her backpack. She took out the money to pay for it and approached the counter. The woman running the store was Soon Ja Du, the sister of the Korean Store owner. She accused the girl of stealing, and attempted to take the backpack. Latasha hit Du in response to this. As Latasha turned around, Du picked up a gun behind the counter and shot her in the back of the head. At the same time that the King video was still being shown, a video of the murder was shown on TV. Black residents in South Central were very angry, but the story did not get very much coverage outside of LA. The verdict for Du enraged South Central. Du was given probation and forced to pay a $500 fine. She did not serve any jail time and this was the start of a strain relationship between Koreans and Blacks.
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| Latasha Harlins |
Rodney King’s verdict for the officers on April 29th 1992 is what started the riots. The mostly white jury in the case against the white officers came back with a verdict of “not being guilty”. There was outrage in the community. Feelings of anger and disappointment had built up long enough and within minutes of the verdict, the rioting started. Liquor stores, chain stores, fast-food places, and white people were the main targets of looting, fire, and violence. Many shop owners were stranded in their stores because they were not able to retreat from the rioters. We have come a long way from 1992, but we are still facing racism to this day.
I had the privilege to interview Erin Aubrey Kaplan and Elaine Kim for this project.
I had the privilege to interview Erin Aubrey Kaplan and Elaine Kim for this project.
Sa-I-Gu (Link on Youtube)
Her mother only attended until the 8th grade when she was a kid. After meeting Elaine’s father, she finished high school in her 30’s and her mother looked young and petite that no one realized she was in her thirties. Her mother later attended Mount Holyoke College and graduated in 1938. They had something called the Korean scholarship, funded by a missionary person who knew something about Korea and established a scholarship for Korean women. No one was eligible because not many Koreans or for that matter, Korean women were in the States getting an education. Elaine’s mother was eligible for the scholarship and got a four year, fully paid ride.
Elaine also realized it was much more than just Rodney King or Latasha Harlins. It was a community as a whole who had to see the big picture of anyone can be racist and even after many years, nothing really had changed.
“My name is Elaine Kim and I am in the Asian American, Asian diaspora studies at UC Berkley. I grew up in Maryland in the 1950’s because I was born in 1942, there were no, or very few Koreans or Asian Americans at that time.”
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| Elaine's father in Tokyo |
Elaine Kim’s family history dates back to when her grandmother ended up in Hawaii at the turn of the last century. Her mother was either born in Hawaii or Korea and came as an infant. Her mother had no legal status because there was no record of her entry or her birth. Her father was a landlord son from Kangwondo (강원도). He went to middle and high school in Tokyo and went to Waseda University as an engineer. He then immigrated to the United States as a graduate student studying economics in 1926 when he twenty-five years old. Kim’s parents first met in Chicago and got married.
Kim’s father was a perpetual foreign student because he couldn’t get a green card. Nobody who was born in Asia could get a green card at that time. Kim’s father stayed in the states on a J visa, so he was a graduate student until he was pretty old. Her father was at Columbia when she and her brother was born. Then during the Wold War 2, the US State department wanted to use people who were fluent in Japanese, but they didn’t use Japanese people because they were considered the enemy. So, they used Koreans, like Kim’s father, who were educated in Japan and that is how her father was finally able to receive a green card. He worked for the state department and later on moved to Washington D.C. and that’s the part of the country she grew up in.
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| Elaine's parents |
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| Elaine's family picture |
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| Elaine's mother |
Her mother only attended until the 8th grade when she was a kid. After meeting Elaine’s father, she finished high school in her 30’s and her mother looked young and petite that no one realized she was in her thirties. Her mother later attended Mount Holyoke College and graduated in 1938. They had something called the Korean scholarship, funded by a missionary person who knew something about Korea and established a scholarship for Korean women. No one was eligible because not many Koreans or for that matter, Korean women were in the States getting an education. Elaine’s mother was eligible for the scholarship and got a four year, fully paid ride.
Elaine ended up going to the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University. Her brother was also the first U.S. born Korean to go to undergrad at Harvard University. Her family was the All-American family. But it wasn’t easy for her,
“It was really hard for us I think because there weren’t many Asians and most people thought we should go back to our country you know… and regarded us as eternal foreigners who didn’t really belong there and it was a little of an alienating existence.”
In 1966, she decided to take a break and traveled to South Korea, where she taught at Ewa University as a lecturer. She stayed on and taught for two semester, and she was the only “Gypo” (교포), which are oversea Koreans or Korean residents abroad.
“It was a difficult, but great experience for me because I learned a lot from living there at that time because in the mid 1960’s in that time it was very undeveloped, I would say, economically underdeveloped and not socially, and that’s when at that time I realized that I really wasn’t Korean even though everyone in the US treated us like foreigners.”
After Elaine was experiencing all the cultural differences, she sought out to try something new.
“Then when I came back I started to work in the poverty program in Washington DC and that’s where I met African American people who were really advocating for people of color being equal Americans and that was the first time I realized that you could be a person of color and be an equal American so that’s one of the reasons I felt that I owed a huge social debt to African American civilized movements”.
Elaine then came to UC Berkley for graduate school. There, she met her first Asian Americans. She lived in a part of the country that did not have many Asian Americans, and even in California most of the Koreans were in Southern California or in the Los Angeles area. Within a small population of Koreans, they all seemed to know each other and network amongst each other as a community to stay together. It was the first time she saw American founding and American dressing kids because she hadn’t seen anything like this. Elaine was hesitant and was shy around them.
“One day I was coming out of class and this one person was asking, are you Chinese or Japanese? and I turned around and I was just angry because I heard that a lot when I was a kid from white people and it was a Filipino guy standing there and he said why don’t you come, we’re having a student strike or an Asian American ethnic studies strike so why don’t you come to the meeting,..so I came. And they sort of talked about the War in Vietnam and US wars in Asia, like dropping the bombs in Hiroshima, and conquering the Philippines and the the Korean War. And then I thought, that was the first time I thought you could attach the US wars in Asia to racism in the United States, so I owed a tremendous psychological debt to them because I didn't understand why my parents were in the United States if they loved Korea so much why weren’t they in Korea. And everybody was telling to go back to where we came from and here we were…and it really helped me to understand and not blame my parents that is, so then I joined the strike.
“I was sort of horrified when media presented the issue of Black hatred against Koreans. And first of all I wanted to know for myself if that was really the case and that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to work on this video because it would require us to talk to the people whose businesses have been destroyed. They, some who couldn’t speak english expressed a lot of fear in African American people and a lot of resentment of the people who were pilfering the stuff in their stores and also people who they thought were very rude to them and there were some who didn’t express that at all and said it was all a question of understanding that the people in ones communities your stores in also have a viewpoint. It’s not only us Koreans who have a position in that we want to do business here and that we need to help our families to survive by getting a store in the most affordable area and all that. And also that they had to imagine that they had somebody there.”
“We noticed that everyone in the black community that we talked to knew totally about Du-Soon-Ja killing Latasha Harlins, everybody knew. and there’s no denying that, and some people knew that after she was given a suspended sentence and didn’t serve jail time, that there was a Korean guy who threw his dog out the window in an second story apartment and then jumped on the dog and went to jail for it. Everybody knew that it was differential justice that you could put a Korean guy in jail for killing a dog but you could not put a women in jail for killing a girl, a black girl. And the reason why everybody knew about that showed that video is up until the Rodney King beating until sa-i-gu, and there wasn’t a tension there, but that everybody was racist to black people including Koreans. Like beating Rodney King, shooting Latasha Harlins, it doesn’t matter if its a white person, it can also be a Korean participating. So people knew about that."
“There was favoritism towards the White folks towards Du-soon-ja, sympathy for her more than Latasha Harlins. There was a lot of tension, but then again most of the people who did the burning and looting weren’t necessarily black people, there were central Americans who were living in the neighborhood. And also when we were driving around South Central and interviewing people, there were a lot of African American people who were nice to the people whose stores had been burned down and they were helping them. So it was not the way it looked. If you looked at the pictures, what you saw was sort of an ariel view looking down of everyone fighting amongst themselves, but I think it wasn’t quite like that.”
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| Elaine as a Cheerleader in high school |
Elaine Kim write a piece called “Home Is Where the Han Is: A Korean American Perspective on the Los Angeles Upheavals” for a section of Newsweek Magazine section called “My Turn” where they ask for a thousand word personal essay. She wrote about her perspective and the piece talked about how the riots had “What they experienced on April 29 and 30 was baptism into what it really means for a Korean to "become American" in the 1990s”. However, she did receive letters all expressing different opinions. She didn’t get negative letters from black people, but she said there is a possibility that black people who had bad feelings towards her article just didn’t write letters to her or white folks who had supportive attitudes just didn’t write letters. But the majority of the ones she received were white folks who felt she was betraying them. Some of the letters had statements like, Asians were supposed to be good and they should side with the Americans.
(Link of her article)
“How dare I criticize America and how dare I side with Black people. So that was so shocking tom e because I’ve been teaching at a University so I didn’t know people felt like that still, and that like when everybody acted like a kid they acted like that and you know it was because I was in school when they had segregation. they took black children out of white schools. So I didn’t really think, after all these decades have passed, couldn’t be that people still think that way, I was so stupid, and when I got those letters, I was so surprised and disappointed by them and plus, as I quoted, some of them said why don’t you go back. If you don’t like it here, if you can’t say the good things about the US then why don’t you go back to your country. And also what you a re doing teaching in a tax supported university in America, so I definitely am American, and I worked really hard to get to the position that I’m in. It had nothing to do with anyone handing me anything which is what they all had against the black people. Everybody thinks that everyones handing the black people a free ride and an undeserved free ride, and I too was receiving a free ride and instead of saying thank you I was criticizing, so I was just really disappointed that, it’s what people said in the 1950’s and 60’s, and why would they be saying that in the 1990’s. And that part threw me off and made me feel like I was completely out of touch with what was actually going on in the United States.”
Elaine’s story is one of many examples of racism and lack of diversity. African Americans have been living in the United States for many generations, yet their social groups are still trying to find economic stability and recognition without our skin color becoming a vile metaphor that determines our worth. But the LA riots have found it to be a stepping stone to diversity here in Los Angeles. There needs to be a lot more done for minority in the area, but looking back, it really has made progress within the geopolitics of Los Angeles.
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