Korea doesn't see race the way you do

The writer argues that Korea is not post-race so much as differently racialized, with nationality often shaping how people are treated more than skin color. The piece says Korean identity is deeply tied to nationalism, while Western societies more often center race. It also argues that both race and nationalism are social constructs rooted in colonial history.

The essay says a young woman from Gabon was met with confusion in Korea because people did not know how to place her within their expectations.

It cites professor Zeljana Zmire’s phrase nouveau riche nationalism to describe how a country’s economic status can affect treatment.

The writer says people often assumed he was American, but those assumptions changed when he dressed formally and appeared to be of higher status.

The piece says Korean nationalism was shaped by colonialism, imperialism, and reactions to foreign powers in Northeast Asia.

It says Western race categories and East Asian nationalism both emerged as ways of dividing and organizing people, and both are described as social constructs.

Published Sep 26, 2026 12:11 pm KST

Courtesy of David Tizzard

“They’re kind of shocked when I tell them I’m not American. Then they’re really disappointed that I’m not French either, because they love French people,” a young woman explained to the room. “When I tell them I’m from Africa — I don’t say Gabon because that just makes things more confusing — they don’t know how to react. It’s like they have no frame of reference. Why am I not poor, for example. How can I be in Korea?”

I empathized deeply with the student. She wasn’t what Korean people expected her to be. My friend professor Zeljana Zmire has wonderfully described this as “nouveau riche nationalism” — the idea that for many Koreans, the gross domestic product of the country you are from will often have more influence on how you are treated than your actual skin color.

For years, I’ve had people asking, assuming or simply stating without fact that I’m American. “Migukin onda (An American is coming),” the kids would shout at me on the street. Nearby tables in busy pubs would make similar comments. These would be especially pronounced when I was dressed down in jeans and a baseball cap. The observations fade into the background when I am wearing a blazer, tie and Italian shoes. Then, it seems, I simply become “gentleman” – a man of no particular nation, but rather someone whose status is implied by his sartorial choices.

These rather silly and completely unscientific examples are just part of why I consider Korea to be, somewhat, a post-race society. That might seem an outrageous thing to say in what is still one of the most ethnically homogenous nations in the world despite the growing multiculturalism of the last two decades.

And yet, while much of North America and parts of Western Europe view people through the lens of skin color and ethnicity, nationality normally occupies a more prominent place in everyday encounters in Korea. A Korean person's first answer to the question of who they are is generally not “Asian” in the way that it might be on an American census form. More and more, people from Korea find it abhorrent if they are referred to as someone from Beijing or it is suggested that they wear kimonos.

There are, of course, complex historical and political reasons for all of this. The rise of nationalism in Northeast Asia was a response to colonialism, imperialism and the arrival of foreigners on ships determined to plant their flags and line their pockets. Korean national identity tends to be stronger and more socially salient than a broad pan-Asian identity.

Pan-Asianism became deeply entangled with Japanese imperialism. Japan's claim to be the leader of an Asian order ultimately became inseparable from the violence of empire. It’s that dreadful rising sun flag that generates such negative feeling in the region; the famines in Indonesia, the rape of Nanjing, the forced labor and comfort women in Korea and beyond. Politically, it’s the Ilchinhoe here in Korea that tried to merge Seoul and Tokyo into one ethnic body as a response to the arrival and peril of the “white man.”

But none of this worked. The nationalism that runs so strongly through Asia today is a response to all of that colonialism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The imperialist behavior of Britain, France, Russia and then Japan, as well as the resulting wars and conflicts, produced a strong sense of identity in this region that found hope and identity in the nation. Dreams of freedom were written under a flag and a song rather than a skin color.

By the same token, the focus on race in the West might also be argued to be a product of colonialism but from a different perspective. There, race became important because the colonialists were trying to incorporate and integrate people from the colonies into their societies. Race was repeatedly transformed into a technology of division: a way of sorting human beings into categories that could then be governed, exploited, excluded or privileged. Colonialism made particularly powerful use of this system.

We can even take a step back and say that race and nationalism itself are products of this time. While race undoubtedly has very real effects today, it is, nevertheless, a social construct. Sounds unbelievable considering how deeply people believe in it, but then one only has to remember all the wars and deaths caused by religion to remember how committed people can be to ideas that came from people’s heads.

This is not to say nationalism is any better. Benedict Anderson famously described the nation as an “imagined community”: a group whose members will never know most of one another, yet nevertheless imagine themselves as belonging to the same collective. After all, as well as World Cups and Olympics, nationalism also gave us the borders, bloodbaths and bureaucratic flags that defined the bloodiest century in human history. Yet somehow, we swapped divine right for national destiny and called it progress.

And before nationalism, religion often provided the more powerful answer to the question of who belonged. A person could be Christian, Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist before they were French, Egyptian, Indian or Korean in the modern national sense. This has hardly disappeared. In parts of the world today, religious identity remains more important than the passport someone carries.

Human beings have always needed ways of imagining their connection to people they will never meet. Religion once provided one of the great frameworks for doing so. Nationalism later became another. Today, race, nationality, religion and ethnicity overlap in complicated ways, depending on where we happen to live. We seem to have an almost irresistible need to divide the enormous complexity of humanity into smaller groups: believers and unbelievers, us and them, citizens and foreigners, white and Black, Korean and Japanese. The categories change, but the impulse remains.

Korea isn't necessarily post-race. It is differently racialized. Korea demonstrates what happens when nationality rather than race becomes the dominant grammar through which difference is understood.

When Western observers project their racialized frameworks onto East Asia, they commit a double error. They fail to see the particular historical development of racial categories in their own societies, while simultaneously misreading the potent, fiercely territorial nationalisms that animate much of the region. By flattening complex national identities into a homogenized “Asian” box, they reveal more about their own domestic anxieties than the reality on the ground. Until we recognize that both race and nation, despite their very real effects, are nonetheless just ghost stories we tell ourselves about who belongs, we will keep exporting our categories of division and wondering why they don't fit.

Of course, that doesn’t help us understand the terrifyingly dizzying realization that if neither nationalism nor race are actually real, what the hell are we? As humans?

Perhaps the answer is that we are creatures who keep inventing categories large enough to make strangers feel like family. And I hope you can feel like that here, too. If a bit of knowledge helps some people navigate their time here in Korea a little more easily, that’s a good thing. And if your experiences are different from mine or my students, they should be heard too. It might even save Karina some flak online, and perhaps the next Korean celebrity who falls foul of the ethnocentrism of assuming that the categories that make perfect sense at home make sense everywhere else.

作者认为，韩国与其说是后种族社会，不如说是种族化方式不同，国籍往往比肤色更能影响人们的待遇。文章指出，韩国的身份认同与民族主义紧密相连，而西方社会则更注重种族问题。文章还认为，种族和民族主义都是根植于殖民历史的社会建构。

文章中提到，一位来自加蓬的年轻女子在韩国遭遇了困惑，因为人们不知道该如何将她纳入自己的期望之中。

它引用泽利亚娜·兹米尔教授的“暴发户民族主义”一词来描述一个国家的经济状况如何影响其待遇。

作者说，人们常常以为他是美国人，但当他穿着正式服装，显得地位较高时，人们的看法就改变了。

文章指出，韩国民族主义的形成受到了殖民主义、帝国主义以及对东北亚外国势力的反应的影响。

它指出，西方种族分类和东亚民族主义都是划分和组织人群的方式，两者都被描述为社会建构。

发布于2026年9月26日下午12:11（韩国标准时间）

承蒙大卫·蒂扎德惠允

“当我告诉他们我不是美国人时，他们都挺惊讶的。然后，当我说我也不是法国人时，他们又很失望，因为他们很喜欢法国人，”一位年轻女子向大家解释道。“当我告诉他们我来自非洲——我不会说加蓬，因为那样只会让他们更困惑——他们不知道该作何反应。他们好像完全没有概念。比如，为什么我不穷？我怎么可能在韩国？”

我非常同情这位学生。她并不符合韩国人对她的固有印象。我的朋友泽利亚娜·兹米尔教授曾精彩地将其描述为“暴发户民族主义”——对许多韩国人来说，一个人的国籍所在国的国内生产总值（GDP）往往比肤色更能影响他所受到的待遇。

多年来，总有人问我，或者想当然地认为我是美国人，甚至毫无根据地断言。“Migukin onda（美国人来了！）”孩子们会在街上冲我喊。在熙熙攘攘的酒吧里，附近桌的人们也会说些类似的话。尤其当我穿着牛仔裤和棒球帽时，这些议论更是甚嚣尘上。而当我穿上西装外套、打上领带、穿上意大利皮鞋时，这些议论就变得无关紧要了。那时，我似乎就成了“绅士”——一个没有特定国籍的人，而是一个身份地位通过着装选择来体现的人。

这些略显荒谬且完全不科学的例子，恰恰是我认为韩国在某种程度上是一个后种族社会的原因之一。尽管过去二十年来韩国多元文化主义日益盛行，但它仍然是世界上种族构成最单一的国家之一，因此，在这样一种观点看来或许有些惊世骇俗。

然而，尽管北美大部分地区和西欧部分地区以肤色和种族来评判他人，但在韩国，国籍在日常交往中通常占据更为重要的地位。韩国人被问及身份时，通常不会像美国人口普查表上那样回答“亚洲人”。越来越多的韩国人认为，如果被称作“北京人”或被建议穿和服，会让他们感到非常反感。

当然，这一切背后有着复杂的历史和政治原因。东北亚民族主义的兴起是对殖民主义、帝国主义以及外国船只抵达此地意图插旗敛财的回应。韩国的民族认同往往比泛亚洲认同更为强烈，也更具社会影响力。

泛亚主义与日本帝国主义紧密交织。日本自诩为亚洲秩序的领导者，最终与帝国主义的暴行密不可分。正是那面令人胆寒的旭日旗，在这一地区引发了如此强烈的负面情绪：印尼的饥荒、南京的劫掠、朝鲜半岛及其他地区的强征劳工和慰安妇。在政治上，正是韩国的“一振会”试图将首尔和东京合并为一个民族国家，以此应对“白人”的到来及其带来的威胁。

但这一切都无济于事。如今在亚洲盛行的民族主义，正是对19世纪末20世纪初殖民主义的回应。英国、法国、俄国以及后来的日本的帝国主义行径，以及由此引发的战争和冲突，在这一地区催生了一种强烈的身份认同感，人们将希望和认同寄托于国家之上。自由的梦想不再以肤色来衡量，而是以国旗和歌曲来书写。

同样，西方对种族问题的关注也可以被认为是殖民主义的产物，但视角有所不同。在西方，种族之所以重要，是因为殖民者试图将殖民地人民纳入并融入他们的社会。种族被反复转化为一种划分的工具：一种将人划分成不同类别，进而进行统治、剥削、排斥或赋予特权的方式。殖民主义尤其有力地利用了这一体系。

我们甚至可以退后一步，说种族和民族主义本身就是时代的产物。虽然种族在今天无疑有着非常现实的影响，但它终究是一种社会建构。考虑到人们对它的信仰如此根深蒂固，这听起来或许难以置信，但我们只需回顾一下宗教引发的所有战争和死亡，就能明白人们对源于头脑的观念可以多么执着。

这并非意味着民族主义就更好。本尼迪克特·安德森曾精辟地将民族描述为“想象的共同体”：一个成员彼此之间鲜少相识的群体，却仍然自认为属于同一个集体。毕竟，除了世界杯和奥运会，民族主义也带来了边界、血腥屠杀和官僚主义的旗帜，这些都定义了人类历史上最血腥的世纪。然而，不知何故，我们用民族命运取代了君权神授，并称之为进步。

在民族主义兴起之前，宗教往往更能有力地解答“归属感”的问题。一个人可能先是基督徒、穆斯林、印度教徒或佛教徒，然后才成为现代意义上的法国人、埃及人、印度人或韩国人。这种情况至今仍未消失。在当今世界某些地区，宗教身份仍然比护照更为重要。

人类始终需要一些方式来想象自己与素未谋面的人之间的联系。宗教曾是构建这种联系的重要框架之一，民族主义后来又成为另一个。如今，种族、国籍、宗教和族裔以复杂的方式交织在一起，具体情况取决于我们居住的地方。我们似乎有一种近乎无法抗拒的冲动，想要将人类的巨大复杂性划分成更小的群体：信徒和非信徒、我们和他们、公民和外国人、白人和黑人、韩国人和日本人。分类方式或许会改变，但这种冲动却始终存在。

韩国未必是一个后种族国家，它的种族化方式有所不同。韩国的例子表明，当民族性而非种族成为理解差异的主要框架时，会发生什么。

当西方观察者将他们种族化的框架投射到东亚时，他们犯了双重错误。他们既忽视了自身社会中种族范畴的具体历史发展，又误读了该地区大部分地区根深蒂固、充满强烈领土意识的民族主义。他们将复杂的民族认同扁平化地塞进一个同质化的“亚洲”框架中，这更多地暴露了他们自身的焦虑，而非当地的现实。除非我们认识到，种族和民族，尽管它们确实会产生影响，但归根结底，不过是我们讲述的关于谁属于某个群体的虚构故事，否则我们将继续输出我们固有的划分框架，却又疑惑为何这些框架并不适用。

当然，这并不能帮助我们理解一个令人恐惧又令人眩晕的现实：如果民族主义和种族都不是真实存在的，那么我们究竟是什么？作为人类？

或许答案在于，我们人类总是喜欢创造出足够宽泛的类别，让陌生人也能感受到家的温暖。我希望你在这里也能有这种感觉。如果一些知识能帮助一些人更轻松地适应在韩国的生活，那当然是件好事。如果你的经历与我或我的学生不同，也应该被倾听。这或许还能让卡琳娜免受网络上的攻击，也可能避免下一个韩国名人因为民族中心主义而误以为在自己国家行之有效的类别在其他地方也同样适用。