Managing Ethnic Conflict within a Community Context: Black Korean Relations in an American City

Abstract

Relations between African Americans and Korean Americans have been defined mainly by negative interactions between Korean merchants and Black consumers in urban communities. The nature of this conflict has resulted in anti-Asian sentiments and angry attitudes that have escalated the conflict to boycotts of Korean business interests, beatings due to mistaken identities, deaths of merchants and consumers and, as we noted in the 1992 urban uprisings in Los Angeles, looting and burning of targeted-Korean businesses. Although the conflict in part stems from economic and cultural differences, it is not possible to understand its roots without examining and understanding the framework created by a Eurocentric racism and the impact of news media in its portrayal of the two principals to the public and to each other. This paper suggests using a strategy of dialogue between members of the two communities in mixed groups at all levels, in order to increase the level of understanding and reduce or resolve the existing conflicts even though the factors which might contribute to the conflicts have not been or can not be eliminated. “The European is to the other races of mankind what man himself is to the lower animals: he makes them subservient to his use and when he cannot subdue he destroys them.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835