Last class we watched an graph that Korean people are not kind to foreign people.
It was very interesting because Korea showed a notable result.
Therefore I searched about this topic.
As a Korean, I can understand enough this result, however, foreign people are hard to understand this phenomenon. I think there are several reasons such as history, culture and so on.
First of all Korea has been a racially homogeneous nation for a long time.
From ancient times Korean people live together with neighbors by groups.
Until 18 century's modernization, Korean didn't see even western people.
So it is just about 3 centuries that Korean people join with foreign people.
Secondly many Korean people are too much care about other people. They are likely to care about the different shape, face, color and language too much.
Third, some Korean people still have 'white supremacy' so many Korean people look down east-southern Asian worker or black. Korean people call them "Foreign labors" but they don't call white people "foreign labors." So there are still discrimination in Korea.
I think it is why Korean people unkind to foreign people.
From the past, Korea has ethnocentrism. In Joseon dynasty we got invasion so many times from near countries. So we need to get together to protect our country. This changed to little bad way and Korea began to exclude strangers and people from other country. And from modern area, we build our country by ourselves. When Korea havs IMF crisis, we gather golds from households in order to bail out ourselves. By these reaseon, Korea has ideology that we have got together whenever we have hardships and finally we made it. So Korean people feel proud of themselves. Getting through hardships is done with same Korean people like themselves. So after that thought is getting harden, we tend to exclude foreigners and stick to our position.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comment. It's right that Korea has dynamic history for a long time and by that reason Korean people are not familiar with foreign people. However, we should try to break old traditions. This is why we learn about globalization.
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