South Korea Desegregates Its Armed Forces

Welcome to the 20th Century, Korea!

The government said Friday that mixed-race young men in the country are entitled to join the military under a revision of the military conscription law passed by the National Assembly last June.

The move drew attention as it came amid the skyrocketing popularity of Super Bowel MVP Hines Ward, a Korean-American athlete. The “half-Korean” football player’s success story, however, sparked introspection in South Korea about discrimination against people having mixed-race backgrounds.

Well, instrospection is good, right? Yes, but it’s also a fairly vivid illustration of how backward Korean attitudes about race really are. Hines Ward has started a long overdue national discussion about race, but most of the discussion really isn’t so much about racial equality as it is about who counts as Korean. Can you count if you’re half black or white? Watching MBC news tonight, I saw an academic state (sarcastically) that of course you can . . . if you win a Superbowl.

Under the previous law, the military banned men who “clearly appear of mixed racial background” from serving mandatory military duty out of concern they might have difficulty in fitting in.

This is silly. If the United States military was able to clamp down hard on harassment against homosexual servicemembers, the Korean military can clamp down hard on harassment against mixed-race soldiers. Only the will is lacking.

While serving in Korea, I met an American soldier whose father was African-American and whose mother was Korean. He was raised in Korea and had experienced a hellish childhood at the hands of his schoolmates. There’s no sign of that kind of attitude changing anytime soon, and it’s a fact that explains why so few foreigners with children want to live in Korea unless they can either send their kids to the U.S. military schools or fork out the money for private “international” schools. Because people tend to reach the most productive years of their professional lives when they have young children, one can imagine that Korea’s attitudes about race impose a financial cost.