Imperial Citizens Koreans and Race from Seoul to LA [Hardcover]

Asians and Latinos comprise the vast majority of contemporary immigrants to the United States, and their growing presence has complicated America's prevailing White-Black race hierarchy.Imperial Citizensuses a global framework to investigate how Asians from U.S.-dominated homelands learn and understand their place along U.S. color lines. With interviews and ethnographic observations of Koreans, the book does what others rarely do: venture to the immigrants' home country and analyze racism there in relation to racial hierarchies in the United States.Attentive to history, the book considers the origins, nature, and extent of racial ideas about Koreans/Asians in relation to White and Black Americans, investigating how immigrants engage these ideas before they depart for the United States, as well as after they arrive. The author shows that contemporary globalization involves not just the flow of capital, but also culture. Ideas about American color lines and citizenship lines have crossed oceans alongside U.S. commodities. In the process of analyzing Korean and American racial ideologies, Kim uses a well-developed theoretical framework. . . . Kim's research and analysis offers a fresh perspective within the field and provide a strong reminder of the power that keeps 'racial concepts' firmly tied to the structures of superiority justification. A masterful demonstration of the globalization of white racism! Nadia Kim's interviews with Korean immigrants and their children reveal integral links between U.S. global hegemony and immigration. This book depicts the human tragedy of Korean American hyper-conformity in a nation that perpetuates white supremacy: preference for white beauty leading to plastic surgery; women preferring white men who exoticize or abuse them; and Korean internalization of white-racist attitudes toward Americans of color. Nadia Y. Kim is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Loyola Marymount University. Nadia Kim writes cogently and compellinglylC'