“No Blacks, No Africans”: How Covid-19 Fueled Racist and Exclusionary Attitudes in the Korean Club Scene

Shuanise Odunaiya

SOAS University of London

In light of the recent tragic event that took place in Itaewon, I wanted to extend my deepest condolences to the families and friends that have been impacted by this devastating tragedy. Words seem inadequate during times like this and like many others, I have struggled to make sense of the night of October 29, 2022.

For many, Itaewon is an area where meaningful social connections are formed. The presence of Itaewon’s long-established communities, with its diverse range of cultural voices and backgrounds, has allowed many, including myself, to feel at home away from home.

The relationships formed within Itaewon, in its rich and varied forms, have taught me a lot about my own positionality, ethnographic practices, and the times where life and fieldwork overlap. While in this article, I share some of my own fieldwork experiences and engage in more difficult conversations around race and identity, in hopes of encouraging a more open dialogue around fieldwork experiences for Black researchers, I’m grateful for the friends and research colleagues that enriched my time in South Korea.

While these may feel like uncertain times, I know of the community’s strength and resilience, which I hope will guide them through this tough period.

*  *  *

In this article I argue that the emergence of COVID-19 has highlighted the omnipresent issue of anti-Black racism within South Korean society. In recent years the Korean government has made efforts to restructure exclusionary policies that have kept the Black population in Korea constrained within a system of structural injustice.[1] Regional districts have implemented culturally diverse initiatives and curricula as a means to combat these biases while promoting multiculturalism. Nevertheless, colorism and anti-Blackness have been deep-rooted, ongoing struggles within South Korean society, which will be discussed in detail.

This article draws upon my own fieldwork experience during the pandemic and the intersection of anti-Blackness, which discernibly shifted my experience as a Black and African researcher navigating fieldwork in Korea. I reflect on my positionality in situations where access to fieldwork spaces was denied and the intimate moments of self-doubt and conflicting personal and professional expectations in the era of COVID-19, which I hope will be useful in illuminating the psychological and emotional implications for Black researchers.

If you speak to any researcher who began their studies in 2019 like myself, one of the first topics of discussion will likely revolve around how the pandemic shifted their planned research, either through changing their on-the-ground fieldwork to virtual research, or the constraints on physical movement that changed the participatory university experience. You might also hear of the intangible virtual connections through Zoom and MS Teams classes and supervision meetings, socio-economic challenges, or the emotional ambivalence and uncertainties that manifested through the silence and space that lockdown provided in contrast to the seemingly loud and chaotic nature of everyday life. While like many others, my academic routine shifted in many ways, but I never imagined that a pandemic would radically alter the course of my own research; neither could I have perceived the immense challenge of building trust and connecting with research collaborators during my fieldwork in Seoul.

Like many underground music spaces during the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak, participants within Seoul’s creative community faced significant challenges due to social distancing measures, club closures, and the country’s ‘test, trace and isolate’ policy (Allen 2022, 42). Furthermore, the outbreak of the pandemic cast a negative light on the underground music community in which my research was to take place. The Itaewon club outbreak that took place during the Golden Week public holiday (April 30–May 5), in which a 29-year-old man visited several clubs in the Yongsan area and reportedly infected 256 club goers, resulted in the second indefinite closing of nightclub spaces in 2020. Consequently, many within the dance music, foreign, and LGBTQ communities faced heightened scrutiny as media coverage reported Itaewon as the cradle of rising COVID infections in Korea. This further shaped public perceptions, causing a surge in homophobic and racial discrimination.

Throughout the various phases of the lockdown, many grassroots and local dance music communities in Seoul found new ways to adapt to the restrictive and paralyzing environment. Throughout 2020 the demand for social connectedness and presence was met through various live-streamed concerts, raves, forums, apps, and websites. Many musical platforms who already had an online presence chose to further expand their virtual events. They explored various methods such as virtual gaming club experiences, using music as an online community facilitator. In many ways this sudden increase of virtual interaction and development expanded the scope of my own research, adding more dynamic layers to consider. From my own home in locked-down London, I was able to discover and build new connections with creatives within the Seoul community.

However, the lockdown also led to more difficult situations. Investigative media reports into the Itaewon club scene, which reported the area as a dirty, contaminated hub, infected by foreigners and homosexual immorality, naturally led to tensions between members of the Seoul underground community and outsiders. Researchers and journalists were ostracized and cold-shouldered by members of the community. My own position as an outsider researcher became even more difficult because of questions around my race and ethnicity. 

In the UK where I spent much of my childhood, Black and ethnic minority groups account for 13.8% of the total population (Lindholm & Vanhatalo 2021, 623), with Black and ethnic minorities in London making up 40% of the city’s population (Bourke 2022, 591). However, South Korea has remained a largely ethnically homogenous society, with an estimated 1.6 million foreigners residing in the country as of 2022: just 3.1% of the country’s total population of 51.63 million (Yon-se 2022).

Several times when I attended nightclub spaces or venues where meetings had been prearranged, upon arrival, my intersectional identity as a Black researcher led to incidents involving racial discrimination and exclusion. While using social networking platforms I consistently display a profile picture and relevant profile information, for example my full name that might infer my background or a sense of who I am. However, the faceless nature of emails meant that at times my racial identity remained hidden behind a veil of anonymity from recipients. On several occasions, I was denied entry into club spaces that were implementing racist entry policies, which prevented planned research from taking place.

Over the past few years, several establishments across South Korea have been criticized for racial discrimination and xenophobic policies, refusing entry to foreigners, and specifically excluding Black patrons. Some incidents at club doors, publicized on social media, have ended in hostile encounters and the violent and antagonistic treatment of Black people by club doormen.

One interaction, which left a lasting impression, was a prearranged interview with the owner of a hip hop club in the Hongdae area. Upon my arrival at the venue, the security guard who was resting on a chair in the entryway, quickly rose to his feet, using his large frame as a physical barrier to the venue. When I explained that I was meeting the owner, I was asked to wait while he disappeared inside. When he returned, he called attention to the color of my skin by rubbing the inside of his left arm with the fingers on his right hand, saying in English, “No Africans! Covid!” I had spoken to him in fluent Korean, and this refusal to engage with me in Korean was a deliberate attempt to reinforce my exclusion from the venue and to further marginalize me, creating a linguistic exclusionary barrier regardless of my actual language proficiency, which could only be crossed through his consent and acceptance.

It is important to note that there have been cases where foreign visitors from a range of backgrounds have also experienced denial into spaces. However, even though my research took place in South Korea—ostensibly distant from the entrenched racial binaries of the US—it is still a society where hierarchical racial structures are present.

Historically, Black people have disproportionately and routinely been the targets of prejudice within the already oppressive atmosphere of anti-Blackness that has circulated throughout the Asian diaspora. Colorism, which Carol Camper describes as a “legacy of colonization” (Camper 2004, 179), has been used as a device—which Latrice Martin, Cedric Herring and Hayward Horton note as predating colonialism in Asia—to categorize individuals with fairer skin tones into superior social positions, while individuals with darker skin tones assumed lower positions in society due to performing intense labor and physical exertion in the sun (Martin, Horton, and Herring 2017, 144). This impulse toward lightness and whiteness is rooted strongly in the intersection-fusion of class ideas from Asia (darkness comes from being poor, working in the sun all day) and white racial framing pushed by western colonization (whiteness equals power and supremacy conflated with moral goodness) (Chang 2016, 157).

In spite of the lack of consensus on its origins, colorism has been utilized and perpetuated within white supremacy as a means to provoke tensions and divide communities of color, through tropes such as the “model minority,” that is veneration of the Chinese American, later the Asian community, for their self-attained accomplishments through hard work, noble and upwardly mobile virtues in contrast to the downwardness of Blacks who lack said virtues (Peterson 1966, 180).

Frequently, what felt like an orientation towards anti-Blackness, meant that of the thirty-five nightclub spaces I attempted to visit during my fieldwork period, seventeen of them were accessible. Spaces, I might add, that were predominantly devoted to hip hop and music commonly associated with Black culture, and that undoubtedly became easier for me to gain entrée into if I attended with an Asian or white companion.

As an academic researcher I feel that it is important to maintain a relativist position and to be sensitive to diverging social dynamics, even where these dynamics relate to race. But these personal experiences of racist exclusion leave me struggling to reconcile my desire for professional relativism with an equally profound sense of the need for justice and social equality. I feel a tension between my competence as a researcher and my moral consciousness as a Black woman and have yet to find a way to allow these two seemingly antithetical social roles to coexist organically. While on occasion I did vocally condemn flagrant instances of racism in the moment, I found that it only soothed my own moral values and projected familiar ethical norms and conceptions of the good from my own viewpoint.

Furthermore, the consequences of confronting structures of racial oppression and privilege can quite quickly escalate, leading to heightened tensions which at times in South Korea, have led in retrogressive directions. For example, many of the foreign victims I have spoken with, who, after detailing discriminatory policies online and additionally victims that have publicized their experiences of racially motivated violence at specific nightclubs, have received threats of defamation lawsuits from nightclub owners, which exemplify the racial antagonisms and legislative vulnerability of minorities.

While I avoided exacerbating these already present racial tensions, the consequences of these interactions meant that during the first month of my fieldwork, I found myself engaging in what

W.E.B DuBois articulated as “a double consciousness” (Du Bois 1999, 10–11): attempting to maneuver a delicate balance between Korean social respectability; conservativeness and decorum; consistently policing my own mannerisms, body, and hairstyle choices in order to avoid race-based stereotypes; aiming to gain acceptance by individuals within the dominant social group, while somehow maintaining my own sense of authenticity. As Brandon Manning states:

Black people who navigate predominantly white spaces recognize that along with code switching and forms of respectability politics, they are also made to feel that they have to police emotions in public spaces. (Manning 2022, 137)

 The burden of conforming to racist ideologies and inequalities at the expense of my own ideals feels tiresome and costly, and as DuBois recognizes, “two unreconciled strivings” (Du Bois 1999, 10–11).

Although since 2007, there have been efforts to enact antidiscrimination laws in South Korea, comprehensive legislation that prevents racial discrimination has yet to be put in place (Oh 2022, 10). I hope that a wider understanding of racial disparities and the complex and multifaceted manifestations of racism will lead the government to enact legislation that prohibits openly discriminatory policies. However, I’m also aware that at the time of this research, it has been a fifteen year wait to pass adequate legislation to prevent such acts from taking place. While we wait for South Korean legislators to implement laws that acknowledge the nature and extent of racial inequalities within its society, I have come to the conclusion that, for Black and African researchers who conduct fieldwork, it is by promoting our own observations, experiences and perceptions, and being given further consideration within the discourse of fieldwork strategies, that we can best hope to ameliorate the negative psychological impacts of race-based discrimination during fieldwork. Furthermore, it is through these contributions that we can confront and illuminate racist practices and policies and empower minority ethnic voices during the fieldwork process and make the Black experience in the field more equitable.

Notes:

References

Asian Development Bank. 2021. Assessment of COVID-19 Response in the Republic of Korea. 2021, xxii.

Bourke, Joanna. 2022. Birkbeck 200 Years of Radical Learning for Working People. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Camper, Carol. 2004. “Into the Mix.” In “Mixed Race” Studies: A Reader, edited by Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe. New York: Routledge.

Chang, Sharon. 2016. Raising Mixed Race: Multicultural Asian Children in a Post-racial World. New York: Routledge.

Danielle, Allen. 2022. Democracy in the Time of Coronavirus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Du Bois, William. 1999. Souls of Black Folk. 1st ed. London: W. W. Norton & Company. Kim, Minjeong and Hyeyoung Woo, eds. 2022. Redefining Multicultural Families in South Korea. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Lindholm, Camilla and Vanhatalo, Ulla. 2015. Handbook of Easy Languages in Europe. Berlin: Frank & Timme.

Manning, Brandon J., 2022. Played Out: The Race Man in Twenty-First-Century Satire. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Martin, Lori Latrice, Derrick Horton, and Cedric Herring, eds 2017. Color Struck: How Race and Complexion Matter in the "Color-blind" era. London: Sense Publishers.

McCloskey, Deirdre, and Aberto Mingardi. 2020. The Myth of the Entrepreneurial State. Massachusetts: American Institute for Economic Research.

Oh, David. 2022. Mediating the South Korean Other: Representations and Discourses of Difference in the Post/Neocolonial Nation-State. Michigan: University of Michigan Press.

Petersen, William. 1966. “Success Story, Japanese American Style.” New York Times Magazine, January 9, 1966.

Yon-se, Kim. 2022. “Foreign Population to Rise to 4/3% in 2040.” The Korea Herald, April 14, 2022. https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20220414000692.