Day: November 14, 2013

There is a famous aphorism in English that goes:

Never attribute to malice that which is more easily explained by stupidity.

The phrase applies a sort of Occam's Razor to the problem of bad behavior in people.

Recently, having run across several accounts of "racism" in Korea, I wondered if there might be a sort of corollary to this aphorism that applies specifically to those sorts of bad behavior. Of course, as foreigners in Korea, we often suffer strange or disturbing slights and mistreatments. One frequent thing that I have experienced myself is to be ignored by taxi drivers.

My thought, though, is that rather than assume that's racism at work, why not assume it's not that different from the reason store clerks say nothing to you, or why my students sit and stare at me when I say hello: it's fear or anxiety over fraught language interaction.

Obviously, there is still generalization and stereotyping going on – after all, it might be one of those foreigners who speaks Korean well that the taxi driver drove past.

But social language anxiety is very powerful. Consider my own bizarre telephone anxiety as a case-in-point. I am not that indrawn of a person, yet I am terrified to answer my phone in this country. Unless it's a number of someone I've already added to my contact list (and therefore their name shows when they call) I simply don't answer my phone, for fear of having to interact in Korean. This is true, despite the fact that I have in the past successfully interacted on the phone in Korean, when it was absolutely necessary.

Might it not be the case that many of these taxi drivers and store clerks who slight foreigners are simply engaging in similar language-anxiety driven behavior? I think so. Koreans are typically very self-conscious about their poor English skills, because their society has spent several generations, now, pounding into their heads that they should have such skills.

Well, anyway, I guess I could develop this further and more precisely, but mostly, I wanted to invent a new corollary to the aphorism at the start of this blog-post. It goes:

Never attribute to ideology (e.g. "racism") that which is more easily explained by social anxiety.

It really can be easily represented by one of those SAT-style vocabulary analogies:

ideology:anxiety::malice:stupidity

[daily log: walking, 4.5 km]