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]
The reverse of the aphorism can apply equally well, I think.
FWIW — On my recent hiking trip, I think I received more kindness, generosity, and help from people with very low English than from people with good English, even “per capita”, though this is just a general impression with a sample size of one observer (myself).
I’ve talked to many Western foreigners in Korea who by default would argue for racial thinking as peculiar to White-Americans from the South or something like that (so any allegations of raciam against Koreans are ipso-facto illegitimate, the result of cultural misunderstanding and so on), but consider (1) the behavior of Koreans who are reasonably fluent in English (they, too, engage in “racist” behavior) and (2) Koreans with non-fluent-English who go waaaay out of their way to give people a hard time or “cheat” them — That cannot possible be language social-anxiety, because it’s essentially the opposite of avoidant behavior.
Peter – I don’t think we disagree.
With respect to your first point… I probably don’t make it very clear, but in fact I would expect GREATER linguistic anxiety with HIGHER familiarity with English – hence in fact your observation (which matches mine) that people with lower English are typically “friendlier” is a support for my idea rather than a rebuttal.
On your other points, I think there might be something to the idea that racialized thinking is more American (or Western) than universal, yet this also means that those Koreans who are more cosmopolitan (and “worldly” and well-traveled and better at English, etc.) are also more likely to be “infected” with racialized ideologies.
But I think there is a “native” stream of racialized thinking as well, perhaps descended from or at least in line with the Chinese conception of non-Chinese as “barbarians,” etc., which was also an idea in Japanese culture that got amplified with the Meiji restoration and led to “co-prosperity” etc.
Your last point, with respect to non-English-using Koreans who will harass or “cheat” foreigners, I would rather assume this is simple criminality as opposed to anything related to racism at all. There are criminals who specialize in victimizing foreigners in all societies, and they are not really racists (although I’m sure that plays into it, too, when it’s available as a cultural “resource” so-to-speak) so much as they are specialists – ripping off foreigners takes a different skill-set than ripping off locals, because foreigners have different vulnerabilities and different cultural “blind spots” through which “ambush” is possible.
Lastly, you and I have both talked many times of real, actual, experienced racism in this country, and my observation isn’t meant to discount that or deny it. In the same way, the first aphorism doesn’t deny malice – it only says that, all things being equal, we should look first to stupidity for an explanation of bad behavior. Likewise, I mean only to say that rather than jump to the conclusion, immediately, that the bad behavior we witness is necessarily racist, instead we should look first at other possible explanations.
I wrote this post partly in reaction to a post on another site (which I don’t want to dignify with a link because he’s someone I actually respect much of the time) regarding the too-frequent “racist” behavior he’s experienced in trying to get a cab. I just don’t think it’s true. I think cab drivers are trying to minimize hassle and maximize profits, and many of them have come to feel that foreigners qua foreigners are more trouble than they’re worth, and I compare that to my own decision that answering my phone is more trouble than it’s worth – i.e. I say there is probably a component of anxiety in this decision-making process.
Hope you’re having fun in Malaysia.