In this season of disappointment, perhaps the most frightening specter raised by the 2016 presidential election is the resurgence of racism in its ugliest, most mean-spirited form. Maybe it’s not even a resurgence. Maybe it’s always been there, bubbling along just beneath the surface even among the politest of society, and all it needed was a spark to explode it into full flame.
As an immigrant, I have felt the slap of racism. As a reporter, I have seen firsthand the damage ignorance and intolerance can create. I’m sad to observe that the racial landscape is, in many ways, not at all different, and in some ways even more dismal than it was more than two decades ago, when I was a television reporter in Sacramento, California.
In 1992, just after the Rodney King riots, all media were holding town halls on racial unrest and education efforts to quell the violence and promote understanding. As part of that effort, I, along with two other reporters — Marcos Breton of Mexican heritage, and Alice Scott, an African-American — were asked by the Sacramento Bee to write a reflection on our own experiences with racism.
Our words back then had great impact on the Sacramento community. I am sharing my long ago column again now because I believe it is relevant and timely, perhaps even more today than it was in 1992:
It’s 1967. A small girl stands alone in a playground full of laughing and shrieking children. Hot tears burn her cheeks as she tries to shut out the taunts of “Hey, chink-a-chink-a-chink” from the second graders who will be her new classmates.
It’s three years later. The girl is now in the fifth grade and starting to notice boys. She is hurt and stung when one she notices in particular, an athletic cutie named Gerard, turns one day and jeers, “Whatcha looking at, flat face, ugly face?”
Now the girl is in college at a prestigious eastern school. As a freshman, she’s flattered when a second-year medical student asks her to the Yale-Harvard football game. But one of her roommates cuts her with an unintentionally cruel remark: “You know, it’s the really ‘in’ thing these days at the Med School to go out with Asian women. My brother and all his friends are doing it.”
It’s 1992. The girl is grown up and a reporter at a Top 20 television market station, KOVR, the ABC affiliate in Sacramento. It’s not difficult for me to pull up these memories. They are very much a part of who I am today. I think they help explain my drive to succeed and my quest as a reporter to tell people what they don’t know and to explain things I think they should understand.
This brings me to April 29, 1992, the day of the Rodney King verdict and the day Los Angeles exploded in a fury of racial violence. As I watched it unfold on television, I was fascinated by the Korean shopkeepers who were shooting their guns to protect their property. I was born in Korea. My dad ran a gas station for a time, and my mom, a gift shop. So I have to confess that my first reaction to the image of the Korean shopkeepers was a thrill of pride that they had the guts to defend what they’d worked so hard to build. But my next reaction was one of horror that my countrymen were shown on national television as gun-toting vigilantes.
Much has been made by the national media about the conflict between blacks and Koreans in South-Central L.A. in the days following the verdict, I was sent to Los Angeles for one of my career’s most challenging assignments: To investigate the extent of the “Black-Korean conflict” and to determine how it played a role in the violence.
Once I was there, both sides opened up to me. The Koreans explained their stories to a fellow Korean-American who could understand their pain. The blacks viewed me as a fellow minority who could understand the struggle against economic oppression. In the end, my visit confirmed what I already knew in my heart, that the story of the L.A. riots was not the story of one group pitted against another. It was the story of years of frustration finally exploding, an economic revolt with ethnic minorities caught in the crossfire.
I believe people of color in highly visible positions have the responsibility to fight for understanding in a world that often has too little time to learn, and even less patience. We have to make our voices heard in the media’s largely white management offices about issues that concern us, issues like hate crimes and discriminatory quotes.
On a story like Rodney King, we have to cover not only the story of the verdict and its violent aftermath, but the reasons underlying those events. We have to seek our explanations not just from the police, the mayor and other city officials, but from people who live and work and fight and die on the gritty streets of Los Angeles every day.
We people of color in newsrooms across the country are the bridges to understanding. If we do our jobs well enough as communicators, perhaps there will be a day when stories like the Rodney King verdict and the subsequent riots are the stuff of ancient history And perhaps little girls and boys, no matter who they are or what languages they speak, can play with anyone they wish.
