Think Like a Korean: What White Folks Can Learn from a Collectivist Culture

Do you all remember the shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007?  It was horrific; the deadliest shooting by a single gunman in US history.  It brought up all the usual conversations about fear and grief and gun control but I remember chatting with a Korean friend of mine immediately after the shooting and her response really surprised me.  She was devastated that the gunman was Korean.

It completely baffled me.  Why was she so shaken?  I couldn’t fathom the depth of her feelings.  It wasn’t like she had done the shooting.  She didn’t even know the guy!

But to her, it didn’t matter that he was a stranger or that he lived 3,000 miles away.  It didn’t matter that she had never met him or even heard his name before April 16, 2007.  What mattered was that he, as a fellow Korean, was connected to her.  He was inextricably part of her and she felt as though she bore some of the weight of what had happened, simply by being Korean.

Over the next few days several other Korean friends expressed a similar sentiment and it was a feeling altogether unfamiliar to me.  It had never occurred to me after tragedies like Sandy Hook or Santa Barbara to grieve the fact that the perpetrator was White.   It doesn’t reflect poorly on me, does it?

selfcheckout

Collectivist vs Individualistic

Korea is what’s known as a collectivist culture.  It emphasizes the needs of family, work, and community above the needs or desires of individuals.   Each person labors for the good of society as a whole.  Cooperation and care for the other are benchmarks and the group rises and falls together.

On the other hand, America – particularly White America – is an individualistic culture.  We promote the needs and desires of individuals regardless of the cost to the group.

Is one better than the other?  It’s hard to say.   Certainly each has it’s positive and negative aspects.   But ultimately, understanding collectivism is essential to understanding White Privilege.  It’s nearly impossible to shoulder the weight of Whiteness when looking at it through the lens of individualism.

Born to Walk Alone

Individualism is deeply ingrained in White culture.  From our bootstrap mentality to our self-serve buffet tables, our corporate structures to our check-out lines to our songs, our deference for individualism is all-encompassing in the US.  And this makes it difficult to decipher our role in something like the shooting of Michael Brown or, more recently, Walter Scott.  Why should we, just because we are White, bear the blame?  We had nothing to do with it!  Why can’t we just move on already?

We are so laser-focused on ourselves and our own individual actions that we cannot see the forest for the trees.  We say, “hey, I didn’t shoot the guy.  I’m not part of this,” and go about our days wholly satisfied with our own innocence.  We approach it as individuals and thus absolve ourselves as individuals.  Case closed.  But in order to understand our own culpability we have to shift our focus.  We have to pan out.  We have to see that White folks collectively bear the blame.

I didn’t personally shoot Michael Brown last August or Walter Scott last week but I am part of it.  I am part of a culture that is producing more and more Darren Wilsons and Michael Slagers.   I am part of a culture that has sharp racial disparities in police stops.  I am part of a culture that is killing unarmed children.  We have to be willing to look at these facts, as a group, and ask ourselves how and why these things are continuing to happen in our supposedly post-racial world.  Nobody is exempt.  Nobody gets a free pass.  Until we learn to think like Koreans and shoulder the collective weight, we won’t make any progress.

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Other posts on Race

Feeling Your Skin
Can I Get An Amen… from the Awkward White Lady?
A Song Of Lament
The (Not So) Subtle Racism of the Gilmore Girls

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Special thanks to the InterVarsity student at the OPAT conference last weekend – Annie – who made a keen observation about White culture that got the wheels turning for this post.