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talkpoliticshttp://www.nation.co.ke/Features/lifestyle/Flying+Kenya+business+flag+in+South+Korea+/-/1214/1255704/-/item/0/-/bx57syz/-/index.html
“It was terrible!” recalls the woman, Everlyne Nyambegera. “Children were crying, their mothers dashing for the exits and all this made me also break down and start crying too.”
As a resident of South Korea who lives only about an hour from Seoul I do have to say I was surprised by this. Korea being what it is a lot of people here don't have much experience in dealing with foreigners. However, there are lot of foreigners in Seoul. The US Army has a base in town and there's Itaewon, an area that is pretty the foreigner district.
That said, some people here still get very weirded out around foreigners; especially black people. In any case, this is still a really shocking reaction to see and when it made the news some of the other expats and I got to talking about it and the old debate among expats in places like this came up yet again: Was the situation xenophobia or racism?
Among expats this also seems to turn into the people who excuse everything with xenophobia and the people who blame everything on racism. Personally, I think it's had to make that sort of call if you weren't there. I've more or less gotten used to people being weirded out by my being a foreigner and in the over three years I've spent in Asia and can only think of a handful of times when people really demonstrated they didn't like be because I wasn't one of them.
So here is the questions I put to you: Where is the line between xenophobia and racism? What, if anything, can the law do to protect people from the latter?
One fine morning, pandemonium broke out in a South Korean supermarket, and customers and shop stewards alike scampered for safety. Babies strapped on their mothers’ backs, others in prams screamed as their parents sought the nearest exits. And it wasn’t a terrorist attack, neither was it a band of robbers who had raided the convenience store. No, it wasn’t a
fire alert either. One Kenyan woman had just walked in to make a purchase.
As a resident of South Korea who lives only about an hour from Seoul I do have to say I was surprised by this. Korea being what it is a lot of people here don't have much experience in dealing with foreigners. However, there are lot of foreigners in Seoul. The US Army has a base in town and there's Itaewon, an area that is pretty the foreigner district.
That said, some people here still get very weirded out around foreigners; especially black people. In any case, this is still a really shocking reaction to see and when it made the news some of the other expats and I got to talking about it and the old debate among expats in places like this came up yet again: Was the situation xenophobia or racism?
Among expats this also seems to turn into the people who excuse everything with xenophobia and the people who blame everything on racism. Personally, I think it's had to make that sort of call if you weren't there. I've more or less gotten used to people being weirded out by my being a foreigner and in the over three years I've spent in Asia and can only think of a handful of times when people really demonstrated they didn't like be because I wasn't one of them.
So here is the questions I put to you: Where is the line between xenophobia and racism? What, if anything, can the law do to protect people from the latter?
