A transnational application of critical race theory: schooling experiences of multicultural students in South Korea

ABSTRACT

Utilizing Critical Race Theory (CRT), this study conducted a systemic review of scholarship on the schooling experiences of racial/ethnic minority students called multicultural students in South Korea. For the current analysis, CRT helped illuminate racism and other intersecting forms of structural issues that shape multicultural students’ experiences, which tend to be obfuscated in the dominant multicultural education discourse in Korea. In doing so, this study helped acknowledge the structural embeddedness of multicultural students’ experiences with discrimination and stigma and race/ethnicity as a marginalizing factor in the Korean education system. In addition to providing local implications, the current study seeks to expand the transnational application of CRT in education by examining racial injustice in Korean society that has received little attention in the CRT scholarship.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical race theory
• global race and racism
• transnational approach
• multicultural education
• South Korea

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Hines Ward is born to an African American father and Korean mother.

2. In the Korean context, multicultural children refer to those born between one Korean citizen parent and one parent of other national origins (Shin, 2019). Multicultural labelling is problematic because, to name a few, it 1) homogenizes multicultural population (Grant & Ham, 2013) 2) perpetuates “othering” of multicultural population (Kim et al., 2018), and 3) excludes other racial/ethnic minorities in Korean society who are not associated with Korean blood (N. Y. Kim, 2015). Despite these limitations, I use the term throughout this paper for two main reasons. First, while other alternative terms have been proposed, multicultural label has become a dominant and normative discourse in Korean policy, media, and academic arenas and is most commonly used (Yuk, 2016). Second, my intention of using the term is not to replicate the aforementioned problems, but rather to critique and make their problematic nature more explicit. As a result, I used multicultural labelling throughout this analysis and as a key search term for the current literature review while acknowledging the limitations of the language.

3. In the US context, racist nativism refers to “how perceived racial differences construct false perceptions of People of Colour as ‘nonnative,’ and not belonging to the monolithic ‘American’ identity, an identity that has historically been tied to perceptions and constructions of whiteness” (Huber, 2011, p. 382), which has been used to justify discrimination and racism against various groups of People of Colour in the US. In Korean context, due to a narrowly defined societal perception of who constitutes “real” Koreans based on blood association, language, and culture (Lim, 2009), those who violate those criteria are considered not “real” Koreans, othered, and discriminated.