Remaking of Race and Class: Internationalization of Community College and Politics of Korean Students' Belonging

• In Event: To Romanticize or Not To? Collective Struggles of Marginalized Youth and the Politics of Representation

Abstract

Based on a year-long ethnography work at a public community college in a Chicago suburb, this study examines the complex processes and mechanisms through which the lower middle- and working-class Korean international students’ subjectivities are shifting, and their social locations are being negotiated through complicated interactions and various institutional management techniques of its student populations. This contrasts, on the one hand, how the values and beliefs held by instructors, counselors, and administrators in U.S. community colleges affect particular race and class regimes; while, on the other hand, the presence of international students enacts affects the race and class making of Korean American students at community colleges and more broadly of all students.
As community colleges and their personnel (in)voluntarily engage in the implementation of the dominant discourse of globalism, which is implemented in the name of “modern make-over project”, they also direct not only dominant students but also Korean international students’ ways of belonging to the institution and to the dominant US and global society. In dominant discourses about the community college, students are often posited as the backbone of American industry, called to support their country’s economic progress in the face of escalating global competition. Under the revival of nationalistic slogan, I argue that American public community colleges function in the complicated ways as critical arenas in which key political and economic agenda are implemented not only through the improvement of domestic students’ work skills, but also by regulating the desires, needs, and strategies of international students in accordance with imperial neoliberal market norms. I take Korean international students, who failed to get into top-tier universities or colleges, and are thus stigmatized as “losers” or “the surplus” in their home, as revealing because their homeland experienced among the world’s most rapid neoliberal transformations after the late 1990s Asian financial crisis.

The results of the year-long ethnography work suggest that there is a profound reorganization of racial and class hierarchies at work. First, the presence of the Korean international student has adversely affected the status of 1.5 generation of Korean immigrant students, rendering them no longer American cultural citizens in the making, but instead as simply “foreigners”. Second, being aware of their alienated locations on campus, these Korean international students strategically pinpoint, except for all the other groups of domestic and international students, including poor “white” native born and immigrant students as not exactly “genuine Americans,” and put them on the periphery as academically and economically inferior.

As the result of the Korean state’s new ways of legitimizing one’s social membership according to his/her profitability, and the college’s institutional practices of instrumentalizing the international students as an “ATM” and managing them as suspicious foreigners from an imperialistic perspective, the Korean international students, who envisioned themselves as invisible working-class Korean immigrants in the U.S. can be portrayed as an emerging group of the displaced who are lost in the transnational sphere.

Author

• Sujung Kim