Classed Notions of Ethnic Authenticity Among Second-Generation Korean Americans

• In Event: 30803 - Inequality and Diversity among Asian Americans and Beyond

Abstract

Responding to the hypothesis that Asians become “honorary whites” as they accrue wealth and status, a growing body of research sheds light on how Asian Americans both reproduce and challenge dominant narratives of whiteness while retaining their ethnoracial differences. In this paper, I examine how class inequality between Asian Americans complicates intragroup solidarity and sense of group position, taking the specific case of Korean Americans. I draw on 32 interviews with second-generation Korean American adults who are (a) “persistently privileged” (upper-middle class individuals from upper-middle class backgrounds), (b) “stuck at the bottom” (working-class individuals from working-class backgrounds), and (c) upwardly mobile (upper-middle class individuals from working-class backgrounds). I find that respondents draw intragroup boundaries based on “ethnic authenticity,” definitions of which are differentiated by class. Persistently privileged Korean Americans invest economic capital into cultivating their version of “authentic Koreanness,” which is transnational cultural capital: cosmopolitan assets enabling mobility across the national contexts of Korea and the US, allowing them to view themselves as part of a global elite. In contrast, working-class Korean Americans, who see themselves as “stuck at the bottom” of the US socioeconomic ladder and “stuck in place” in the US national context, define “authentic Koreanness” as constituted by responsibilities to their local and immediate Korean American communities, as well as to other minoritized groups in the US. Upwardly mobile Korean Americans, who have departed working-class backgrounds for elite colleges and workplaces, are left to negotiate these contrasting notions of “authentic Koreanness,” reflecting their class trajectories. I argue that these classed differences in the understanding of what it means to be an “(in)authentic ethnic” in the second generation carry important implications for the political groupness of Korean Americans and possibly other Asian Americans, illustrating how ethnoracial identity and class status interact to shape solidarity.

Author

• Jane Choi, Harvard University