Ending the Korean War Teaching Initiative

Questions

1. On the cusp of the Korean War, President Harry Truman’s Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Forces, argued that “the nation’s manpower cannot be used with maximum efficiency unless the armed services offer to all men in uniform equal opportunity to discover and exploit their capabilities.” Please discuss this rationale for the desegregation of the military. What was the impetus behind racial integration? What role did the uniform play in achieving this objective?

2. How were non-white “UN” soldiers positioned and imagined vis-à-vis white American soldiers?

3. How did Koreans understand racial relations, especially if the Korean War was the first exposure to and encounters with soldiers of color? How might the seemingly consolidated “whiteness” of Soviet and U.S. troops, for instance, operate alongside understandings of Black military personnel? What racial frameworks impacted recognition of or invisibility of Latinx (Chicano, Puerto Rican) and Latin American (Colombian) soldiers?

4. How does the racialization of Asian women operate alongside and through sexuality? What are the relationships between racialization and infantilization? How was the broader feminization of Asian men leveraged through different laboring subjects (houseboys and mascots)?

5. In what ways did the concepts of disability, debility, and race become entwined during and in the wake of the battle phase of the war? How did these medicalized concepts serve to make non-normative subjects and allow state-sanctioned violence?

6. How did the South Korean government’s classification of certain vulnerable populations as "disabled" during and after the Korean War contribute to the politicization of disability and the perpetuation of racial violence, for example, by conflating mixed-race with disability for export purposes?