RACE/WAR/EMPIRE: THE KOREAN WAR AS RACIAL PROJECT
Held out as a civil rights triumph, the Korean War has been retrieved as a turning point in U.S. history in securing race its rights. Pointing to the desegregation of U.S. forces on the battlefields of Korea in a July 27, 2013 speech commemorating the war, President Barack Obama stated, “If these Americans could live and work together over there, surely we could do the same thing here at home.” Yet what unfailingly goes unmentioned in these celebratory accounts of the Korean War as the catalyst for the dismantling of Jim Crow is its astonishingly illiberal death toll. In a war in which the United States ruled the skies, raining down fire and fury from above, four million Koreans, the vast majority civilian, were killed. In what sense can an imperial war that wreaked such indiscriminate ruination be understood as a post-racializing milestone? How, moreover, can understanding how the logic of race was getting flexibly recoded in order to serve the imperatives of empire enable us to understand U.S. militarism not as an engine of democratic opportunity or democratization around the globe but as structurally racist? In this module, we consider the Korean War as an racial project, one in which the lethality of race, war, and empire was framed not as world-destroying but as democratizing in its effects.
Introduction
Keywords
Racial capitalism
Militarized multiculturalism/racial liberalism
Racial soldiering
Target
White supremacy
Orientalism
Anticommunism
“Enemy within”
Subimperialism
Settler militarism
De-indigenization
Biopolitical excess
War trash
Executive Order 9981
Questions
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore has critically redefined racism as the “state-sponsored or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” Discuss Gilmore’s definition of racism in application to the Korean War. How is race, for example, operationalized in the expansion of what war planners referred to as an “area target”?
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Can the industrialized structure that allowed for mass death in Korea be understood as liberal? Are there other terms that better capture the politics of the U.S. war machine? Please explain your answer.
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How can anticommunism be understood as racism? How does political difference differentiate those permitted to live or die under U.S. imperialism?
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Throughout much of its history, South Korea produced propaganda depicting North Korea and communism as grotesque inhuman monsters. What does it mean to visualize an ideology and a political belief as monstrous?
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Why does communism in an era of global decolonization get racialized?
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In televised testimony, one of the U.S. POWs who chose to stay in China, stated, “I am Clarence Cecil Adams of Memphis, Tennessee. My family and millions of other Negroes plus myself have suffered under the brutal attacks of white supremacy and the cruel slave laws of the southern states. These are the reasons why I can’t be happily living with my family.” This statement was framed as the brainwashed remarks of a turncoat. Even as they may read as scripted, are Adams’s words dismissable as mere propaganda? Why or why not?
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The National Parks Service painstakingly breaks down the racial makeup of the nineteen seven-foot tall steel statues that are part of the Korean War Veterans Memorial, erected in 1995, on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Permanently on patrol, twelve are identified as “Caucasian,” three as “African American,” two as “Hispanic,” one as “Asian-American,” and one as “Native American.” Why do you think this U.S. federal agency was so keen to convey the multiculturalism of its fighting forces in Korea? What message does the memorial attempt to make about a genocidal war in which an estimated four million Koreans were killed?
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To what extent did Executive Order 9981 truly advance racial justice, and how did it contribute to the military’s role in shaping postwar racial liberalism and its contradictions?
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How are the racial legacies of the Korean War translated to and refashioned through different militarized geopolitical contexts–for example, through South Korean participation in the Vietnam War, or the recruitment of Filipina women into camptown industries?
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On the sixtieth anniversary of the Korean War armistice, President Barack Obama, in his commemorative remarks, sought to extract lessons from the war. Please discuss these two “lessons” of the Korean War in conjunction with each other:
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“Korea taught us that, as a people, we are stronger when we stand as one. On President Truman’s orders, our troops served together in integrated units. And the heroism of African Americans in Korea–and Latinos and Asian Americans and Native Americans–advanced the idea: If these Americans could live and work together over there, surely we could do the same thing here at home.”
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“[O]ur allies and adversaries must know the United States of America will maintain the strongest military the world has ever known, bar none, always. That is what we do.”
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How do the processes of militarization and settler colonialism work in tandem to perpetuate empire? How does settler militarism rely on and reproduce itself through racialized and gendered logics?
Study Materials
[Book chapter] Chow, Rey, “The Age of the World Target: Atomic Bombs, Alterity, Area Studies,” The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 25-44.
Rey Chow argues that the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was an epistemically transformative event that exposed the links between war, racism, and knowledge production. Tracing the relationship between seeing and war, Chow argues that the aerial bombing transformed seeing into an act inextricable from militarized destruction. War after the atomic bomb, as Chow contends, would become increasingly wars of perception between “partners who occupy relative, but always mutually implicated, positions” in their practices of casting as racialized and terrorizing an enemy other. These epistemological effects have also taken the shape of academic disciplines–namely U.S. area studies, the origins of which lie in Cold War military imperatives. By casting entire areas as regions to be studied, “regions took on the significance of target fields—fields of information retrieval and dissemination that were necessary for the perpetuation of the United States’ political and ideological hegemony.” By casting entire areas as regions to be studied, “regions took on the significance of target fields—fields of information retrieval and dissemination that were necessary for the perpetuation of the United States’ political and ideological hegemony.”
[Book excerpt] Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, “Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography,” Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (London: Verso, 2022), 15-24.
Gilmore traces the expansion of the post-World War II U.S. warfare state–one ruled by the Pentagon that deploys militarized violence in overseas wars and against its own citizenry–as rooted in the originary gendered and racialized violence of the United States. Reflecting on how the New Deal “welfare state” became entangled with the “warfare state,” Gilmore argues that economic crises produced by capitalism’s drive for accumulation across the long twentieth century were not only disproportionately borne by but also blamed on gendered and racialized populations, from Japanese Americans in concentration camps to Black and brown incarcerated people in deindustrialized metropolises across the United States. Arguing for the necessity of centering race as an analytic category to understand the relationship between power and territory, Gilmore gestures to how a “geographical imperative lies at the heart of every struggle for social justice: if justice is embodied, it is then therefore always spatial, which is to say, part of a process of making a place.”
[Book chapter] Park, Josephine Nock-Hee, Introduction, Cold War Friendships: Korea, Vietnam, and Asian American Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 2016), 1-22.
Park explores how Asian American literature provides a genealogy of Asian American racial forms tied to the Cold War. Examining the literature of the Korean and Vietnam Wars, from Richard Kim’s The Martyred to Andrew Pham’s Catfish and Mandala, Park underscores Asian America as a “wartime creation,” focusing on a figure that reemerges across these war texts, whom she terms the Asian “friendly”: those who might have been on the receiving end of American Cold War humanitarianism and inclusion. As an ally who is neither quite a friend of the United States, given that the friendly is a dependent, nor an enemy, the “friendly” signals what Park calls a “crisis of representation” within the binary terms of the Cold War, which Park treats not only as a purely territorial or ideological conflict but as a problem of narration, producing social and literary effects that are inscribed onto the racialized Asian body.
[Book chapters] Cheng, Sealing, Introduction and “‘Foreign’ and ‘Fallen’ in South Korea,” On the Move for Love: Migrant Entertainers and the U.S. Military in South Korea (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 1-14, 50-73.
Beginning in the late 1990s, the composition of women working in U.S. military camptown clubs in South Korea shifted from Korean women to foreign migrant women from the Philippines and the former Soviet Union, including Ukraine and Russia. Cheng’s ethnography focuses on Filipina women whose entry into the camptown entertainment industry indexes the triangulation of the United States, South Korea, and the Philippines. Examining the racialized South Korean legal, economic, and social apparatuses that produce migrant Filipinas as “bad women” in need of policing and discipline, and as disposable workers, Cheng also highlights the role of NGOs in reproducing masculinist ideas about migrant entertainers as “victims of sex trafficking” in need of recuperation. Attending to migrant entertainers as “global actors who pursue desires and dreams shaped by the globalization of modernity,” Cheng centers not only as the objects of transnational flows of capital and labor but also as subjects, whose own “capacity to aspire, their will to change, and their dreams to flight” reshape the meanings of such flows.
[Book chapter] Han, Benjamin, “Narratives of Exchange: Asian/American Performers after the Korean War,” Beyond the Black and White TV: Asian and Latin American Spectacle in Cold War America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2020), 43-73.
In Beyond the Black and White TV, Benjamin Han examines the ideological role of the televised variety show in the Cold War in three significant junctures: the Korean War in 1950, the 1959 Cuban Revolution, and the incorporation of occupied Hawaiʻi as a U.S. state that same year. Han argues that the variety show operated as a vehicle for promoting the United States as the world’s premier example of racial equality and democracy even as these fictions fell under duress during the civil rights movement and in Soviet critiques of American racism. In this chapter of the book, Han focuses on the Kim Sisters, a Korean singing group who began their careers in nightclubs performing to audiences of U.S. soldiers stationed in South Korea, as an example of “ethnic spectacle” located in and performed by Asian and Latin American bodies that were broadcast on global television. Speaking to both the “self-Orientalization” of the Kim Sisters in their performance of Koreanness–for example, through dress–as well as their enactment of a “subversive pleasure” that enabled the group to break through in a white entertainment industry, Han highlights how the Kim Sisters’ success in the United States became a tool of Cold War cultural diplomacy between the United States and South Korea.
[Book chapter] Kim, Dong-Choon, “The War Against the ‘Enemy Within’: Hidden Massacres in the Early Stages of the Korean War,” in Gi-Wook Shin et al. eds., Rethinking Historical Injustice and Reconciliation in Northeast Asia (London: Routledge, 2006), 75-93.
Kim Dong-Choon examines how wartime regimes not only identify external threats but also construct an “enemy within” to consolidate power and justify internal purges. He argues that during the Korean War, the South Korean state actively positioned civilians, leftists, and even politically neutral individuals as potential subversives, thereby justifying their constant surveillance or outright elimination. In this intensely polarized political landscape, the state imposed a rigid binary, demanding absolute loyalty while casting those accused of communist sympathies as existential threats to national survival. Kim underscores that this anticommunist logic was not merely a reactionary wartime measure but a structural mechanism of governance, where mass executions functioned as political purification, reinforcing state legitimacy through the physical elimination of ideological ambiguity. Challenging conventional narratives that frame these massacres as the chaotic byproducts of war, Kim argues that this violence was neither incidental nor exceptional but integral to South Korea’s postcolonial state formation. He critiques the prevailing historiographical silence that continues to obscure the scale and intent behind these killings, revealing how Cold War frameworks have shaped both official memory and justice efforts. Moreover, by situating these internal purges within the broader patterns of U.S.-backed counterinsurgency during the Cold War, Kim reveals how the Korean War’s internal violence was part of a transnational logic of militarized state-building. He ultimately reframes the war as a process of state consolidation through mass violence, where the elimination of internal enemies was essential to securing political order in Cold War South Korea.
[Book chapter] Klein, Christina, "Introduction," Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 1–18.
Christina Klein explores how U.S. popular culture shaped public perceptions of Asia during the early Cold War, constructing narratives that legitimized American military intervention while masking imperial power under the guise of benevolence. She introduces the concept of “Cold War Orientalism” to describe how films, literature, and mass media did not merely reflect geopolitical realities but actively worked to reconcile U.S. military and economic expansion with an ethos of modernization, sentimental internationalism, and cultural uplift. This ideological formation mobilized empathy and intimacy as tools of imperial governance, positioning U.S. influence in Asia as a benevolent civilizing force rather than a continuation of colonial domination. Klein highlights how this framework operated within strict racial and gendered hierarchies, portraying certain Asian nations—such as South Korea and Japan—as worthy of U.S. guidance while marking others, like communist China and North Korea, as irredeemable threats. She also examines how Cold War orientalism functioned as a form of soft power, producing a sense of cultural intimacy that obscured the coercive dimensions of U.S. empire. By linking these cultural narratives to the broader infrastructure of U.S. hegemony, Klein reveals how middlebrow representations of Asia were not only central to shaping American perceptions but also instrumental in legitimizing U.S. military presence, development projects, and geopolitical realignments.
[Book chapter] Nebolon, Juliet, Introduction, Settler Militarism: World War II in Hawaiʻi and the Making of U.S. Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2024), 1-19.
Examining the World War II period in Hawai‘i, which constitutes the longest period of martial law in U.S. history, Juliet Nebolon examines the operations of what she terms “settler militarism,” or the convergent operations of settler colonialism and militarization through their twinned demands for land acquisition and replacement of Indigenous peoples. As a dual “home front,” or settler colony that was included into the U.S. national formation, and as a “war front,” or a military outpost during U.S. operations in the so-called Pacific Theater, Hawai‘i provides a lens into understanding the ways that settler colonialism and the normalization of military logics and infrastructural buildup abet one another. This collaboration occurs not only during the time of martial law, which is often exceptionalized as a violent aberration, but rests on co-constitutive cultural and legal, and always racialized and gendered, processes that structure the longer history of U.S. imperialism, which extends beyond the shoring up of defense industries into the biopolitical management of land, life, and labor. Though Settler Militarism focuses on Hawai‘i, Nebolon points out how the settler colonization of the Pacific through the U.S. empire of military bases is the precondition for the U.S. military occupation of places like Korea.
[Article] Kim, Hosu and Grace M. Cho. “The Kinship of Violence.” Mothering in East Asian Communities: Politics and Practices (Ontario: Demeter Press, 2014): 31-52.
Hosu Kim and Grace Cho situate the figure of the “war orphan” not simply as a child who has lost their parents, but as a structural category produced by the material violence enacted by US militarism and South Korean nationalism that coalesce in the space of the military camptown. Focusing on biracial children and their Korean mothers, the authors examine how such children posed a challenge to the anticommunist foundation of the South Korean nation while the transnational adoption industry that burgeoned around their export shored up US cold war humanitarianism; as well as how the foundational violence of the transnational postwar adoption industry “created new ties across different groups of people who were born of the dark history of war.” Through the figure of the war orphan, the authors illustrate the Korean War to be a biopolitical war, producing categories of those in need of disavowal or rescue: “dead parents, living parents made socially dead, birth mothers seeking reunification on television, birth mothers who were never allowed any airtime because of their degraded social status, and American GI fathers who were not held accountable for the children they fathered in Korea.”
[Article] Attewell, Wesley, “Empire, redux: Towards a new political geography of race war,” Progress in Human Geography 48, no. 6 (2024): 826-842.
In “Empire, redux,” Wesley Attewell addresses how the field of political geography, with its focus on questions of empire, has fallen short on matters of race. Centering race is crucial, Attewell argues, to understanding empire as a “multi-scalar project that unsettles the neat conceptual divides between the foreign and the domestic, the intimate and the global.” Acknowledging the U.S.-centrism of the literature he reviews, Attewell revisits the foundational work of geographers like Neil Smith and the genealogy of feminist geography, pointing how out though though these bodies of work have made important contributions to thinking about the intersection of empire and place-making and shifting the scale of geography from geopolitics to the body and intimate relations, their methodologies have nevertheless precluded more nuanced understandings of how the “foreign” and “domestic” intersect in their shared inheritance of US “race war.” Taking up works of Black and Indigenous geography like the scholarship of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Osisanmi Burton, and Lisa Bhungalia, Attewell bridges geography and American studies and critical ethnic studies, illustrating how such interdisciplinary traversal is not only necessary for understanding empire’s operations but also pathways for its unmaking.
[Article] Kim, Joo Ok, “Sleuth Cities: East L.A., Seoul, and Military Mysteries in Martin Limón’s Slicky Boys and The Wandering Ghost,” Journal of Asian American Studies 17:2 (2014): 199-228.
Joo Ok Kim examines how military mystery fiction serves as a critical lens for understanding the racialized and militarized geographies of U.S. empire. Through an analysis of Martin Limón’s Slicky Boys and The Wandering Ghost, she introduces the concept of “sleuth cities” to theorize how East L.A. and U.S. military districts in South Korea, such as Itaewon and Tongduchon, function as interconnected sites of racial formation, surveillance, and imperial governance. These spaces, shaped by Cold War militarization and the racial logics of U.S. state power, reveal how domestic policing and overseas military occupation operate through parallel systems of control. By centering the Chicano military detective George Sueño, Limón’s novels complicate noir traditions that have historically relied on Orientalist tropes, exposing both the transpacific circuits of U.S. empire and the contradictions within racialized military service. Kim further examines the gendered dimensions of militarization, particularly how The Wandering Ghost foregrounds the systemic sexual violence embedded in military infrastructures and the precarious position of women within these spaces. By theorizing the literary Asian-Latino Pacific as a framework that reveals the shared racial formations shaped by U.S. militarism, Kim demonstrates how Limón’s military mystery fiction both critiques white supremacy and U.S. imperial governance while remaining entangled in the very logics of heteronormative masculinity and military power that it seeks to interrogate.
[Novel] Morrison, Toni, Home (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012)
Toni Morrison’s novel Home narrates the story of Frank Money––an African American veteran of the Korean War––who struggles to reenter segregated U.S. society after serving in a recently integrated U.S. military. Suffering from the trauma of killing a young Korean girl for sexually arousing him, Frank travels to the South to rescue his sister, Cee, who is being used as a test subject by a eugenicist white supremacist southern doctor. Interspersed with flashbacks both from his past in the American South and in Korea, the novel draws connections between U.S. imperial military violence overseas and the racial violence within the borders of the United States. Moreover, through the figures of Cee and the young Korean girl, Home highlights the gendered racial logic that undergirds and is perpetuated by U.S. imperial militarism by revealing how the Korean War was a laboratory for new U.S. military technologies and tactics, the products of U.S. scientific knowledge. By foregrounding the importance of the Korean War in relation to the long durée of U.S racial capitalism and imperialism, Morrison’s novel shows the unending nature of the Korean War, as a war “we’re still fighting” in Korea, as well as within the United States.
[Film] Fuller, Samuel, dir. The Steel Helmet (1951), 85 min.
Samuel Fuller’s film The Steel Helmet (1951) plunges viewers into the brutal realities of the Korean War and the pervasiveness of racism within the supposedly racially integrated ranks of the U.S. Army. Centering the protagonist Sergeant Zack, the plot unfolds as he links up with a diverse group of soldiers, including a Black medic, Corporal Thompson, a Japanese American Sergeant, Tanaka, and a Korean child mascot, Short Round. Woven into this narrative of combat is a critical examination of race relations. Short Round embodies the racial contradictions of U.S. militarism in Asia, positioned as both war victim and recipient of U.S. military humanitarianism. His attachment to Sergeant Zack and eager assimilation into U.S. militarism naturalizes Cold War paternalism, legitimizing U.S. military intervention as benevolent and necessary. Thompson and Tanaka both face prejudice and discrimination, and their subjection to racial slurs and differential treatment from their fellow soldiers underscore the pervasive racism that existed within the armed forces despite the official policy of integration. Even as wartime experiences are shared by soldiers within the Korean War context, they are different for minority soldiers, and the film subtly explores the complex dynamics of race and power and the hypocrisy of fighting for freedom abroad while continuing structural discrimination of racial minorities at home. Tanaka’s presence, for instance, serves as an acute reminder of the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, a topic that was still a sensitive and largely unspoken issue at the time of film’s release. As the patrol pushes forward, the film raises further questions about assimilation, belonging, and dehumanization of the enemy. In the climax, Zack faces a stark moral dilemma: executing a captured North Korean officer. By portraying both Zach and the North Korean officer as neither heroic or villainous, the film connects Zack’s personal moral struggle to the broader ethical problem of warfare, which frequently dehumanizes the enemy into expendable targets. By providing a raw and unflinching portrayal of war, The Steel Helmet provides a critical examination of race relations within the U.S. military and prejudices of American society at large.
[Documentary] Wang, Shui-Bo, dir. They Chose China (2005), 52 min.
Following the story of 21 U.S. soldiers who chose to remain in China after the 1953 Korean War ceasefire, a decision that took much of the American public by surprise, They Chose China charts the evolution of US dialogue around prisoners of war emerging in the 1950s. Challenging the United States’s self-positioning as the world’s foremost defender of democracy, the film explores how both Black and white non-repatriates cited U.S. racism and McCarthyism as reasons for their decision, in addition to humane treatment by their Chinese captors whom they referred to as “teachers.” Viewed as politically suspect on their return to the United States, these former POWs were not treated as war heroes, but approached as possibly brainwashed, communist liabilities. By juxtaposing archival footage with contemporary interviews with former POW camp officers and translators, as well as reflections from those who returned to the United States, They Chose China reflects on the promises and challenges of the postwar moment as they were enacted and lived by those who sought a different pathway forward, however fraught.
[Speech] Obama, Barack, “Heroes Remembered: Remarks by the President at 60th Anniversary of Korean War Armistice,” July 27, 2013.
Delivered before an audience of U.S. Korean War veterans and members of the neoconservative Park Geun-Hye government, President Barack Obama’s “Heroes Remembered” speech offers a post-racializing narrative of American military heroism that obscures the violence of empire. The valorization of U.S. veterans of color rehearses a historical pattern in which racialized subjects have been required to prove their Americanness through military service. Celebration of racial diversity in the armed forces elides the contradictions of this inclusion. Black soldiers fought in Korea while facing Jim Crow segregation back home, while Asian American soldiers included Nisei veterans, whose families were incarcerated in U.S. concentration camps only a few years prior to the outbreak of the Korean War. The speech’s racial optics–given by a Black president who represents the promises of post-racial America–mask the ways in which race and empire are co-constitutive markers of what Lisa Yoneyama calls “imperial amnesia,” in which U.S. commemorations of war erase the racialized subjects who bear its costs.
[Primary Source Document] “Executive Order 9981,” July 26, 1948, Record Group 11: General Records of the United States Government, Series: Executive Orders, US National Archives and Records Administration, College Park
Signed by President Harry Truman on July 26, 1948, Executive Order 9981 sought to formally dismantle racial segregation in the U.S. military by declaring that all service members should receive equal treatment and opportunities regardless of race, color, religion, or national origin. While the Korean War is often seen as a watershed moment for civil rights, efforts to integrate the armed forces met significant resistance from the predominantly white military leadership, particularly in the war’s early years (1950–51). The integration of the military did not fundamentally challenge U.S. imperialism or the racialized violence it perpetuated. Instead, it allowed for a more racially diverse military force to be deployed in subsequent wars, such as the Vietnam War, that often reinforced racial hierarchies globally. The U.S. imperialist war and embrace of “diversity” in its military ranks served a strategic function, where military service became both a site and mechanism through which the United States rebranded itself as a multicultural force for democratization around the world.
