Ending the Korean War Teaching Initiative

Genealogy of the “Gook”: From Anti-Asian Racism to Solidarity Across U.S. Empire

Introduction

Korean Americans are weaned on an apocryphal tale around the term "gook.” When sighting U.S. soldiers, our ancestors excitedly shouted, “미국!” (me-gook or United States, lit. “beautiful country”) as a way of remarking the presence of American troops deployed to the Korean theater during the early 1950s. Yet in the context of asymmetrical war, the metonym that designated the foreigner was instead turned lethally against Koreans when GIs misunderstood “me” to mean what it does in English, namely, a reference to self, and “gook” to be a term for “Korean.” Scrambled in this way, with its intended sense lost in translation, the phrase was taken to mean “I am a gook” and on another level “Kill me and my kind without consequences.” Yet, as many people have pointed out, this apocryphal account obscures the slur’s “pan-racist past,” to borrow a phrase from David Roediger. “Gook” cannot be claimed, this is to say, by Koreans alone. Although its origins occasion some debate, with scholars recognizing that the term circulated in sites outside Asia, including the Caribbean, the slur traversed U.S. imperialist warfronts in Asia across the twentieth century, taking on new “life” in each theater of war as a term designating the killability of deindividualized Asian life. In this sense, it prompts us to reconsider how militarism and imperial war serve as the structural basis for anti-Asian racism. From the Philippine-American War to the Korean War to the Vietnam War, “gook” is part of a U.S. military-imperial lexicon, a vocabulary of psychological warfare, that conjoins peoples targeted by the U.S. war machine. Associated with women who followed U.S. forces—in Korean War parlance, “blanket squads”—the term arises in the context of the U.S. imperial war in the Philippines as a way of contemptuously referring to native peoples. The gendered and sexualized connotation arguably persists in the racialized violability that the term implies. By the time the slur’s itinerary reached Southeast Asia in the mid-twentieth century, its association with disposable Asian life was cemented. Yet even as this counterinsurgent term has served an undeniably lethal function, how does it perversely serve as the grounds for imagining solidarity across histories and geographies of imperialist war?