This is an excerpt from a paper I did which outlined the beginnings of Europe's mistreatment of Africans, touching on English pre-contact conceptions of blackness, and later, European colonial powers' (largely English) treatment of Africans, who embodied what blackness represented. Korea's case is less clear-cut and different in many ways (e.g. the influence of the American media was not a factor in pre-colonial England), but that's where the fun lies, right? In academic terms, this is a stone that's been left unturned. An understanding of Korea's racial conceptions of self as a nation/race, along with popular conceptions of darkness and skin tone (this should prove to be useful towards an understanding of other Asian immingrant groups' racialization in the West) would provide a clearer conceptual model of how a culture's ingrained cultural prejudices can manifest themselves in actuality, determining the manner in which that group will position itself in relation to other racial groups in America.
English prejudice towards Africans was present from the first contact with the "dark continent" in the middle 1500s, and was to be expected, given the especially ethnocentric nature of the English. As Winthrop Jordan clearly points out, the fact that Africans were described as black would prove significant: "In England, perhaps more than in Southern Europe, the concept of blackness was loaded with intense meaning. Long before they found that some men were black, Englishmen found in the idea of blackness a way of expressing their most ingrained values."[1] By this Jordan means that white was attributed to the English themselves, with its connotations of goodness and light. When these "emotionally partisan" colors were applied to people, within the dichotomy of black and white lay an implicit comparison of all that was base and evil ("black" people) with all that was whole and pure ("white" people). It is significant that at the time of first contact with Africa, the conception of ideal beauty was a complexion of rose and white. "Negroes seemed the very picture of perverse negation."[2] A major element in English ethnocentrism was the factor of religion (Protestantism), which played an integral role in English culture. The view of all non-Christians as heathens is inherently ethnocentric, and was held by most Christians for centuries. This was especially true for the English during the time of Queen Elizabeth's Protestant reforms and England's struggle against Spain. This ethnocentrism was an inseparable part of English identity, as Protestantism was an inseparable element of English patriotism. According to Jordan, "Heathenism was treated not so much as a specifically religious defect, but as one manifestation of a general...failure to be English or civilized."[3] Skin tone was arguably the deciding factor which might explain Europeans' eventual differential treatment of Native Americans and Africans (despite the fact that English and Spanish contact with the two groups occurred in quite different contexts, the end result, black slavery, was very similar). Indians were for a long time viewed by the English as heathen savages to be civilized, while Africans were considered far away from the English in terms of social distance as well as skin color. As Professor Wood points out, not only were they heathens, but they were black ones to boot.[4] Whatever the case, the first Africans in the colonies did not enter into a prejudicial vacuum, for the English of the Old World undoubtedly held predispositions against Africans, and it is reasonable to assume that these were present in the British colonies in the New World as well. The English had strong preconceived notions of black people which would eventually serve to make the African a prime candidate for eventual enslavement.
Jordan, Winthrop. "First Impressions: Libidinous Blacks," in From Different Shores . Ronald Takaki, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 43-54
[1]From Different Shores, pp. 43-44
[2]From Different Shores, pp. 44
[3]From Different Shores, pp. 47
[4]lecture, 11-3-92