It has its negative aspects, but even though I think Korea stresses its purity in blood (homogenity) beyond the bounds of reality (if you look at the history of the northern areas of Korea and the nomatic tribes of Manchuria), Korea is a more homogeneous society than we are used to in Europe or the US…

….and maybe that is why when you ask Koreans about racism in Korea, they say there is none.

I think they are ultimately wrong, but I have to admit that given the relative lack of ethnic diversity, they haven’t had the same level of problems Europe and Western societies have experienced.

So, I don’t think they have the same baggage when using the word race that especially Americans have when they start talking about race.

In short, when Koreans mention race, I barely raise an eyebrow, but if I hear some Americans talking about it, red flags get ready to wave….

(What about translating “racism” as ??쩌?징짹?째짢?쨀???쩌???…)

Do we really have to torture ourselves about using the word “race” when it comes to a Korean society that places so much emphasis on blood?

Like my students thinking it was weird I didn’t know my blood type? Or foreigners who get turned down for donating blood?

Or how about if I had a thousand won for every time I heard or read Koreans explaining how Korea is a “homogeneous” nation and that is one of their proudest claims to fame?

So, by the very definition Koreans are so fond of telling us, if you translated the word as “the Korean nation” you would be meaning the Korean “race” too…

It seems to me clear that they mean an ethnic group instead of a nation — which in our mind would be a heterogeneous mix of people — which is not what they have in mind.

Do we have to go to such lengths to protect Koreans by desensitizing the word for the non-Korean reader?

My wife would translate the word as “race”. She has a long story she will tell you about her college professor in tourism English reading an English guide book on Korea and how when he came to the spiel on the “homogenity” of the Korean people, he explained how he had a top notch student once, a student who had won the scholarship as the top student (just as my wife had) and how he disappointed him greatly when she asked him to speak at her wedding, because she was marrying a white guy (just as my wife had) and how he kept telling her “no” and he kept saying no because she was helping erase one of the proudest things for the Korean people — their homogenity.

I see no problem with translating the word as the Korean race. I think that is an honest translation of what Korea has in mind when it uses the word. Koreans as an ethnic group, not as simply a nation-state.

Doesn’t Korea want to give overseas ethnic Koreans voting rights?

We Americans are super duper hyper sensitive about any utterance that includes the word “race.” I think there’s nothing wrong with the term and nothing incorrect about translating minjok as race. The only risk you run by using that word is that many speakers of American English will cease to pay attention to what you’re saying.

I get that Americans think “race” is a subcategory of human and that “ethnic group”/”ethnicity” is a subcategory of race. That table of categorization is only a recent development, however, and anyone who has read their way through older material knows as much. Even now, do any internet search of “the jewish race,” “the scottish race,” “the french race,” or “the finnish race” and you’ll easily see that the word is also used to mean what Americans mean by ethnicity, and with innocent enough intentions.

If there weren’t any other options I’d insist on using the word race for minjok, but I think that for most contexts there are other options. After all, if even Antti doesn’t like the term, then it wouldn’t hurt to avoid it where possible.

I think I most often translate “Hanminjok” as “the Korean nation.” I imagine one reason I feel comfortable with that term is because I used to be a little familiar with a little bit of Native American tribal politics and recall that many tribes refer to themselves as “nations,” as in “Apache nation,” Canada officially calls its native tribal groups “first nations.” Your average younger American will at first think that “nation” means “state” (another confusing word for Americans, but as in something that has “statehood”), but in this case as well, anyone who has done enough reading outside their time and space knows that “nation” spoke first of ethnic, tribal, or other “sub-racial” group.

“The Korean people” would work in a lot of cases, but it could, depending on context, be taken to mean (for example) the South Korean public, and when I need to emphasize the Koreans as One Big Tribe (an in a manner of speaking they still are something like a large collection of thoroughly intertwined clans) I think I usually go with “Korean nation.” It might make me sound like the Old Testament, but if that’s the tone of the Korean text being translated, there’s usually little way around it.

While I’m at it, I should mention that it seems My Fellow Americans have a hard time understanding how nistorically many Koreans feel more alegience to the Korean nation (minjok) than they do to the Korean state/s (either of them, N or S), but the problem they have with this speaks more of the nature of the American state than anything else. Another reason why one is going to run into trouble just touching the subject.