L.A. Uprising/Saigu

In this article, journalist Christian Parenti offers an account of Operation Weed and Seed as “classic counterinsurgency, and racist to the core,” a Department of Justice operational plan that targets “Black and Latino youth as the enemy”—i.e., “‘weeds’ in need of eradication.” He describes how the geostrategic reterritorialization of areas like South Central and other urban areas with high rates of racialized unemployment as “enterprise zones” must in fact be understood as the intensified extension of the police state to and the authorization of naked force on already heavily policed communities of color.

In this excerpt from a chapter in Blue Dreams, anthropologist Nancy Abelmann and sociologist John Lie expose a little-known fact about post-1965 Korean immigration to the United States: namely, a significant number of Korean immigrant shopkeepers in South Los Angeles had fought in the Vietnam War alongside U.S. forces. Indeed, many of these men immigrated to the United States directly from the Vietnamese theater of war.

In this book, Angie Y. Chung provides a nuanced analysis of contemporary activism, politics, and community-based organizing among Korean Americans after 1992. In chapter 4, Chung examines Saigu (the event itself, as well as the community organizing that emerged in its aftermath) as significantly influenced by U.S.–Korean relations and events, such as the 1980 Gwangju Uprising and growing protests of the U.S. military presence in South Korea, as well as the Bush administration’s hostile rhetoric toward North Korea.

In this book, Claire Jean Kim challenges conventional framings regarding Black–Korean conflicts, including notions of racial scapegoating and the “irrational venting of Black rage” on Korean immigrants. Drawing on the 1990 Red Apple boycott in Brooklyn as her primary study (in which Haitian and Black nationalist activists organized boycotts against two Korean-owned produce stores), Kim focuses on the larger system of white supremacy, capitalism, and power relations that produce racialized orders (what she coins “racial triangulation”). In chapters 1, 2, and 5, Kim examines the ways in which stereotypes like the model minority—which applies to Korean immigrant entrepreneurs in specific ways (as hardworking immigrants longing for middle-class security)—are shaped by entrenched histories of U.S. racialized violence, including war-making in and the militarization of the Korean peninsula.

In this interactive documentary, Lee gestures to the larger historical context of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, including urban deindustrialization, police brutality and the militarization of the LAPD, the influence of the minjung movement on immigrant labor organizing in Los Angeles, and the history of Korean immigration as shaped by U.S. intervention. While footage of Saigu and other audiovisual materials (for example, more recent interviews with witnesses of Saigu) are indexed for viewers, the documentary itself does not offer a single coherent narrative, nor does it offer a talking head to guide viewers. Rather, viewers must sift through footage and interview clips to juxtapose different narratives of Saigu—which shatters any notion of Saigu as simply resulting from Black and Korean tensions.

In her poem “Sa-I-Gu,” Ishle Park notes that Koreans mark disaster with numbers, here alluding not just to Saigu (or 4.29) but also 5.18 (the 1980 Gwangju Uprising and massacre) and 6.25 (the supposed start of the Korean War). Viewing the destruction of South Central from “mile-high” cameras, hovering media helicopters, as her poem recalls, dubbed the destruction below “the war between blacks and Koreans,” an account shrouded in “white silence.”

Commenting approvingly on a fellow YouTuber’s video of armed Korean immigrant merchants atop their swap meets and places of business during the 1992 L.A. uprising, an ex-marine, who was once stationed in South Korea, describes “rooftop Koreans” as having “mystique” in the “gun world.” According to him, they exemplify America’s core ideal of having the right “to have your own business and being able to defend it.” The contagion of misinformation is transmitted from the narrator in the original video to the ex-marine. The original narrator describes the armed merchants as escapees from North Korea who, as “voluntold soldiers[,] . . . knew how to fight”—disregarding the fact that many of the immigrant store-owners were Vietnam War veterans deployed by South Korea to fight alongside U.S. forces. This misprision then serves as the foundation for the ex-marine’s projection onto the blank canvas of the “rooftop Koreans” the “American dream,” which can only be safeguarded by gun violence. Transformed in this way into a fanatical Second Amendment meme, armed Korean merchants are lauded for “battletrack[ing]” “looters” and “rioters” in a domestic war.