| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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The particularities of Korean ethnicity and nationality as portrayed in popular shows are in constant negotiations with the overarching frameworks of race and multiculturalism as they pertain to immigration and assimilation in the United States. While one can dismiss the stereotypical images on television as screenwriters’ and producers’ misrepresentations and oversimplifications of ethnicity and race, these images can also be interpreted as the litmus test for the kinds of images and representations that can be consumed by the mainstream public with little controversy. As Pierre Bourdieu (1999) contested in On Tele-vision, the media can demonstrate the society’s constructions of ethnicity and race and can abet in the reproduction of structural and systemic inequities.
Early studies on immigration assumed that the singular goal of all immigrants is to assimilate as quickly as possible into the mainstream socioeconomic structure and culture of the United States. In other words, the ultimate reason for immigrating to the United States was to become American. Robert Park and Ernest Bur-gess (1924) believed that, within a few generations, immigrants would be assimilated completely into the mainstream for the most part. As research (Alba, 1990; Waters, 1990) has demonstrated, this has been possible for immigrants of European descent, even for Southern and Eastern Europeans, who were not considered white until relatively recently (Ignatiev, 1995). However, stemming from the notion that mainstream indicates majority population and power and white, the assimilation process has been less successful for immigrants of color.
The discourse of assimilation is primarily a tem-poral concept, hinging on the assumption that the longer immigrants stay in the United States, the more assimilated or Americanized they will become. Also, this hypothesis assumes that even if the immigrants themselves were not able to assimilate in their lifetime, their children and their children’s children born on American soil would eventually become American without qualifying hyphenations. Racial diversity within the United States intersects with inequities in terms of ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, access, and opportunity to further complicate the possibility of complete structural assimilation of immigrants hailing from Asia, Africa, and South/Central America.