If two of the generations separating me from slavery had not been skipped, perhaps I would have grown up with a different attitude toward my racial background. My attitude was not based solely on what my father told me; it was also reinforced by the racism I experienced as a child in Alabama. When I became an adult, my mother tried to protect me by reminding me that racism would continually threaten my well-being. When I told her in 2009 that I was leaving the military, she shouted, “Are you out of your mind? Nobody is going to hire you. It’s bad enough you look Asian, but you’re also part black. Nobody is going to give a job to a black man who looks Asian.” My parents did not tell me lies. On the contrary, they told me their truth. They were describing life as they had experienced it and trying to protect me from the suffering they endured.
Interracial marriage did not become legal in all U.S. states until 1967, when the Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that laws banning interracial marriage were unconstitutional. Although interracial marriage was illegal in nearly all the southern states prior to 1967, white people were not the only ones opposed to it. Marrying when interracial marriage was still controversial in many parts of the country, my parents did not feel welcome in African American or Korean communities. Many Koreans did not like that my mother had married a black man, and many African Americans did not like that my father had married an Asian woman.
The fears we develop in childhood can dominate our behavior as adults. As an adult I tried to keep my racial background a secret, because my father said people would hate me if they discovered that a person who looks Asian is part black. Since I also felt alienated from the Korean, African American, and white communities—where many people saw interracial marriage as an abomination—I was afraid of how people would react if they knew I was a product of this abomination. I felt like I was carrying a horrible secret within me. Eventually I reached a point where I could not carry this secret any longer.
When people asked me about my racial background, I would lie by saying, “I am half Korean and half white.” But when I was a twenty-two-year-old army officer I decided to no longer keep my racial background a secret. When I began to tell people the truth that I was half Korean, a quarter white, and a quarter black, their responses surprised me in a way I never expected. Instead of being horrified, they seemed oddly pleased. One southerner I told responded by saying, “That’s a really cool mix.”
Responses like this shocked me at first, because it was difficult for me to believe that anyone could see my multiracial background as positive. But attitudes about race had in fact changed. According to a Gallup poll, in 1958 only 4 percent of Americans supported interracial marriage between blacks and whites, and by 2013, the amount of support had grown to 87 percent.1
Racism still exists in America today. I have experienced it firsthand and so have many other Americans from various racial backgrounds. Just because a black president was elected does not mean racism in America is dead. But if we have made progress on the issue of race, why can’t we make more progress? I have met some people who say African Americans are not any better off today than they were under slavery two hundred years ago. Whenever I hear this it reminds me of the pro-slavery and pro-segregation propaganda in the South that claimed black people were not treated badly and most slaves were happy being slaves.
To understand what state-sanctioned slavery truly was in America, a more accurate name for it would be state-sanctioned rape and murder upon a country’s own people. It was common for slave masters to rape slave women and murder rebellious slaves, and these crimes were tolerated by the legal system. Under the system of state-sanctioned slavery, an ordinary white person could murder a black person, admit to the murder without claiming self-defense, not even accuse the black person of committing a crime, and not be put on trial.
William Lloyd Garrison, an American white man born in 1805 who dedicated his life to ending slavery, tells us: “Let it never be forgotten, that no slaveholder or overseer can be convicted of any outrage perpetrated on the person of a slave, however diabolical it may be, on the testimony of colored witnesses, whether bond or free. By the slave code, they are adjudged to be as incompetent to testify against a white man … Hence, there is no legal protection in fact, whatever there may be in form, for the slave population; and any amount of cruelty may be inflicted on them with impunity. Is it possible for the human mind to conceive of a more horrible state of society?”2
Frederick Douglass, who was born in 1818 and rumored to be descended from his white master and a black slave, describes the complete lack of legal protection for slaves in the part of Maryland where he lived, and he debunks the myth that slaves were happy being slaves:
I speak advisedly when I say that in Talbot County, Maryland, killing a slave, or any colored person, was not treated as a crime, either by the courts or the community. Mr. Thomas Lanman, ship carpenter of St. Michaels, killed two slaves, one of whom he butchered with a hatchet by knocking out his brains. He used to boast of having committed the awful and bloody deed. I have heard him do so laughingly, declaring himself a benefactor of his country and that “when others would do as much as he had done, they would be rid of the damned niggers.”
Another notorious fact which I may here state was the murder of a young girl between fifteen and sixteen years of age, by her mistress, Mrs. Giles Hicks … This wicked woman, in the paroxysm of her wrath, not content with killing her victim, literally mangled her face and broke her breastbone … The offense for which this girl was thus hurried out of the world was this: she had been set that night, and several preceding nights, to mind Mrs. Hicks’s baby, and, having fallen into a sound sleep, the crying of the baby did not wake her, as it did its mother. The tardiness of the girl excited Mrs. Hicks, who, after calling several times, seized a piece of firewood from the fireplace and pounded in her skull and breastbone till death ensued. I will not say that this murder most foul produced no sensation. It did produce a sensation. A warrant was issued for the arrest of Mrs. Hicks, but incredible to tell, for some reason or other, that warrant was never served, and she not only escaped condign punishment, but the pain and mortification, as well, of being arraigned before a court of justice …
One of the commonest sayings to which my ears early became accustomed, was, that it was “worth but a half a cent to kill a nigger, and half a cent to bury one.” While I heard of numerous murders committed by slaveholders on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, I never knew a solitary instance where a slaveholder was either hung or imprisoned for having murdered a slave …
Slaves were expected to sing as well as to work. A silent slave was not liked, either by masters or overseers. “Make a noise there! Make a noise there!” and “bear a hand,” were words usually addressed to slaves when they were silent … It was a means of telling the overseer, in the distance, where they were and what they were about … The remark in the olden time was not unfrequently made, that slaves were the most contented and happy laborers in the world, and their dancing and singing were referred to in proof of this alleged fact; but it was a great mistake to suppose them happy because they sometimes made those joyful noises. The songs of the slaves represented their sorrows, rather than their joys. Like tears, they were a relief to aching hearts. It is not inconsistent with the constitution of the human mind that it avails itself of one and the same method for expressing opposite emotions. Sorrow and desolation have their songs, as well as joy and peace.3
Racism is still a problem in America today, but African Americans are no longer subjected to the full horror of state-sanctioned slavery, which denied slaves basic education (it was illegal to teach slaves to read and write) and gave them no legal protection against being beaten, murdered, raped, worked relentlessly without pay, bought and sold as property, and stolen from their mothers as infants. If someone looked white but inherited a small amount of African American blood from an ancestor, that person could also inherit the status of a slave and be denied basic education and any legal protection against being raped and murdered.
For example, if a boy’s father was white and his mother was a biracial slave, he could be treated as a slave even though most of his blood was European. Frederick Douglass said a man “could sell his own child without incurring reproach, if