(It's been a *very* long time since I've posted on this board, but because the S&G board is so dead and this topic hits close to home...)
I'm black, and grew up an Army brat. As such, I enjoyed living in some of the most diverse areas in the country despite their seeming unlikelihood, thanks to the military's proud (and ironic) tradition of being at the vanguard of multiculturalism in America. Who would've imagined that a town in central Texas would boast a population, 1/3rd of which were Korean-Americans?
The military presents a concise, yet very diverse sampling of pretty much every ethnicity, race, and creed there is in America. My neighbors were Puerto Rican, Samoan, and Filipino. My first girlfriend was Japanese-Korean, my sixth grade history teacher was Jewish, etc.
So, I grew up very close to Koreans, and relished the opportunity. I became a bit of a Koreaphile, teaching myself as much about their language and culture as I could, hoping to one day become fluent in Hanguk-mal.
However, once I left my delightful little military microcosm, I quickly learned that not all diverse communities are made equal. I moved to the East Coast, in an urban neighborhood with a large Korean and Black population. It was horrid; I was exposed to a level of racism I thought didn't exist anymore, I have never felt so categorically snubbed. Even though I was eager to live in this new environment with my Korean neighbors, willing to engage them *in their own language*, their complete and utter disdain for me as a black male was f-ing palpable.
There were some bright spots, to be sure, but they were disturbingly few and far between. The experience has left a very nasty taste in my mouth, I became extremely resentful, I even dropped my major from East Asian studies because I felt so betrayed (it didn't help that the stories of black travellers to Korea itself were uniformly worse, either).
It means that it is just his opinion and therefore not relevant unless he can show some proof of it. That's why I asked for a link.
You cannot possibly have such a bizarrely myopic view of U.S. history. A two-second Google search on "lending discrimination" provided:
http://www.huduser.org/publications/fairhsg/lending.html - What We Know About Mortgage Lending Discrimination in America, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
Recent Perspectives on African-Americans in Post-Industrial Labor Markets, by James B. Stewart, The American Economic Review © 1997
This isn't exactly a *shockingly new* idea that blacks suffered extensive economic discrimination throughout the last two centuries. Though not limited specifically to blacks, it's kinda why things like the Fair Housing Act were passed in the first place.
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