Segregation, Integration, and Death: Evidence from the Korean War

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Connor Huff ◽  
Robert Schub
Keyword(s):  
Korean War ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Quantitative Evidence ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Us Military ◽  
Level Data ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Micro Level ◽  
Military Units ◽  
Null Finding

Abstract How does the design of military institutions affect who bears the costs of war? We answer this question by studying the transformative shift from segregated to integrated US military units during the Korean War. Combining new micro-level data on combat fatalities with archival data on the deployment and racial composition of military battalions, we show that Black and white soldiers died at similar rates under segregation. Qualitative and quantitative evidence provides one potential explanation for this counterintuitive null finding: acute battlefield concerns necessitated deploying military units wherever soldiers were needed, regardless of their race. We next argue that the mid-war racial integration of units, which tied the fates of soldiers more closely together, should not alter the relative fatality rates. The evidence is consistent with this expectation. Finally, while aggregate fatality rates were equal across races, segregation enabled short-term casualty discrepancies. Under segregation there were high casualty periods for white units followed by high casualty periods for Black units. Integration eliminated this variability. This research note highlights how enshrining segregationist policies within militaries creates permissive conditions for either commanders' choices, or the dictates and variability of conflict, to shape who bears war's costs.

The Parallax Shift

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Prados
Keyword(s):  
Korean War ◽  
Military Doctrine ◽  
Special Forces ◽  
Potential Conflict ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Near Term

Special Forces materialized during a period when US military doctrine was actually least favorable to their creation. Under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who entered office near the end of the Korean War, the military’s emphasis shifted from preparing its forces for near-term potential conflict...

Repairing Police Action after the Korean War in Toni Morrison’s Home

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (137) ◽  
pp. 119-140
Author(s):  
A. J. Yumi Lee
Keyword(s):  
Community Care ◽  
Korean War ◽  
Military Intervention ◽  
Transformative Justice ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Police Action ◽  
History Of ◽  
Prison Abolition ◽  
Fictional Story

Abstract Narrating the fictional story of an African American veteran of the desegregated Korean War, Toni Morrison’s 2012 novel Home links the violence of US military “police action” in Korea to the long history of police violence at home. This article argues that Home’s critical portrayal of the Korean War punctures two enduring 1950s myths: the myth of a peaceful domestic “color-blind” society and the myth of heroic US military intervention abroad. The article reads Home as an allegory that invites readers to imagine forms of justice outside of a policing framework, both globally and domestically, through its narrative of repairing trauma and harm through community care rather than punishment or retribution. This reading shows that Morrison’s rewriting of the 1950s in Home places the contemporary idioms of police and prison abolition and transformative justice in a broader historical and global imaginative frame.

(Re)mapping the Yanggongju and the Camptown in Shin Sang-ok's Hellflower

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 43-66
Author(s):  
Laura Ha Reizman
Keyword(s):  
Korean Peninsula ◽  
Korean War ◽  
The South ◽  
Military Dictatorship ◽  
New Era ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Love Triangle

The Korean War (1950–53) changed the material and affective landscape of the Korean peninsula and ushered in a new era ruled by a military dictatorship dependent on US military power. With bases dotting the South Korean peninsula, former agricultural villages became camptowns that catered to the needs of American soldiers. This article focuses on the South Korean melodrama Chiokhwa (Hellflower, 1958), directed by Shin Sang-ok, which narrates a love triangle between two brothers and Sonya, a camptown prostitute or yanggongju. It examines the role of the postwar environment in constructing the spaces of the subject. Using the yanggongju figure as a technology of postwar memory, this work reevaluates the ecology of ruination left in the wake of the Korean War—as portrayed through Sonya, scenes of the city, the camptown, the base, and the surrounding fields and marshes—to explore the sense of loss and displacement of this period.

Korea

2018 ◽  
pp. 151-182
Author(s):  
Paul J. Heer
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Korean War ◽  
Military Intervention ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Korean War

This chapter chronicles and assesses Kennan’s role in policy deliberations following the outbreak of the Korean War. It examines the inconsistency between his support for US military intervention—on behalf of US credibility and prestige—and his prior dismissal of Korea’s strategic importance. It highlights his warnings against US military intervention by General MacArthur north of the 38th Parallel, and his role in dealing with the disastrous consequences that followed that intervention. The chapter characterizes Kennan’s growing disillusionment with his marginalization in policymaking under Acheson, and with the overall direction of US policy toward East Asia in the wake of the war crisis.

The Racial Borderlands of the Korean War

2020 ◽  
pp. 203-240
Author(s):  
Daniel Y. Kim
Keyword(s):  
Mexican Americans ◽  
Korean War ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Writers Of Color ◽  
War Novels ◽  
Us Imperialism ◽  
Detention Centers ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Korean War

This chapter brings together an array of Korean War novels, authored by US writers of color, to engage in a counterhegemonic project of cultural memory that explores the conflict’s significance for African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Asian Americans: Toni Morrison’s Home, Rolando Hinojosa’s trilogy of works set during the conflict (Korean Love Songs, Rites and Witnesses, and The Useless Servants), and Ha Jin’s War Trash. These works critique the mistreatment of US soldiers of color and Chinese combatants by those in command. Morrison’s and Hinojosa’s novels emphasize the racism that persisted within the newly integrated US military, and Jin’s highlights the plight of prisoners of war in US-administered detention centers. These novels also highlight, however, nonwhite soldiers—including African American and Chicano servicemen—who committed atrocities during the conflict. Hinojosa’s and Jin’s writings, moreover, contextualize the war in a wider and longer set of historical trajectories: the former suggests a connection between US imperial aspirations as they took shape in 1950 and the ones that led to the US-Mexico War a century before; the latter conveys how the Korean War has been framed by the nationalist mythology of the People’s Republic of China as a great victory against US imperialism.

scholarly journals China’s Policy in Refusing North Korea Nuclear Proliferation

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 100
Author(s):  
Vera Zerlinda Alamsyah Sulaiman
Keyword(s):  
North Korea ◽  
Korean War ◽  
Nuclear Proliferation ◽  
Security Threat ◽  
Extended Deterrence ◽  
Us Military ◽  
Military Presence ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
The Impact

This paper explains the main factors underlying China's policy of refusing North Korea's nuclear proliferation, whereas the two countries have established defense alliance relations since the breakup of the Korean War. Geopolitically, North Korea is a strategic country for China in the East Asian region, and both countries view the presence of the US military in the region as a threat. Subsequently, North Korea began to develop its nuclear capability to challenge the continuous US military presence in South Korea. Although China and North Korea see the US influence as a security threat, China maintains its position of refusing North Korea nuclear proliferation. Previous studies regarding the relations between the two countries have explained the factors that underlie China's refusal of North Korea's nuclear proliferation. However, there have been no studies that precisely portray how nuclear weapons can influence China's policy-making towards its allies. By using extended deterrence perspective, this paper explains the variables that influence China's rejection of North Korea's nuclear proliferation. The main argument in this study is that China refuses North Korea's nuclear proliferation as a result of the disadvantage if North Korea continues its nuclear proliferation and the impact towards the regional stability that is unfavorable to China.

“He’s a South Korean When He’s Running with You, and He’s a North Korean When He’s Running after You”

2020 ◽  
pp. 31-52
Author(s):  
Daniel Y. Kim
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Korean War ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Racial Ideologies ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Korean War

Through a carefully contextualized analysis of Samuel Fuller’s 1951 film The Steel Helmet, this chapter illuminates several tropes that circulated in contemporaneous US depictions of the Korean War: an interracial group of US soldiers, a Korean orphan, and enemy soldiers who disguise themselves as refugees and routinely violate other rules of war. In this movie are the remnants of a prior racial ideology that had demonized the entire Japanese population during World War II and the emergence of a new one that emphasized lawfulness as the primary criteria that could distinguish between subjects of color—both American and Asian—who were loyal and those who posed a threat. As this film demonstrates, the integration of the US military, and particularly the incorporation of Japanese American and African American soldiers into formerly all-white units, became vital during the Korean War to US assertions of its own ethical superiority over the Communist enemy, as was its soldiers’ humanitarian commitment to protecting Korean civilians—especially orphans. Ultimately, this chapter demonstrates how The Steel Helmet both crystallizes the emergent racial ideologies of US Cold War liberalism—especially their legalistic aspects in regards to war and their espousal of military multiculturalism—and then shatters them.

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