by MICHAEL HURT
An African American academic resident in South Korea finds every good reason never to return home
I am a Rip van Winkle – a man out of time. As I watch America eat itself, I muse upon this fact more deeply. My status as a black American who has lived in South Korea since 2002, with no real plans to go back, has seemed strange to some.
But in recent years, my friends regard this ongoing decision to not return as less strange. And in recent months, it has come to be a point of no small amount of envy to many of my friends who dream of escaping the twin epidemics of Covid-19 and white supremacy-fueled rampant racism in the United States.
In 1670, the Puritan preacher Samuel Danforth warned his fellow colonizers that America had an ongoing moral challenge as it continued its “Errand into the Wilderness.” But the Puritan “wilderness” was not a blank swathe of land, those beckoning fields of Little House on the Prairie.
To the contrary, it was a land filled with fearful, fantastic beasts and rapacious monsters. It was a moral maw, a gaping abyss that beckoned the gawker to jump. It was a land of moral risk, of spiritual danger.
The spatial and moral wilderness defined the constant fear that
Puritan elders had of going “astray” and falling into the beckoning
darkness of civic immorality and spiritual iniquity.
In 1987,
pioneer rapper Chuck D of Public Enemy made the declamation that America
was an “anti-nigger machine,” and that, “If I come out alive … then
they won’t come clean.”
Indeed, neither Amaud Arbery nor George Floyd made it out alive, but unlike most blacks murdered in the USA, their stories made it out – on video. Which is what made the Rodney King incident so shocking back in 1992: the whole thing was on tape.
But absolutely nothing came clean.
No fear of being shot
I never really made a conscious decision to leave the United States. Rather, it was a constant stream of small and incremental decisions to stay.
$4 doctor visits? Stay here. $12-a-month high blood pressure pills? Yeah, stay. Ability to leave my laptop on my table at Starbucks and to go to the john and find it there 20 minutes later? Stay. $600 root canal with zirconium crown? Stay. Being able to take public transport across Seoul for $1.50? Stay. 5G? Stay.
No fear of being shot – whether by mass shooter, or for “existing-while-black”? Again, stay.
By
the time the scoring even gets to Korea’s fast, smart and effective
handling of Covid-19 with big data-enabled contact tracing, strict and
adhered to containment measures, and free coronavirus treatment to all
citizens and non-citizens as well as immigrants regardless of document
status, the scoring is hopelessly skewed.
Who in their right mind, in command of their senses, or with even half the proverbial brain, would go back to live in the Failed States of America? Because that’s what America is – a failed state.
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