I am going to be giving context to why, if Ms. Kim had been "one hundred percent Korean, [the crowd would] have busted a few windows just for appearance's sake" (133). Around the 1950s and onwards, the was a trend towards (mainly white) suburbanization out of cities (colloquially known as the "white flight"). Consequently, businesses began moving out of cities and into the suburbs to be near the wealthier population. Within urban Los Angeles, Koreans began taking up most of the shops and businesses in mostly black areas. Along with the culture gap, blacks oftentimes felt threatened economically by this foreign immigrant group. This led to tensions between Koreans and blacks.
Another big catalyst for the negative relations between blacks and Koreans was the case of Latasha Harlins (whom Ms. Kim mentions). Here's a link for those who want to find out more (Click Here) but I will briefly summarize it for you. On March 16, Korean shop owner Soon Ja Du saw 15-year-old Latasha Harlins put a bottle off orange juice in her backpack, and thinking that she was stealing began to beat her. During the scuffle, Harlins tried to leave, putting back the drink, but was shot and killed by Du. In court she was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter, but was sentenced to 5 years of probation, 400 hours of community service, and a fine of $500. This resulted in much outrage from the black community. The rapper Ice Cube would release the controversial song "Black Korea" as a result (which also mentions a lot of what I talked about in this post). Tupac would later dedicate a song to her. The Harlins case, coupled with the recent Rodney King incidence is said to be the major cause of the 1992 L.A. Riots (known as Sa-E-Gu, or 4 2 9 in Korean).
During the riots many Korean-owned stores were targeted, being stolen from and vandalized. To fight back, many of the Koreans got weapons and stationed themselves on rooftops to shoot down any would-be thieves and vandalizers.
To bring this back to the novel, I thought that maybe Beatty was trying to make a point in the incident with Ms. Kim. The black people overlooked the fact that she was Korean and accepted her as one of them. Similarly, despite Gunnar's more "white" upbringing he is eventually accepted by the black community and is even appointed "Negro Demagogue." Perhaps Beatty is suggesting that being black is not so easily defined.
Ms. Kim's defiance of easy categories anticipates Yoshiko's, who is more readily accepted as "black" in Hillside than Gunnar himself was. In defiance of the rough history you cite (which came to a head in the riots, where plenty of Korean shop owners were defending their property with firearms), Beatty points to a range of black-Asian common causes. By inviting the US govt. to use the "leftover" A-bomb from WWII on Hillside, he suggests a parallel between Japanese Americans (who have their own history of imprisonment and racial profiling in the 20th century) and African Americans.
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