The “Roof Koreans” Meme

Abstract When a protest to support the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement was organized in Seoul in the summer of 2020, not a few commentators in South Korea's online communities expressed their cynicism about the movement. While some referred to the recent hate crimes conducted against Asians after the coronavirus outbreak, many others summoned the memory of the 1992 Los Angeles riots. The fact that many Korean American–owned stores had been looted and damaged during the riots was brought to notice by these commentators as an evidential basis for the uselessness of Koreans’ solidarity with the BLM movement. This article attempts to narrativize how the racial tensions between Black and Korean Americans in Los Angeles in 1992 have been collectively remembered in South Korea to examine the role of the collective memory of the event in the South Korean public's current attitude toward race issues. The images of the so-called roof Koreans, Korean American shopkeepers who kept watching with rifles in hand on the rooftops of their buildings during the 1992 riot, were resummoned during the BLM movement and used in internet memes as a symbol of ideal citizens who could protect their neighborhood with their military training experience back in their home country, South Korea. This collective memorization of roof Koreans as military veterans of the ROK Army raised masculine self-esteem of South Korean males compared to their male counterparts in the United States, in their imagined racial hierarchy, when the hierarchy was questioned and challenged.