Graduation Year

2026

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

American Studies

Second Department

History

Reader 1

Professor Lily Geismer

Reader 2

Professor Thomas Kim

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

© 2026, Mina A. L. Jung

Abstract

This thesis examines the historical formation of the "rooftop Korean," the racial figure of the armed Korean American shopkeeper that emerged during the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising and has since been mobilized repeatedly in service of anti-Black counterinsurgency. Drawing on the framework of racial capitalism, this thesis argues that the rooftop Korean was not a spontaneous product of the Korean-Black conflict in South Central Los Angeles but the culmination of decades of U.S.-Korea relations, South Korean militarization, and the racial geography of capitalist development on both sides of the Pacific.

Tracing a transnational arc from the Korean War through the Vietnam War and into the deindustrializing streets of South Central, this thesis demonstrates that the U.S. military industrial complex simultaneously militarized Korean bodies abroad and criminalized Black bodies at home through overlapping logics of counterinsurgency. The racial geography of capitalism that placed Korean small business owners in Black neighborhoods was not incidental but the structural outcome of South Korean export-oriented industrialization and the gutting of South Central's Black working class.

Through close analysis of media representations, Korean and Korean American community sources, and the political aftermath of the 1992 Uprising, this thesis deconstructs the dominant "abandonment narrative" that has organized Korean American political identity since Sa-I-Gu. Rather than a story of state abandonment, the rooftop Korean represents the contradictions of racial capitalism: a figure conscripted into anti-Black counterinsurgency by the very state whose commitment was never to Korean life, but to the property relations and spatial order that Korean merchants helped to maintain.

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