Al Jazeera’s Media Coverage of Mixed Race Korean Adoptees Is Simplistic And Sensationalistic.

Posted to Paperslip on August 19th, 2025.
Please note that we use the term “Hapa” to denote mixed race Black-Korean, White-Korean, and Other-Korean children / adults / Adoptees. The mixed race Korean Adoptee community embraces and frequently uses the term “Hapa” and this is why we use this term.

We’re not going to link their coverage but we wanted to say this about Al Jazeera’s coverage of mixed race Adoptees over the past few years.

We’ve seen several instances of Al Jazeera's coverage of mixed race Korean Adoptees, and we find their framing—particularly the emphasis on “racism”—deeply lacking in historical nuance. It’s irresponsible to reduce this complex issue to a simplistic racial narrative without acknowledging the broader historical and geopolitical context, especially the aftermath of the Korean War and the circumstances that led to the existence of many mixed-race (Hapa) children in Korea.

South Korea has long been a site of foreign occupation and military entanglement, and the U.S. involvement in the Korean War was not a purely heroic rescue mission. There are numerous documented cases of sexual violence committed by U.S. soldiers against Korean women, which persists into the modern day. This author has a cousin whose Korean grandmother’s home was broken into by a white US soldier in the 1950s who raped her when she was a young teenager, producing a child whom she raised. Her story was certainly not an isolated case. The devotion of a Korean mother who was rendered such through rape by a foreign soldier does not neatly fit into the category of Korean “racism” which Al Jazeera is so keen to associate with the much more nuanced history of the adoption of mixed race children from S. Korea. In fact, we know many anecdotal stories of Korean mothers who tried hard to keep their mixed race children, yet simply could not due to societal pressure having just as much to do or more with gender inequality and the stigma against unwed mothers as to do with “racism”.

It’s important to know that the South Korean government, eager to maintain U.S. military support, effectively institutionalized prostitution to serve American troops—not just during the war, but for decades afterward. These women often had / have no real agency, and the children born from these unequal relationships were frequently stigmatized, even when their mothers wanted to keep them. It should be strongly noted that anecdotally, Korean mothers of mixed race children often wanted to keep their children—but in Korea, if a woman is unmarried, her child/ren could not be registered with the Korean government and could thus not attend school. Children who could not attend school had no future in Korea — mixed race or otherwise. It is no accident that mixed race children were often relinquished as toddlers — around 2-3 years of age, at just the moment when they would have entered school in Korea, had they been able to do so. It should be noted that unmarried mothers were and are heavily stigmatized in S. Korea, no matter what the race of their children — in fact, the number of children sent for overseas adoption who were not mixed race, but were 100% Korean, massively dwarfs the number of mixed race children sent from Korea for overseas adoption.

We know of stories of Korean mothers who went to great lengths to try to hide their mixed race children (no matter what the race of their fathers) in order to keep them safe from marauding Korean Adoption Agency social workers, keen to round up their children for the overseas adoption market. Indeed, this is the very foundation of the decades long Korean adoption industry itself. In light of this devotion of many Korean mothers of mixed race children who became Adoptees through hardship and an utter lack of social protections for Korean mothers, it is even more disingenuous for the adoption of mixed race Adoptees to be painted with the broad brush of “racism”. As with most Western narratives surrounding Korean Adoption, the perspectives and experiences of Korean birth parents are frequently erased. This pattern is evident in Al Jazeera’s portrayal of mixed-race Korean adoption, which reduces a complex and painful history to a one-dimensional accusation of racism.

To portray this situation through the lens of modern identity politics—especially from a narrow, 2020s-era "woke" perspective—oversimplifies and distorts the historical realities. It's also dangerous in how it risks damaging the already sensitive relationship between Black and Korean communities in the U.S., especially when it misrepresents the identity of Hapa Adoptees. Referring to a mixed-race Korean Adoptee as simply "Black" (as done by the Al Jazeera host in question) erases their full identity and the complexity of their experiences. In fact, most of the Hapa Adoptees we know are quite keen to reclaim the Korean side of their heritage—which Hapa Adoptees lost just as much as did “full-blooded” Korean Adoptees.

Al Jazeera also ignores the S. Korean cultural context which still exists, in which children are primarily considered the provenance of the fathers — not the mothers, which is the opposite in Western culture. This is another presumptive Western lens foisted upon a non-Western society. In the cases of mixed race (Hapa) Adoptees fathered by foreign soldiers, the Korean government culturally considered these children to be the charge of their foreign fathers. Not to justify their actions, but by this logic, sending the progeny of foreign soldiers overseas to be in their fathers’ lands made sense.

Furthermore, Al Jazeera assumes that mixed race Black / Korean children had a lower social status in Korea than mixed race White / Korean children. Anecdotally, such does not appear to be the case. Mixed race children of any kind in the wake of the Korean War faced stigma for all of the complicated and nuanced reasons we have already outlined. Al Jazeera’s choice to only focus on the experience of mixed race Black / Korean Adoptees is another racial lens imposed by a Western point of view which makes false assumptions about post-War Korean culture and racial heirarchy.

Hapa Korean Adoptees come from a deeply painful and complicated history. The power imbalance between foreign soldiers—whether black, white, or otherwise—and Korean women shaped the lives of these children from the beginning. To ignore this in favor of generating outrage-driven narratives for clicks is not only intellectually dishonest but ethically irresponsible.

Broadly speaking, the American public knows very little about S. Korean history, and even less about the nuances of Korean Adoption history. It does our communities — and by that, I mean the Korean, American, Korean American, Korean Adoptee, and African American communities — no service to paint over the nuances of this heartbreaking subject in exchange for clicks.

This issue deserves thoughtful, informed engagement—not sensationalized oversimplification. 

Shame on Al Jazeera for reducing it to a shallow headline.