한국 대학생의 외국인 차별 의식의 근원 - 민족, 문명, 선진국 담론의 비판적 검증

Abstract

There have been debates about Koreans’ discriminative consciousness towards foreigners with the recent rise of interest in ‘damunhwa’(multiculture) in Korea. Many arguments have appeared in the mass media and academia in regard to the fundamental sources of the consciousness, which are not empirically verified and, thus, have caused confusion. This paper aims to empirically reveal the discursive frameworks upon which Korean university students’ discriminative consciousness towards foreigners are grounded. For this, it conducts a survey of 200 university students and attempts to verify the real influences of three main discourses that have been argued by previous studies as the main sources of discrimination, such as (exclusive) ethnic nationalism, the sense of superiority in culture, and the discourse of seonjinguk. Through the analysis of the survey, this paper has found that the discourse of ‘seonjinguk’ has the strongest explanatory power among the three discourses. Disputing the common idea in the public, it has also suggested that the influences of ethnic nationalism and the sense of superiority in culture on the discriminative consciousness are not that strong. An analysis of correlation has shown that respondents who have discriminative consciousness based on the discourse of ‘seonjinguk’ are more likely to have positive consciousness towards Koreans while having negative consciousness towards Southeast Asians, black Africans, Korean-Chinese, and Chinese. The consciousness that ‘Korea is seonjinguk’ is found as a factor that increases positive consciousness towards Koreans, whites, and Japanese. The multivariate regression analysis has also demonstrated that the discriminative consciousness based on the discourse of ‘seonjinguk’ increases negative consciousness towards Southeast Asians, black Africans, and Korean-Chinese.