Kyeyoung Park

Kyeyoung Park, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, explored ethnic and racial attitudes in Los Angeles in the wake of the 1992 Rodney King verdict and subsequent uprising. Her ethnographic work drew on a history of rapid economic and population shifts which created direct competition among ethnic groups for jobs, housing, and access to educational and health institutions. Park located tensions between minority communities and immigrant Korean merchants within a context of class as well as racial conflict, and examined the extent to which race and ethnicity have become the foundation and the most salient expression of a new form of urban class struggle.