Gook: The Short History of An Americanism

Abstract

"The Haitians, in whose service United States Marines are presumably restoring peace and order in Haiti, are nicknamed 'Gooks' and have been treated with every variety of contempt, insult, and bestiality." So wrote Herbert J. Seligman in the Nation in 1920. The contempt and bestiality will scarcely surprise those who have much studied American imperialism, but hearing the term gook applied to black people may. In the last forty years, gook has chiefly slurred Asian people—especially, but far from exclusively, those actively opposing American presence in Korea and Indochina. But the broader pan-racist past of gook provides almost a short history of modern U.S. imperial aggression and particularly of the connections between racial oppression and war.

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