Boston’s Korean American community was already reeling, Linda Champion said.
Racist attacks tied to the pandemic were sparking fear within Asian American circles, and Champion, a Black and Korean attorney, said those in the Korean American community had been talking about how they could keep one another safe.
Then in late February, they got wind of a paper from a Harvard University law professor that had angered Korean American students on campus, Champion said. Written by J. Mark Ramseyer, a professor who specializes in Japanese law, the paper argues that Korean women enslaved by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II had chosen to become sex workers, or as the Japanese euphemistically referred to them, “comfort women.”