Essay 951

Andrew Young’s melting pot boils over

By Clarence Page

WASHINGTON -- After making what he admits were “demagogic” remarks about Jewish, Asian and Arab business owners, Andrew Young has done the right thing. The former civil rights leader, Atlanta mayor and UN ambassador found himself guilty and sentenced himself to resign as head of a Wal-Mart advocacy group.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said it did not ask for Young to step down, but it did not stand in his way when he did. After all, what does it profit an international mega-corporation to hire a liberal feel-good front man if he makes people feel bad?

Young, 74, stuck his wingtips in his mouth during an interview that appeared in Thursday’s Los Angeles Sentinel, the West Coast’s oldest and largest black-owned weekly, when he was asked whether Wal-Mart squeezed small stores out of black neighborhoods.

“Well, I think they should; they (big stores) ran the mom-and-pop stores out of my neighborhood,” he told the Sentinel. “But you see those are the people (owners of mom-and-pop stores) who have been overcharging us--selling us stale bread, and bad meat and wilted vegetables. And they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they’ve ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it’s Arabs, very few black people own these stores.”

I don’t expect anyone to be nominating Young for an NAACP Image Award this year, although he might be a contender for the Mel Gibson Sensitivity Prize.

Unlike Gibson’s infamous drunken slurs against Jews, Young was apparently sober and trying to say something that anyone familiar with urban commerce knows to be quite true. He dug his grave with the way he said it.

There’s nothing new about the “black tax” that residents of economically abandoned urban neighborhoods have had to pay for goods and services in recent decades. It is part of the economic dynamic of old urban neighborhoods that waves of immigrants, including black immigrants from the South, have operated mom-and-pop stores, become successful, and eventually move on to better neighborhoods.

These “middle-man minorities,” as economist Thomas Sowell labeled them more than a decade ago, are a worldwide phenomenon reflecting how some ethnic cultures are more entrepreneurial than others because of culture and peculiar historical circumstances. They may be Cuban merchants in Latin America, ethnic Chinese in the Philippines or East Indians in East Africa.

This helps to explain, for example, why a survey of black-owned New York businesses in the 1980s found that more than half were owned by immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean, even though immigrants comprised only a tenth of New York’s black population overall.

In cities like Chicago, Detroit and New York, for example, many black neighborhoods saw black, Jewish or Italian merchants move their stores in the wake of riots in the 1960s, only to be replaced by Arab merchants displaced by the 1967 Six-Day War, and later, Korean merchants.

But like Wal-Mart, these middleman minority merchants provide commerce in communities that have little or none and they stir resentment from the very communities they serve.

Long-simmering resentments toward mostly Asian merchants in South Central Los Angeles boiled over into mainstream news during that city's 1992 riots. TV cameras caught armed Korean merchants guarding their stores against mostly black and Hispanic looters.

Young could hardly have picked a worse place to reopen old resentments than Los Angeles, a city that has been trying ever since 1992 to cool its heavily immigrant stir-fry of blacks, whites, Hispanics and Asians. Yet, he also provides what educators call a “teachable moment.”

Instead of getting mad at Young or at immigrant merchants, we should take a lesson from neighborhoods that are bringing businesses back, including a new wave of locally owned mom-and-pop stores and franchises. Through public-private partnerships, neighborhood-based community development corporations in many cities are pooling resources to help lure major chain stores to serve as anchors for the development of smaller businesses.

The real problem Young uncovered is not ethnic but economic and educational. Better schools provide the tools that enable people to take care of themselves and their families, ride out economic hard times and help their children move on to better lives.

And, in our market-driven society, economics determine the market conditions that create the engines of upward mobility that enable low-paid workers to move up to higher-paying jobs. Those who get left behind while others, including immigrant merchant families, get ahead are left more isolated and resentful than ever. Capitalism obviously works. Our challenge is to make it work for every American.