Another Unwarranted Apology. When are Americans going to get some guts and stand by the things they say?
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Andrew Young — minister, former mayor of Atlanta, Georgia, and, under President Jimmy Carter, U.S. Ambassador to the UN — apologized yesterday for remarks he made in defense of Wal-mart's tendency to make life difficult for "mom and pop shops":

"But you see, those are the people 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."

Young, who has since apologized for the remarks, said he decided to end his involvement with Working Families for Wal-Mart after he started getting calls about the story.

"Things that are matter-of-fact in Atlanta, in the New York and Los Angeles environment, tend to be a lot more volatile," he said.

A Jew bitched about this:

The remarks surprised Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, who pointed to Young's reputation of civil rights work.

"If anyone should know that these are the words of bigotry, anti-Semitism and prejudice, it's him," Hier said. "I know he apologized, but I would [hound him anyway] say this ... during his years as a leader of the national civil rights movement, if anyone would utter remarks like this about African-Americans his voice would be the first to rise in indignation."

But who could say such a thing about blacks? Blacks don't own stores in white neighborhoods or 'Asian' neighborhoods that overcharge locals for substandard goods.
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Andrew Young was absolutely right about some "mom and pop shops". In inner cities, we're not talking about Doug and Lois Dumbrowski's general store, in which their kids, Doug, Jr., Ted, and Mary Elizabeth, help out when they're not in school. We're really talking about Kim Daejung working 16-hour days and employing only his family, not locals; or about Muhammed Saleh and the other Yemenis he has brought over to work extremely long hours at low pay, in convenience stores in black neighborhoods, while, again, not employing locals. Those stores have convex mirrors to watch black customers to make sure they don't steal. The employees may even carefully follow blacks with their eyes if not even follow them physically, in person!
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(Interesting sidelite (well, I think so): In looking for typical Korean names, I found a webpage that defines the common name "Young":

YOUNG m & f Korean
Means either "forever" or "prosperity" in Korean.

Forever, Young! Oddly, that page does not show the most common Korean name we encounter, "Kim". Hmm.)
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Latino neighborhoods tend not to have the same problem. Perhaps because Latinos come from societies where Latinos are in charge, when they come here, they tend to set up their own little bodegas — which, again, tend to hire non-family members only if no family member is available to help out. That's not so bad, tho, because they tend to operate only in predominantly Latin neighborhoods. They don't colonize black neighborhoods and treat the locals as The Enemy.
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The lack of entrepreneurship in establishing black small businesses has been a sore point among blacks for decades, but they never seem to progress. Yes, some American blacks do establish going concerns, some quite large (e.g., Johnson Publishing, the people who have given the Nation Ebony and Jet magazines). But the participation rate for blacks in small business is appallingly low. Tho one is tempted to fault white folk for robbing blacks of initiative, the reality is that until the era of compulsory desegregation, there were a great many black communities that had very well-established and profitable black-owned businesses for decades — that were destroyed by desegregation! Black businesses didn't have the leverage in getting good wholesale prices that larger, white-owned businesses had, so they had to charge higher retail prices. Once black customers no longer had to patronize black-owned business but could enter any business, much of their customer base abandoned higher-priced black businesses 'wholesale'. Thriving communities of black businessmen were wiped out by desegregation. Ironic, but true.
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Equally true is everything Andrew Young said. He should not have apologized, and should, indeed, retract his apology and reissue his remarks. We need to talk truth in this country, not play stupid games with "political correctness".
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If the truth hurts, fix the problem. Don't lie about it.
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For my part, I apologize to regular readers of this blog for not being able to update it at my customary rate of three or more posts per workweek, but this was an unusually tough week. On Monday I had my state real-estate salesperson's exam, which I passed. On Thursday I had a test at the office on WordPerfect, which I'm not as sure of. (WordPerf's paragraph-numbering feature is execrably bad in its Windows versions. It used to work fine in DOS, but is just awful in Windows. I hate, ever, to admit that anything in MS Word is better, but have to confess that Word handles paragraph numbering much, much better. I did well enuf in everything else, but paragraph-numbering kept fiting me, which kept me from finishing everything else on time. [Postscript: I passed my WordPerf test too, tho realized after the fact that I could have handled things differently, better. No matter. I passed.]) In addition to working at my part-time nite spot almost 20 hours during my regular four-day workweek, I have another c. 3 hours a day in commuting time (roundtrip) to deal with, and on one nite took another couple of hours to take pix for my Newark fotoblog, which I do post to for every day. I also keep my Simpler Spelling Word of the Day website up-to-date. Once I get home, I have email to catch up on, cats to feed and clean up after, laundry and housework to do, and on, and on. So if on the days I do have time to post to this blog, I sometimes write more than is convenient for you to read at one sitting, I beg your indulgence. If need be, you can download a long post to your own computer, call it up into a word-processing program, and store a "pickup" mark (say, two backslashes: \\) to search for in order to pick up later where you left off.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,607 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:30 PM