In my case, Korean-Americans were the merchants.
For a time, there was a good deal of animosity felt towards the Koreans - mostly by people in their late teens and early twenties; folk groping towards some kind of political and economic consciousness but hamstrung, like so many Americans in all stations of life, by an unfortunately narrow understanding.
In the case of my fellow 11th graders, the narrow understanding was that Washington was subsidizing Koreans with cash incentives to enter "our neighborhoods" drive out "our businesses" and replace them with foreigners who sold us rotten meat and five year old cartons of milk.
Or so went the mythology. I called that a "narrow understanding" but on second thought fanciful understanding seems more like it.
A particularly energetic young man decided that enough was enough, he was going to organize a boycott and protest march against the most prominent (and well stocked) of the Korean grocers - Mr. Kim's Place.
I knew Mr. Kim. I shopped at his store often and never felt I was being cheated, treated unfairly or sold sub-standard fare. Indeed, Mr. Kim stocked some Korean staples I was completely unfamiliar with at the time (later, they'd become daily parts of my life but that's another story). He employed neighborhood kids, gave out free Thanksgiving turkeys to the elderly, played hilarious Korean pop tunes, laughed a lot and generally seemed to be a decent human being.
So I thought it was odd that of all the 'ghetto' stores to pick on, our would-be Sharpton settled on Mr. Kim's as a target.
During a history class that turned into an impromptu organizing meeting, I voiced my objections. The heated crowd shouted me down. Things appeared to be moving towards the protest stage. Somewhere, a news van with microwave dish was revving its engine.
Fortunately, our history teacher (I've forgotten his name sadly, he was quite capable as I remember), being a man of tremendous good sense, decided to nip the thing in the bud by injecting some hard facts into the noise stream.
Instead of protesting the shop owners who have, as Jordan put it, 'taken the risk', the proper target of your energy should be lenders who don't extend biz loans to neighborhood entrepreneurs who might want to open a locally owned store. "Do you want to drive the few people who are here out of the area?" He asked. "Who or what will replace them?"
Things calmed down.
I suppose that nowadays, depending upon where you live, the answer might be WalMart. A disappointing development for a number of reasons.
.d.
I never liked you Rusty...you were always a smart alec, a sass mouth and a bit of a giggle puss.
Dr. Impossible
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