The NY Times reported:
Instead, people who have known Mr. Young for decades seem rather satisfied that his comment that Jewish, Arab and Korean store owners had “ripped off” black neighborhoods, “selling us stale bread and bad meat and wilted vegetables”...
“Now I don’t blame anybody,” he said, a day after apologizing for his remarks and resigning from the Wal-Mart payroll. “It was stupid of me to say in that context. No, it wasn’t stupid of me. I said it in the appropriate context. But I didn’t think about how it would read.”...
Mr. Young made his comment to a reporter from a black newspaper, The Los Angeles Sentinel, responding to a question about Wal-Mart’s effects on mom-and-pop businesses.
“I was giving a rational explanation of a historic phenomenon,” he explained later. “Can you talk about ethnicity objectively without it being demeaning or stereotypical?”
He added that he had also discussed black merchants who overcharged the poor.
“The way this came out it makes me sound like I’m refuting everything I’ve done over almost 70 years, frankly,” Mr. Young said.
He defended his work, saying, “I still think that Wal-Mart is good for poor people.”
Now given that I don't agree with Young's position on Walmart, it is interesting that he apparently has been given the Cosby treatement. By the Cosby treatment I mean that it appears that the outrage is based on selective quoting that has been taken out of context (I do not currently have access to the article in question). What is perhaps most hypocritical of the so-called black leadership who have taken Andrew Young to task on his comments is that no one has even made a motion to disprove what he has said. By immediately labelling his comments as "racist" the statements have been made to appear untrue. I would presume then that James Baldwin is a racist as well since he made similar comments about jews in black neighborhoods in his books.
What about the known fact that black hair care supplies are very prevalent in black neighborhoods? There is a documentary on the internet (Search YouTube for it) that documents this. Now, I'm not going to personally denegrate Koreans for doing business since it is in my opinion the fault of black people for not supporting black businesses that provide the service. But still in terms of facts, Koreans make a nice piece of change by doing business in black neighborhoods.
Let me deal with the Arabs. It is known in black neighborhoods (the ones much of the so called black leadership do not live in), that many corner stores are owned by Arabs. Again, I'm not going to denegrate Arabs because of it, but there's nothing racist about pointing it out. It is not racist to point out that some of these Arabs sell pork which is forbidden for them to eat, sell or handle (if they are Muslim). And blacks in these neighborhoods know this. It is known that many products are priced well above the costs in other non-black neighborhoods. Now there are potentially some reasons for this, such as the smaller item count driving up the per-unit price. Perhaps the costs of insurance for being in a "dangerous" neighborhood is a part of higher costs. I don't know, and perhaps that needs to be discussed, but again if you have an ethnic group making a lot of money (relatively speaking) selling goods at a relatively high cost in poor black neighborhoods then it is not wrong to point it out. Are they "blood sucking"? I don't know, I haven't seen the data but has anyone seen the data? If not how can you simply condemn a comment when even the criticizer does not have evidence to disprove the comment?
Jews: I'm not in possession of information that shows that Jews run hair shops or food places in black neighborhoods. So I can't say. I can say that it is known that there are some Jews who do (or have) owned many properties in black neighborhoods who make quite a nice living off of the rents paid by those tenants. Again, I'm not denegrating this group for conducting business, but if a group of people are making their living from the rents of blacks I can talk about it. If, say in Harlem, the owners of property previously rented to black people, are moving to gentrify the neighborhood and doing upgrades that they were unwilling to make when the neighborhood was "for blacks" then I can ask the question about the motives of those owners.
So, in short Andrew Young may have been out of order in his comments, but none of the critiques or reports thus far have proven it. They have all, so far, parroted the "it was racist (meaning incorrect)" line without even providing proof. I guess that's what we call "reporting" now.
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