They told me if you voted for John McCain, racial tensions in the US would increase — and they were right!!
He wants more blacks to own stores. Who doesn’t? But here’s the thing:
Conservatives are always advising African-Americans to be entrepreneurial. But ambitious blacks seldom have the extended family structures that would allow them to compete with immigrants. If you are the patriarch of a Greek immigrant family, for example, you are culturally expected to browbeat your children and grandchildren into working in the family business.
In contrast, poorer African-American males seldom have strong familial relationships with anyone other than their mothers.
After WWII, most of the liquor stores in Los Angeles’s black ghetto were owned by aging Jews. Then, following the 1965 Watts Riots, the Jews mostly sold out to black businessmen. When liquor prices were deregulated in the late 1970s, reducing profit margins, the blacks sold out to the harder-working Koreans. The efficient but brusque and disdainful Koreans came to be hated by their black customers, especially after a Korean lady shot a teenage black girl in the back of the head in 1991. Thus, the 1992 South Central riots were in sizable part a drunken black pogrom against Korean merchants. (…)
That the advancement of African-Americans, who are our fellow citizens, would diminish immigrants’ profits is just one of those uncomfortable truths that you aren’t supposed to mention—even if you are a civil rights icon.
