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Eats Shoots & Leaves
Citizen
Username: Mfpark
Post Number: 3588
Registered: 9-2001
| | Posted on Friday, August 18, 2006 - 2:14 pm: | 
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Andrew Young Resigns From Wal-Mart Post
By BERNARD McGHEE, AP
ATLANTA (Aug. 18) - Civil rights leader Andrew Young, who was hired to help Wal-Mart Stores Inc. improve its public image, said early Friday he was resigning from his position as head of an outside support group amid criticism for remarks seen as racially offensive.
Young, a former Atlanta mayor and U.N. ambassador, was hired by Working Families for Wal-Mart in February.
"I think I was on the verge of becoming part of the controversy and I didn't want to become a distraction from the main issues, so I thought I ought to step down," he told The Associated Press.
Young, once a close associate of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., said his decision followed a report in the Los Angeles Sentinel, which he said was misread and misinterpreted.
In an interview with the weekly newspaper, Young was asked whether he was concerned that Wal-Mart causes smaller, mom-and-pop stores to close.
"Well, I think they should; they ran the 'mom and pop' stores out of my neighborhood," the paper quoted Young as saying. "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.
An after-hours call to Wal-Mart was not immediately returned. Company spokeswoman Mona Williams told The New York Times for Thursday's editions that Young's comments did not reflect Wal-Mart's views.
"Needless to say, we were appalled when the comments came to our attention," Williams said. "We were also dismayed that they would come from someone who has worked so hard for so many years for equal rights in this country."
The remarks also 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 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."
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Nohero
Supporter
Username: Nohero
Post Number: 5745
Registered: 10-1999
| | Posted on Friday, August 18, 2006 - 2:26 pm: |
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If I may edit your thread title:
"What Was Andy Young Thinking?"
And the answer would be, "No." |
joel dranove
Citizen
Username: Jdranove
Post Number: 904
Registered: 1-2006
| | Posted on Friday, August 18, 2006 - 2:43 pm: |
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An unguarded moment, and the truth is out of his mouth, filtered not by his brain.
jd |
ajc
Citizen
Username: Ajc
Post Number: 5427
Registered: 9-2001
| | Posted on Friday, August 18, 2006 - 11:33 pm: |
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"...words of bigotry, anti-Semitism and prejudice"
It only goes show us there's a little bit of bad and a little good in everyone... everything else is just bull-••••!!!
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3ringale
Citizen
Username: Threeringale
Post Number: 356
Registered: 1-2006
| | Posted on Saturday, August 19, 2006 - 7:54 am: |
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At least Mel Gibson got drunk first.
Cheers |
Strawberry
Supporter
Username: Strawberry
Post Number: 7730
Registered: 10-2001
| | Posted on Saturday, August 19, 2006 - 9:51 am: |
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Andrew Young is just another example of how African American leaders view other minorities. Jackson, Sharpton, Young. Americans, especially those in the black communities need less, not more of these types. There are plenty who reject them but sadly liberals across America hurt the situation by propping these bigots up on stage.
Lamont, the new darling of the radical left celebrating his victory with Jackson and Sharpton is just the latest example.
Let's take this a step further. One of the more interesting Senate races could come down to the NAACP'S Mfume vs Michael Steele. Mfume, the Democrat is a well known radical and Steele is a intelligent Republican. Steele's conservative values, or the values you would want in a leader have constantly been shunned by other black leaders. He's been portrayed as a racist simply because he expects more out of the African-American community. How much you want to bet the radical left goes out of there way to give Mfume all the support he needs, while casting Steele as an Uncle Tom.
The African American community suffers because of those who "represent" them in the Democratic party. Obama offers hope for a better future, but sadly he too will be forced to pander to the left, killing his real potential to help. |
joel dranove
Citizen
Username: Jdranove
Post Number: 908
Registered: 1-2006
| | Posted on Saturday, August 19, 2006 - 10:24 am: |
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Mfume has five kids, each with a different mother, never married any of them.
jd |
kathleen
Citizen
Username: Symbolic
Post Number: 698
Registered: 3-2005
| | Posted on Tuesday, August 22, 2006 - 12:43 am: |
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Mfume became a father when he was a teenager. When he was 23, he returned to school to graduate high school and enroll in college. He graduated magna cum laude, and then got an M.A. from Johns Hopkins. He supported all of his children financially into their adulthood, and today they all speak highly of him.
A lesser man would have turned into a bigot and spent all his time posting swill on MOL. |
3ringale
Citizen
Username: Threeringale
Post Number: 363
Registered: 1-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, August 22, 2006 - 7:17 am: |
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August 20, 2006
Andrew Young Was Right, Not That Anyone Dare Admit It
By Steve Sailer
One of the recurrent rituals of American life is the public humiliation of prominent older folks who just can't keep bottled up what they really think about race. (My wife calls this increasing inability to not say exactly what's on your mind "Elderly Tourette Syndrome".)
Aging white sportsmen are frequently subject to these public eviscerations. Notre Dame football announcer Paul Hornung and Air Force Academy football coach Fisher DeBerry both recently got into all sorts of trouble for suggesting that their exclusive colleges should lower admissions standards to recruit more fast black players. Sportswriters claimed to be aghast that anyone could possibly believe the stereotype that blacks tended to be faster runners on the field…or lower scorers on the SAT.
Paradoxically, minorities can get away with more frankness. For example, the black Chicago Cubs manager Dusty Baker easily survived the brouhaha following his assertion that black and Latin ballplayers tend to do better than white players on humid days.
Last week, though, a famous old civil rights icon resigned his cushy job promoting Wal-Mart to black politicians because he was caught saying what he—and lots of other blacks—actually believe about immigrant shopkeepers.
The giant retailing company has often been frustrated obtaining permits to build stores in the inner city—for example, Chicago city councilmen blocked a proposed Wal-Mart on the South Side. So Wal-Mart hired 74-year-old Andrew Young, who once worked for Martin Luther King Jr., to lobby local governments for them. Young is the former Atlanta mayor who helped capture the 1996 Olympics and made sure that blacks got a sizable hunk of the lucrative contracts—thereby much exacerbating the notorious incompetence of the Atlanta Games.
Asked by an interviewer from a black newspaper, the LA Sentinel, if Wal-Mart displaced mom-and-pop retailers, Young replied:
"Well, I think they should; they ran the 'mom-and-pop' stores out of my neighborhood… 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."
Ironically, the TV show The Simpsons has similarly satirized its Hindu character Apu, manager of the Kwik-E-Mart, for 16 years:
[Marge places a tiny bottle of aspirin over the counter]
Apu: The aspirin is $24.95
Marge: $24.95???
Apu: I lowered the price because an escaped mental patient tampered with the bottle.
Yet, despite protests from Indian-Americans, the show has never backed down from its caricature of a money-grubbing middleman minority.
That’s because there is a major disjunction in American public discourse between the relatively wide latitude you are allowed if you claim to be engaged in "observational comedy" and the much more limited set of facts you are permitted to use when seriously analyzing how the world works. That's a big reason America has better comedy than public policy.
But then, most "serious" political discourse doesn't exist to tell the truth. Instead, its purpose is to show off moral superiority.
Needless to say, the fact that mom-and-pop stores in black neighborhoods are seldom owned by blacks has more to do with black entrepreneurial failings than with the moral failings of middle-man minority shopkeepers. And the stores' high prices and poor selection more reflect the risk of operating in crime-ridden neighborhoods and the inherent inefficiencies of small shops than any nefarious plot against blacks.
If blacks owned those stores, the bread would presumably be even staler and the prices even higher.
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.
Still, public-spirited black ministers have argued, quite plausibly, that having fewer and less efficient liquor stores in the ghetto would be good for local blacks, because they would then drink less.
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.
Since the riots, community activists have succeeded in diminishing the number of liquor stores in South Central.
Nonetheless, even for food and dry goods, Young is right that African-Americans would have perfectly rational reasons for preferring a Wal-Mart in their neighborhood to "vibrant" immigrant-run corner shops.
Wal-Mart provides a much wider selection at much lower prices. As Matt Fellowes of the Brookings Institute has noted in an op-ed entitled The High Price of Being Poor [Los Angeles Times, July 23, 2006], in black and Hispanic Compton, California,
"Instead of large, modern grocery stores, there are more than 200 tiny bodegas, which generally charge higher prices."
So it’s a good thing that major retail chains have been expanding to black neighborhoods in recent years as the crime rate has come down.
Another reason: local blacks have a much better chance to rise up the employment ladder at Wal-Mart than in a Korean or Lebanese-owned shop. Immigrant shopkeepers provide few jobs to local blacks because they prefer to hire co-ethnics, especially for management positions.
Why? I can think of five factors:
1. Our absurd “family reunification” immigration policy provides them with lots of relatives who need jobs (including, for example, new spouses imported from the Old Country, i.e. families that were never “united” in the first place).
2. Immigrant businesses operate more smoothly when the employees all speak the same language as the owner/manager.
3. Most immigrants come from what Francis Fukuyama calls "low-trust" cultures like Latin America, the Philippines, China, and the Middle East. In those countries, you can't count upon the legal system for justice, so you must depend on your relatives. They bring this clannish mindset with them.
(Thus my wife once was a waitress at a Golden Nugget restaurant in Chicago. This small chain was beating Denny's in the local market, so outside investors went to the Greek family that owned it and offered to fund their regional expansion. But the clan turned this opportunity down—because they didn't have enough cousins to manage new restaurants…and promoting non-Greeks to important jobs was just unthinkable
4. They often come from patriarchal cultures where the oldest male is expected to force younger relatives to do his bidding through threats of ostracism. This management tool doesn't work terribly well upon native-born employees.
5. Immigrant entrepreneurs are not infected by political correctness. They feel no guilt over holding caustic stereotypes of Americans, especially African-Americans. However unfairly, they tend to see blacks as shiftless, ignorant pilferers, and thus won't give black job applicants the time of day. In contrast, infinitely more visible Wal-Mart is under constant government pressure to "celebrate diversity" in hiring and promotion (i.e., impose racial quotas on itself).
My personal feelings about Wal-Mart are mixed. I used to fly down to Wal-Mart's corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas on sales missions. Despite the geniality of Wal-Mart's store employees, its corporate staffers were the coldest, most ruthless sons-of-guns I ever did business with.
The normal geniality of American business life comes at the cost of a certain level of corruption—you take your clients' decision makers out to fancy restaurants, golf courses, and NFL games in the hopes of developing a relationship that will cloud their judgment of what they owe their stockholders. But Wal-Mart utterly banned attempts to make friends with their headquarters employees. All meetings between visiting salesmen and Wal-Mart staff took place in windowless cells that wouldn't look out of place in Abu Ghraib. Their negotiating techniques stopped just short of waterboarding.
Since you couldn't take Wal-Mart staff out to lunch, there were no expense account restaurants in Bentonville. Every lunchtime, the Ponderosa across the street from Wal-Mart's headquarters was full of lone men in thousand-dollar suits, ace salesmen all, big wheels who routinely took clients to lunch at The Four Seasons and Charlie Trotter's, each morosely munching his $4.95 chicken-fried steak after a horrible morning of being battered into offering Wal-Mart absurdly low prices, each wondering where in this godforsaken dry county could he get the drink he desperately needed.
I couldn't stand the Wal-Mart people. But I also respected them.
Fred Reed has argued that Wal-Mart is bad for the once independent souls of small town Americans. It ruins both their sense of community, by wrecking their traditional shopping districts, and their individual orneriness, by driving local independent merchants out of business and turning them into low-level managers, dependent on their corporate bosses.
This may well be. But for inner city blacks, it's irrelevant. They don't have much of a sense of community or many independent-minded legitimate businessmen in the first place.
A job at Wal-Mart provides them with some of the same valuable things the U.S. Army offers blacks: jobs, order, and structure.
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.
It’s not a comedy—and it means bad public policy.
http://vdare.com/sailer/060820_young.htm
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Eric Wertheim
Citizen
Username: Bub
Post Number: 251
Registered: 1-2005
| | Posted on Tuesday, August 22, 2006 - 7:27 am: |
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That's a great piece. An equal opportunity, no-BS essay about us. |
joel dranove
Citizen
Username: Jdranove
Post Number: 923
Registered: 1-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, August 22, 2006 - 10:16 am: |
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So, no more affirmative action?
jd |
tom
Citizen
Username: Tom
Post Number: 5601
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Tuesday, August 22, 2006 - 10:45 am: |
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well, jd, that's .... irrelevant.
Good article. While I'm anti-Wal-Mart in general, it is a different scenario in depressed areas that in small towns. You can't wreck a local economy when there is no local economy. |
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