World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [108]
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Once again, I am making no claims here about the immediate or ultimate causes of the Holocaust. The point is simply that Weimar Germany stands as a somber warning against having excessive confidence in free market democracy as the universal solution to the problems of underdevelopment in societies with a (real or perceived) market-dominant minority. Weimar Germany marketized and democratized with a steadiness that would make most of today’s international policymakers proud. Yet in Germany after World War I, the pursuit of free market democracy fueled an ethnonationalist conflagration of precisely the kind that today threatens much of the non-Western world.
Market-Dominant Minorities in U.S. Inner Cities
Are market-dominant minorities a thing of the past in the West? For the moment, the answer is yes. At the national level, none of the contemporary Western nations has an ethnic minority that comes close to controlling the economy. In the United States, self-identified “whites” make up roughly 72 percent of the population and wield roughly proportionate economic power. On the other hand, the story becomes more complex if we look both within certain pockets of the United States today and at nationwide demographic projections for the future.
In the inner cities of all the major metropolitan areas across the United States, ethnic Koreans represent an increasingly glaring market-dominant minority vis-à-vis the relatively economically depressed African-American majorities around them. In New York City, Koreans, less than .1 percent of the city’s population, own 85 percent of produce stands, 70 percent of grocery stores, 80 percent of nail salons, and 60 percent of dry cleaners. In portions of downtown Los Angeles, Koreans own 40 percent of the real estate but constitute only 10 percent of the residents. Korean-American businesses in Los Angeles County number roughly 25,000, with gross sales of $4.5 billion. Nationwide, Korean entrepreneurs have in the last decade come to control 80 percent of the $2.5 billion African-American beauty business, which—“like preaching and burying people”—historically was always a “black” business and a source of pride, income, and jobs for African-Americans. “They’ve come in and taken away a market that’s not rightfully theirs,” is the common, angry view among inner-city blacks.28
Because Asians are relative newcomers, African-Americans view themselves as the “indigenous” and “true” inhabitants of the inner cities, who are now being ripped off, condescended to, and economically displaced by exploitative “outsiders.” In 1990, a nine-month racial boycott against two Korean produce stores in Flatbush, Brooklyn, eventually drove both stores out of business. Led by the Reverend Al Sharpton, the boycotts fueled Asian-black tensions across the city. Two years later, during the Los Angeles riots that followed the jury acquittal of police officers charged with beating Rodney King, African-Americans burned or looted an estimated two hundred Korean grocery shops, smashing windows and attacking Korean shopowners with knives, guns, and crowbars. In the end, fifty-five people died (many of them African-American), another two thousand were injured, and property losses totaled roughly $1 billion.
Relations between Korean-Americans and African-Americans seem to have improved since the Los Angeles riots, as leaders from both groups have made conciliatory efforts. Nevertheless, periodic bursts of anti-Korean baiting and violence still occur. At a December 31, 1994, rally, Norman “Grand Dad” Reide, vice president of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, accused Koreans of “reaping a financial harvest at the expense of black people” and recommended that “we boycott the bloodsucking Koreans.” More recently, in November 2000, African-Americans firebombed a Korean-owned grocery store in northeast Washington, D.C. The spray-painted message on the charred walls: “Burn them down, Shut them down, Black Power!”
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Ethnic Koreans, along with other