BEYOND BLACK AND WHITE: Racial Conflict in the New Multi-ethnic City

Abstract

Claire Jean Kim,Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000, 300 pages, ISBN 0-300-07406-9, $45.00.Jennifer Lee,Civility in the City: Blacks, Jews, and Koreans in Urban America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002, 270 pages, ISBN 0-674-00897-9, $35.00.In-Jin Yoon,On My Own: Korean Businesses and Race Relations in America. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997, 274 pages, ISBN 0-226-959279-9, $45.00.During the past decade, scholars of ethno-racial relations have increasingly grappled with the thorny issue of Black-Korean conflict. This attention is no doubt the result of a number of high profile, sometimes violent, and often prolonged clashes between Blacks and Koreans in large urban settings. On January 18, 1990, an incident between a Black customer and a Korean storeowner at the Family Red Apple Inc. grocery store touched off a yearlong boycott of two Korean businesses in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, NY. The 1992 Los Angeles Rebellion, which was originally sparked by the acquittal of four White police officers accused of beating Black motorist, Rodney King, led to three days of looting, arson, and violence. The event quickly became framed in terms of a conflict between Blacks and Koreans, however, as Koreans owned more than half of the stores that were burned or looted. While the evidence of real and often acute tensions between these groups is irrefutable, in many instances the media has tended to distort the nature, scale, and significance of the clashes by over-dramatizing Black-Korean conflict (Lee 2002), obfuscating Korean-Latino conflict (Bobo et al., 1994; Oliver et al., 1993), and ignoring and therefore silencing Korean voices (Abelmann and Lie, 1995). Thankfully, careful, scholarly analyses of these incidents and the tensions that precipitate them are starting to emerge.Civility in the City,Bitter Fruit, andOn My Ownare some of the best recent examples of this new literature and are each valuable attempts to increase understanding about the nature of merchant-customer relations in predominantly Black urban neighborhoods.