Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-qxdb6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T10:18:54.749Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2004

Cybelle Fox
Cybelle Fox
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, Harvard University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

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, and On My Own are 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.

Type
STATE OF THE DISCOURSE
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , March 2004 , pp. 181 - 188
Copyright
© 2004 W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Abelmann, Nancy and John Lie (1995). Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bobo, Lawrence D. and Devon Johnson (2000). Racial attitudes in a prismatic metropolis: Mapping identity, stereotypes, competition, and views on affirmative action. In Lawrence D. Bobo, Melvin L. Oliver, James H. Johnson, Jr., and Abel Valenzuela, Jr. (Eds.), Prismatic Metropolis: Inequality in Los Angeles. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Bobo, Lawrence and Vincent L. Hutchings (1996) Perceptions of racial group competition: Extending Blumer's theory of group position to a multiracial social context. American Sociological Review, 61: 951–972.Google Scholar
Bobo, Lawrence, Camille L. Zubrinsky, James H. Johnson, Jr., and Melvin L Oliver (1994). Public opinion before and after a spring of discontent. In Mark Baldassare (Ed.), The Los Angeles Riots: Lessons for the Urban Future, pp. 103–133. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, Inc.
Citrin, Jack, Donald P. Green, Christopher Muste, and Cara Wong (1997) Public opinion toward immigration reform: The role of economic motivations. Journal of Politics, 59: 858–881.Google Scholar
Jacobson, Matthew Frye (1998). Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Miles, Jack (1992, October). Blacks vs. Browns. The Atlantic Monthly, 41–59.Google Scholar
Oliver, Melvin L and James H. Johnson, Jr. (1984) Inter-ethnic conflict in an urban ghetto: The case of Blacks and Latinos in Los Angeles. Research in Social Movements, Conflict and Change, 6: 57–94.Google Scholar
Oliver, Melvin L, James H. Johnson, Jr., and Walter C. Farrel, Jr. (1993). Anatomy of a rebellion: A political-economic analysis. In Roberts Gooding-Williams (Ed.), Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, pp. 117–141. New York: Routledge.
Skerry, Peter (1995, January). The Black alienation: African Americans vs. immigrants. New Republic, 19–20.Google Scholar
Tuan, Mia (1998). Forever Foreigners or Honorary Whites? The Asian Ethnic Experience Today. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Waldinger, Roger (1996). Ethnicity and opportunity in the plural city. In Roger Waldinger and Mehdi Bozorgmehr (Eds.), Ethnic Los Angeles. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Waters, Mary C. (1999). Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities. New York; Cambridge, MA: Russell Sage Foundation, Harvard University Press.