Piecework

The persistence of the virtually permanent welfare-supported underclass is the most disgraceful measure of the decline of America’s once all-powerful manufacturing plants. But most Americans don’t want to talk anymore about root causes; they just see people sitting on the stoop while they go to work. Even the most orthodox liberals now understand that welfare degrades those who receive it and infuriates those who pay for it. So it is no surprise that some poor Americans mutter paranoid theories while others look for scapegoats. More and more these days, our favorite scapegoat is the Asian.

Cheap politicians blame Japan for the nation’s economic decline; they work too hard, they save too much money, they close certain markets. Lee Iacocca growls in commercials that Americans make better cars than they do. Idiots like Donald Trump bellow, “The Japanese are ripping us off!” In movies like Rambo, Asians are mowed down by the hundreds while audiences cheer. And as usual in this country, what we are describing as a race problem is really one of class.

On Church Avenue in Brooklyn, you could feel the seething class bitterness of the black demonstrators. Earlier, they claimed that their anger wasn’t simply about the incident that set off the protest. They told various auditors that Koreans-all Koreans!-were rude to blacks, suspecting them of shoplifting, acting curt with them, refusing to touch their hands when making change. “Fuckin’ people don’t know how to treat people,” one exasperated black man said to me. “They act like every African American is a thief.”

Even some Koreans will admit that this perception has some truth to it. A few will cite cultural differences as the heart of the matter (among Koreans, they say, smiling is discouraged, direct eye contact is considered aggressive, and women are taught not to touch strangers). Others blame bitter experience in underclass neighborhoods, which led them to make racial assumptions. A harder truth is that the success of the Koreans in New York is a form of humiliation for many African Americans. You can see a cartoon version of the relationship (and the problems with manners) in Spike Lee’s sad movie, Do the Right Thing. I hear it on black talk radio and in conversations with black friends. With amazing speed, the Koreans have become Haves, while too many blacks, born here, speaking English, remain Have-Nots.

The Koreans only began coming to the United States in significant numbers after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act finally ended the racist restrictions against immigrants from Asia. Today more than two hundred thousand Koreans are believed to be living in New York, and they own 9,500 small businesses. The Korean greengrocer has become a widely admired (if stereotypical) figure in the city’s life. And in spite of language problems and immense cultural differences, the newcomers have leapfrogged over the city’s blacks on what used to be called the ladder of economic success.

“Don’t try an’ tell me that Koreans work harder than we do,” a black man named Virgil Hills said to me a few blocks from the boycott site. “They just got advantages we don’t have.” Again, some truth here. Certainly, it’s extremely difficult for American blacks to open their own grocery stores (or other retail businesses), because so many banks redline them, refusing to provide start-up loans. But the real advantages the Koreans have are not those talked about on the street. Back home, almost all of the Koreans were middle class; that is, urban, well educated, goal oriented, imbued with the Confucian ethic. In a 1987 essay on New York’s Koreans, the sociologist Illsoo Kim cited one survey of 560 Korean householders in New York showing that 86 percent were married and living with spouses. Some 67 percent had finished college back home. Another study showed that 40 percent of Koreans who arrived in the mid-1970s had professional or technical backgrounds. American blacks with the same backgrounds have no need to open grocery stores; they have access to higher levels of American society.