There was an article in D.C.'s City Paper (not the best news source, I grant you) a few months back about how a few stores (the Dollar stores mainly) have just given in to shoplifting. One of these stores was in Southeast and was run by a man from Ethiopia I think and he has sort of a tacit agreement with the locals in his neighborhood. You can shoplift, but only necessities-which he defines as bread, food, and diapers. But if he catches you shoplifting something like batteries...no go and you're not allowed back in. He began this arrangement because he felt it actually reduced shoplifting because people don't want to take advantage of him when he is considered so giving. Part of this agreement was also based on his religious values that you should aid your neighbor. His store is also 4 blocks from the police station, so every time somebody shop lifted he'd run down there, but then they'd make him place a phone call, and by the time the police came the kid would be long gone. He was tired of getting in to physical altercations over a dollar item.
I found it very disturbing this store owner felt he had to agree to shoplifting just to stop it from being so pervasive.
In his excellent book Migrations and Cultures, Thomas Sowell goes into the middleman minority phenomenon at length. It's fascinating how intensely these people are hated for providing necessary services at reasonable prices. The examples we're most familiar with are Jews (even after the Holocaust, still subject to discrimination in Europe) and Korean store owners in black neighborhoods here in the US. Ice Cube has a song out called "Black Korea" that encourages violence against the latter.
So my parents have a 5th grade education but run a store. The store was in downtown area, 99% black community and we were shoplifted 4 out of the 6 days we were open. We were closed on sundays because of church at it being the sabbath and all. The store was open 7 AM til 9 PM. Around 4 or 5 PM we would have tons of kids come in and thanks to surveillance systems that were set up after 6 years of scraping nickels and dimes together, we finally got on tape of these kids stuffing their book bags with candy, chips, and soda pop. We show the tapes to the children's parents because we know all of them on a first name basis. You know what the parents tell us? "Oh, it's okay. They're just kids and it's not like they're stealing all that much." We can't report them to the police because they're underage and we do not want them to go to jail or anything like that. We ask the kids why they steal and they mock us saying "ching chong chinese i can't understand you. Speak english chink." So we ask another customer to ask for us and the kids tell them "mind your own f***ing business." This happens almost everyday. Let's say they steal $.10 4 days out of 6. In one year, that is $146 per kid. Let's say out of 75 kids, only 10 actually steal. That's $1460 per year. When less than $12,000 is made per year, that's a lot of money. Do you think we want to work under these conditions? Without any insurance or heating or air condition in the house because we cannot afford them? We save enough money after 12 years of living in this hole. We sold the store to some black folks who said they wanted to run a business. Because we know they do not have money even though it was valued at $300,000 because we renovated the building little by little every year to make it better, we sold it for $175,000. 2 weeks after we sell, we found out from friends that the new owners sold it to other black folks for $500,000. Now it is a clothing store. Recently when we drove by, the glass windows were all shattered and held together with tape and kids, the same ones that stole from our store, were running out with arm full of clothes. A few minutes later, the owner stepped out looking ready to cry and went back in. Just posting a personal experience. Now I'm in college, and my friends back home tell me the kids who used to steal stuff all have gone to jail for one crime or another.
Apollonia Jordan, crack reporter for SF Bayview, National Black Newspaper, provides a textbook case of demonizing middleman minorities in a rant against Asian-owned beauty supply stores :
"Evil paranoid hate-bearing eyes are what Black people get when they walk into these Asian-owned beauty supply stores making money in our community. Every time we go into one of these stores, there is an Asian person following us around making us feel uncomfortable in your [sic] own community, because in their minds every Black person steals. These people have come into our community & taken over our beauty supply industry & what are we gonna do about it?"
Apollonia makes the ludicrous claim that Asian-run stores have "locked out Black-owned manufacturers from opening up beauty supply chains." Of course, the only way a new minority can 'take over' a market is to undersell, in this case by providing service in high-risk, high-crime neighborhoods.
William Raspberry on middleman minorities: "Their advantage is not knowledge but values: the willingness to live upstairs over the store, to put their children to work behind the counter & to keep to themselves. Make no mistake, they do serve - no matter that their service is likely to be described by those who depend on it as gouging, exploitation or bloodsucking.
"The problem is, their entrepreneurial activity often involves intangibles: walk-to locations, convenient business hours, willingness to run the risks of robbery, theft & nonpayment - all of which are exchanged for cash."
Thomas Sowell: "Where the middleman function has been performed by an ethnically distinct group, such groups have been among the most hated minorities anywhere. Few have experienced the centuries of animosity, persecution, mob violence, mass expulsions & wholesale slaughters which have been the fate of such middleman minorities as the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, the Jews in Eastern Europe or the Armenians in Turkey.
"All the blacks lynched in the entire history of the U.S. do not add up to the number of Chinese slaughtered in one year in 18th-century Vietnam or in 17th-century Philippines, & the mass killings of Armenians & Jews in the 20th century have been many times greater. Often such groups have been accused of charging exploitative prices & usurious interest. Yet it has been common for their expulsion to be followed by rising prices, higher interest rates & shortages of goods."
Kim McKee on the Black-Korean Conflict (pdf): "Many African Americans are unaware that these stores operate on a low overhead & are mom-and-pop establishments, where in the owner's mind, any time he loses a candy bar, a bottle of milk, or a package of cracker jacks, that?s 10ยข more he has to take out of his pocket to service the debt.
"Merchants in D.C. routinely work 12-to-14 hour days, 6 days a week. Yong Kim, a Korean grocery store owner, works from 10 to 9, 6 days a week, every week of the year because the $5700/month he owes in rent & taxes means he can never close his store. Kathleen Hom, a mayoral assistant on the Commission on Asian & Pacific Islander Affairs, discovered that merchants make an average of $8000 a year: 'Most rent their spaces & have no medical or property insurance.'"
Note that Apollonia's rant is in a paper that's big on reparations. So while she's pissed at the work ethic of Asian immigrants, the message to black kids is, Whitey owes you, so why work hard?
