Koreatown Moving into Oakland

This Hyphen Magazine article just begs for my Special Attention (pat pending):

And with the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen, I now live in Koreatown.

Warning: helpless whiney victimization ahead.

Yes, Oakland now has a Koreatown, or more precisely, a “Koreatown/Northgate Community Benefit District,” which means the businesses along Telegraph between 20th and 35th pay higher taxes and get more policing and cleaning.

I saw the streetlamp banners go up a few weeks ago, and heard my local cafe owner complain good-naturedly about the absurdity of it. Only 7 percent of the property in the area is owned by Koreans, and the majority of them are owners only, not residents.

Translation: we don’t take kindly to your kind ’round ‘hea.

There’s a lot of potential for conflict here, as in L.A., where nonresident landlords call the shots with resident, often black, business owners. And there is already some conflict, not surprisingly primarily with black business owners, including one who claims that his Korean landlord threatens him and is trying to drive him out of business.

Setting the stage with the familiar Black versus Korean conflict dichotomy. Apparently this hasn’t gone out of style since the Rodney King LA riots of the 90′s even in this so-called Age of Post-Racial America under Barack Obama as POTUS. Blacks = victim, Koreans = oppressor.

But, according to the linked East Bay Express article, the board of the Benefit District nonprofit has hired a local Af Am resident to be the community ambassador (and he sounds pretty awesome.) And the spearhead of this whole endeavor, Alex Hahn, seems to get it, too:

Such sentiments are nothing new to Alex Hahn, who operated businesses in majority African-American neighborhoods for years. “We have to understand: if you non-black community, you get in there, they think you invade their territory,” he said, adding that the situation is the same no matter what race the majority community is.

First rule of American identity politics, get token member of the opposing side to voice your agenda to give it added legitimacy.

Mr Alex Hahn needs to get a bit of a clue. It not a primarily a “race thing” although that can be an aggravating factor on the surface level.

Years ago, a friend of mine, a recent arrival from Korea, was planning to open a PC-Bang near a local high school in the township of Livingston, NJ, an upper-middle-class enclave of mostly White, Jewish, and Asian residents. His reasoning was that the Fort Lee/Palisades Park, NJ area was too saturated and Livingston was like a virgin territory.

Long story short, his business plans failed because he could not get an approval from the town council. At the last minute, the permit was reevaluated and eventually canceled because one of the board members, a parent and a teacher, had read a newspaper article about a gang-related violence which happened in a PC-Bang in Queens, NY. My friend, who had thought the permit would be a sure thing, had already made binding agreements with vendors, commercial contractors, and the owners of the retail space. He was sued for breach of contract and eventually lost all his investment capital, which was tens of thousands of dollars. He did not blame any of this on “racism” but attributed it mostly to his own mistakes and naivete about doing business in America.

Another example, my girlfriend, who is Jewish, works as a director of a non-profit sketch comedy organization looking to open a small theater in the Village, Manhattan. The owner is a White dude who is a small-time millionaire who made his dough in internet related companies prior. They are looking to obtain a liquor license, standard operating procedure of theaters, but the municipality requires approval from the community. They are facing resistance from the residents concerned about possible rowdy comedy club-goers disturbing the peace and dragging down property values. Racism is obviously not involved here.

This is a reality of doing small business in America.

Mr Hahn does everyone involved a great disservice by helping to frame the discussion in terms of race, rather than specific pragmatic issues relevant to a potentially volatile situation. People can actually do something about the issues. People cannot change their race but the race card invokes helpless victimization which in turn leads to hostilities.

That’s why he says it’s important that the Korean businesses include everyone, and be sensitive to their concerns. “I think we owe them because we make money from their community,” he added. “We have to give them opportunity.” When he operated Acorn Market in West Oakland, Hahn said the majority of workers he hired were from the neighborhood. When young people came and vandalized his store during the Rodney King riots, he chose not to call the police because he said it would have made the situation worse.

Unfortunately, because of the laws of economics and certain biases harbored by many Korean-Americans, no matter how well they have learned Politically Correct double-speak, Mexican labor will be preferable to hiring Afro-Americans. Mr Alex Hahn’s sentimentality sounds like a wonderful lame attempt at PR and a weak call for Affirmative Action by Koreans for Black hiring on the retail business level, something which he must know in his heart won’t happen.

This broad perspective is important because of the (sometimes justified) perception that Koreans come into African American communities, make money off of them, only hire other Koreans, and then take the money back out of the community. It’s a pretty … well … colonizing thing to do — to come into a neighborhood you don’t even live in, buy up the property, and then decide to call it after yourself.

Will someone PLEASE tell “Claire” and send a memo to the African-American community that we Koreans were not the ones who brought them on slave ships out of Africa and kept them in bondage for 300 years? Will someone PLEASE tell Alex Hahn that the last thing we Korean-Americans need is to be manipulated with a Yellow version of White Guilt?

On the other hand, if you’re the only community willing to take that kind of action, the only one that’s participating in the meetings and doing the legwork, how should that work be acknowledged?

A disclaimer: Claire’s one-line grand claim to “journalistic objectivity”.

And if the name were to acknowledge the predominantly black community it’s located in, how would you do that? What would you call it? There are only district names for African and Carribbean immigrant enclaves, not African American communities.

Almost every heavily black area in major US cities has a Martin Luther King, Jr Blvd or a Malcolm X Blvd, places where White folks are scared to be in.

How do you capture that in a name, especially since, although they are still far too often second class citizens, African Americans are still universally considered American, whereas immigrants … not so much. It’s only the foreign Other that requires naming in this manner.

Evidently, Claire seems to think the Korean-American communities don’t not have hard-working, tax-paying Americans. We’re simply the “Foreign Other”. Believe it or not, Blacks can be racist too. Many of them have learned not a damn thing with their Black History Months, MLK, Jr, Civil Rights, yaddy yaddy yada. They have even less of an excuse than White people.

And that may be one of the reasons that Oakland doesn’t have an African American-town. It’s not just that most major American cities have substantial African American populations. It’s that Oakland is known as an overwhelmingly black city. Like Atlanta or Washington D.C., you just say the city name and everyone knows what group dominates there. In fact, Oakland is often used as a metonym for a predominantly black city.

No comment.

And that in itself is misleading, since in Oakland is spoken over 150 languages (although interestingly enough, since about half of the Oakland Public School system’s students are African American, in 1996 African American Vernacular English [AAVE], a.k.a. “Ebonics,” was adopted as the school district’s second official language, and bilingual classroom instruction using Ebonics was mandated.) Just spend an afternoon on a bench on Lake Merritt, the city’s real commons, and you’ll get a sense of the enormous diversity of Oakland. I’d love to see “Oakland” become a metonym for incredible diversity led by African Americans. Think that’s too long a phrase for such a small word?

Ebonics? Oh, Jesus Fuckin Christ. That just says it all right there. One people, One language, under God.

WK, my personal life is not the primary focus of interest here. Furthermore, whatever I wrote in the hipster-grifter thread is valid, independent of the status of my personal details.

I am glad you dug up this article because there seems to be still quite some unfinished business between the KA community and the larger society, particularly Blacks.

Socio-economic realities in America, being what they are, often puts KA’s (especially retail business entrepreneurs) and Blacks in close proximity of each other, ready to butt heads. It seems the source of the friction are largely economic in nature. While I disagree with certain particulars of Mr Hahn’s approach to the problem, as I have stated above, I generally am sympathetic to the general gist of what he’s saying. I also acknowledge that KA’s have an image problem within the Black community, that we appear to be leeches extracting money from the urban areas and giving little in return.

KA’s do need to put more effort into the Black communities. But I do not believe in Affirmative Action hiring. Hiring should be based solely on qualification, work ethic, and merit and if a Black-American fits that bill they should be hired, but not simply because he’s Black. Does American professional sports, like football and basketball, dominated by Afro-Americans, have Affirmative Action for Asian-Americans? No, and they shouldn’t.

Despite the differences, the two communities have much in common. Both have a strong Christian church culture. We need to start having mixed Black-Korean congregations in some of these areas. There is a well-known saying that Sunday service is the most segregated hour in America. Innovative and socially aware and conscientious pastors need to start fulfilling this niche and boldly push the envelope in unexplored directions. Praise time during 2nd gen gyopo services are utterly lame and 1st gen congregations are still stuck in the 19th century. We uptight, stiff upper-lipped neo-Confucians make White people look positively dynamic and that’s really saying something! The Blacks could teach us a thing or two about energetic and lively worship services. In many ways, the Black and Asian communities have strengths and weaknesses that are complementary and when the two approach each other in the spirit of lending a mutual helping-hand it could lead to much greater understanding and demolish walls. It never fails to amaze me how gyopo church-goers, forever enthusiatic about overseas short-term mission trips, neglect the needs of the urban poor and disenfranchised in our own backyards right here in America! KA’s, famous for our obsession for education, should be marching in legions into the inner–city schools as teachers and volunteers to help close the achievement gap, which is often recognized as an unfinished battle of Civil Rights, demonstrating to urban youth that education is not a White folks thing, pounding into their heads that education is the only ticket to survival in our flat world of global competition, and that they have even less of an excuse with the powerful example set by Obama in becoming President.

I dunno, dude. I think the jury’s still out on Michelle Rhee. Personally, I have my doubts about her.

If I had to reform education in America, first order of business is banning compulsory education. No child should be forced by the state to be in school. Education should be voluntary and would make for better quality schools across the board for the same reasons that a volunteer army is better than a conscripted army.

At the same time, the current model of a school and classroom (what F Reed refers to as “regimented ignorance factories”, which has remained largely unchanged in the past 2~3 centuries, has to be re-examined and totally revamped. Learning should be fun and meaningful rather than a dreaded chore. If boredom is the friction that impedes the mental engine then fun is the lubricant that makes it run better. In this day and age, advanced multimedia technology should be a regular fixture in the classrooms. I see no reason why the same geniuses that create CGI graphics in Hollywood movies and video games should not be tapped for developing 3-D computer generated videos to illustrate say, abstract concepts from science or mathematics.

Of course, the education bureaucracy itself needs a major overhaul. America’s downfall is that the notion of “civil service” is largely pejorative and the best minds go into the private sector. The inefficiencies of the bureaucracy should be reformed, the fat trimmed, wasteful leaks stop-gapped, and processes made rational and transparent.

In other words, education reform in America is a comprehensive beast that evokes Hercules and the Augean Stables. Compared to that, power-tripping as a “union-buster” is a cakewalk.

#30

Colontos:
I agree that the quality of schools would probably go up, but the quality of society would go down.

The focus of this discussion is the reforming the dysfunctional public educational system, not the larger problems of community and society. That’s a much bigger issue that must be dealt with separately although it is one that affects the schools as well.

If education is not compulsory, then these kids are not gonna go. They can’t get jobs until they’re 16ish, so until then they’ll be milling around on street corners and on rural roads, causing trouble. Youth crime would skyrocket. Drug use and dealing would increase. And these kids with no education now instead of a shitty education would be even more useless leeches and drains on society than they already are.

My contention is that this scenario is already happening and has happened even with our current state of education and policy. Compulsory education forces the street thugs-in-training and the unmotivated to sit side-by-side with those with a genuine desire to learn. It sacrifices the general welfare of good students and puts an enormous burden on teachers and staff. It has to stop. Given a choice, I’d rather have excellent public schools under the auspices of voluntary education and urban punks running amok outside instead of what we have now, which is mediocre public schools under the obsolete compulsory regime and urban punks running amok outside anyway regardless.

A better solution is this: take those don’t-give-a-shit kids with don’t-give-a-shit parents out of the regular schools and put them into military boarding schools. The parents don’t care and will be glad to be rid of the extra mouth to feed. Once these kids are in the military schools, we drill the fuck out of them and indoctrinate them 24/7. These kids form the core of our new, more powerful military and police forces. Bring some order to society and to the world.

The idea of military boarding schools for troubled youth from troubled families is an interesting one and should be carefully weighed on its own merits.

To elaborate further on my original train of thought, I believe that there has been an overall dumbing-down of standards and curriculum by the Political Correctness establishment. This is a tendency that repeats itself over and over again in US society, not just in education, which is, pandering to the lowest common denominator. The overall trend over the past few decades has been to dismantle high standards and lower expectations. This is how civilizations die.

Each grade level defers its teaching responsibilities and obligations unto the next higher grade until finally, you wind up with the absurdity of colleges and universities teaching remedial materials that should have been already mastered during high school to inner-city freshman students. If this regressive trend doesn’t stop, the worth of a Bachelors degree will be what a high school diploma once was in the past and the Masters degree will take the place of a Bachelors. Oh wait…that’s already happening.

I submit that the very opposite should be enforced instead. There is no reason why much of the core liberal arts curriculum typically covered in the 1st and 2nd years in the university should not be taught during high school. Higher education should be exerting a downward pressure of demand upon the lower grade levels instead of pandering to the dictates of the Political Correctness regime. As you can see, this would have an enormous uplifting effect in terms of what is expected of students as well as teachers. This represents a strenuous 180 degree reversal from the status quo. Such a push-back requires leaders of extraordinary integrity, courage, and willpower. As far as I can tell, no one, not even the mayor-appointed Washington DC education czar Michelle Rhee fits that bill.

But what about the poor troubled kids from bad family environments, etc? Again, the problems of the urban blight minority communities is the resultant legacy of 300 years of slavery and Jim Crow up until about 1965 ~1970. It is not going to go away overnight. But the Samsāraic cycle has to be thwarted by a decisive proactive intervention somewhere and I believe that “somewhere” is in the schools. It is not for nothing that many scholars and thinks agree that education is the last, unresolved battlegrounds of the Civil Rights Movement.