The controversy at Beauty Island shows no signs of letting up. In fact, it’s getting hotter. Everybody’s weighing in on the subject: Milwaukee’s Common Council president, District Attorney McCann, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s editorial board, the County Sheriff --- and right-wing radio talk show host Mark Belling. (And you’re right, Brother Teju, he is a dead ringer for MTV’s Butt-Head.)
Beauty Island is a hair products store located in a predominantly Black shopping area on Milwaukee’s North Side. Korean owned, it caters to an overwhelmingly Black clientele. Numerous customers have at various times complained of what they considered rude or disrespectful treatment by the store’s employees. The complaints have surfaced in Black newspapers, radio talk programs and in articles by Black news commentators in the major corporate media.
About a year ago, an incident took place in which a pregnant Black woman maintains she was kicked in the stomach by a store employee. The store owner maintains the woman was merely being restrained after having allegedly been caught shoplifting. The woman was never charged with any crime. Neither was any store employee.
In response, a group of rap artists called for a boycott of the store and began picketing it on a regular basis. Black radio talk show co-hosts Michael McGee and Teju Ologboni ("The Word Warriors Report", heard mornings on WNOV) have both played leading roles in the boycott, walking the line and reporting on it regularly.
Recently a series of small fires at the store has led to a broad range of media attacks on the picketers and especially on longtime activist Michael McGee, with many commentators (virtually all of them white) accusing him of whipping up violence and racial hatred.
For many racists in the Milwaukee area, McGee has been the Black man they love to hate. A former Black Panther, former Common Council Alderman and nationally known founder of Milwaukee’s Black Panther Militia, McGee has become the object of a media rage rarely if ever focused on the racism for which Milwaukee has become more famous than its beer.
But with all their attacks on McGee and the protesters, the corporate news media and public officials have totally ignored the central issue in the story: the right of the Black community to control its own destiny.
The issue of "outside" merchants in the Black community is an old one. Traditionally, a series of ethnic groups other than Black --- and other than northern, light-skinned European --- have set up small shops in the African American community. In Harlem they were historically Jewish. In Spike Lee’s movie "Do the Right Thing" they were Italian. In some places they are Palestinian or Yemeni or Korean.
Often they are ethnic groups who themselves suffer from discrimination and so have a difficult time setting up shops in predominantly white communities. And often they seem to have an easier time setting up shops than the Blacks who live in the communities where they operate. (Red-lining by the insurance companies and banks is a well-documented fact. American Family Insurance, for example, wouldn’t even insure Black homes in Milwaukee until the NAACP took them to court.)
The relationship between these shop-owners and the communities is inherently unequal. The shopowners, by and large, do not live in the communities where they do business and so the money they take in each day leaves the community each night. Their prices are often high and their quality often low. (Whether the reason for this is the limited resources of the shopowners or because they know that many of their customers lack the means to travel elsewhere is irrelevant to the customer, who pays more for less in either case.)
Many small stores in any community are family businesses and the owners tend to hire their own family members and friends. That becomes a problem when the owners do not live in the communities where they are located. These are the types of stores that traditionally provide many of the entry level retail jobs available to the community. If most of the shopowners are not from the community, that eliminates many of these jobs, particularly for the youth.
If you walk down North Avenue from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive straight through the Black community to about 50th Street, you can see the dimensions of the situation. The number of Black-owned businesses like Rip’s Video, Lena’s Market and the Amoco station at 12th St. are far outnumbered by stores owned by people living outside the community: clothing stores, appliance stores, furniture stores, gas stations, laundromats and so on. Few of these hire from the community.
So the profits leave the community. The jobs are cut off from the community. The prices are higher and the quality is lower. These factors feed a situation in which an already discriminated-against community has less and less power over its own resources and less control over its own destiny. The inevitable result is a buildup of resentment and anger that only needs a spark to ignite it.
If a shopowner is exploiting the Black community, they do it because they are a shopowner, not because they are Arab, Jewish or Korean. In other places and at other times, Arabs and Blacks have been solid allies, particularly over the issue of the Palestinian struggle. Similarly, many Jews have played a heroic role in the struggle for Black liberation, including laying down their lives for the cause. Being Jewish doesn’t make them exploiters. And when we marched in Philadelphia last August to demand freedom for African American Death Row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, the organization Young Koreans United was there in force, lending their voice to the struggle. In that case, Arabs, Jews, Koreans, Blacks and progressive whites were all allies.
This is why targeting one or another ethnic group as the problem --- or "foreigners" as a whole --- misses the point. It’s the relationship of the oppressed communities to small, non-community shop owners as a class that is at the center of the problem.
The fact that the shopowners come from outside the community gives them a responsibility to return something back to the community that is enriching them. Opening up hiring to include community members is one obvious option. So would be creating community-controlled funds for school scholarships, neighborhood playgrounds, day care centers, etc. Even more important would be a collective demand by all shopowners that redlining by the banks and insurance companies be ended. And then there’s the question of reparations by these banks and insurance companies.
The biggest irony is that all the attention focused on the small shopowners takes the spotlight off the really big exploiters of the community. Absentee landlords, for example, who gobble up half or more of a family’s monthly income. Or corporations like Wisc. Electric, Wisc, Gas and Ameritech. Or the multi-million dollar enterprises like Kohl’s Supermarkets or Goodwill Industries, which has just opened up a sweatshop at 27th and North.
These are the corporations that siphon the majority of the profits out of the community. And they’re not owned by Koreans, Arabs or Jews. They’re owned by WASP’s --- white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants, the same people who run the city as a whole. It’s the Bud Seligs and Fred Strattons and Michael Joyces who decide if there’s going to be a new stadium or jail or convention center and where it’s going to be.
They could decide to put a new shopping center or industry on the North Side, but they don’t. They create the situation in which small shopowners from outside the community are able to take advantage of the lack of resources available to the Black community. And they control the media which then "explain" the situation to the rest of us.
Of course, the fact that there are bigger exploiters doesn’t excuse disrespectful and abusive behavior by small shopowners in the central city. And the subject of this disrespect is too often the Black woman. She’s the one who does much of the shopping, whether it’s for food, household goods, clothing or hair products. And she’s got nearly 500 years of the most vile abuse behind her already.
If the allegations against the owner of Beauty Island are true, if he allowed or encouraged a store employee to physically abuse a pregnant Black woman customer, then it is the community’s right to decide whether or not the store should continue to operate.
It’s the community’s decision --- not a government mediator, not the DA, not the Journal Sentinel and not Mark "Butthead" Belling. Just the community. By picketing, boycotts or any means necessary. Because the shopowner is exploitative, disrespectful and abusive.
But not because he’s a "foreigner".
In the same way, it’s the Black community’s right to decide who should represent them. If the FCC, the DA or any other government agency should move to have "The Word Warriors Report" removed from the air, then all progressives in Milwaukee --- of whatever race or nationality --- should rally behind them and defend their right to speak.
That’s what it means to respect the right to self-determination.