Cultural Conflict : Blacks and Korean-Americans Have Become Antagonists Instead of Allies, Although Both Feel Oppressed by Society.

The Wish is embodied in the words film director Spike Lee places in the mouth of a Korean-American merchant in “Do the Right Thing”: We are the same, we are brothers.

That is the essential cry of the film’s Korean immigrant grocer pointing to the color of his skin, begging that his store be spared as blacks in rebellion tear down what they perceive to be symbols of their oppression--businesses owned by “outsiders.”

But the reality in Los Angeles, where Korean-Americans have become the middlemen in poor minority neighborhoods, is fear, hostility and cultural misunderstanding between them and African-Americans.

The fundamental problem, however, is not that people of diverse cultural backgrounds are living and working in close proximity, says Lillian Roybal Rose, an expert in the fields of race relations and cross-cultural communications. “The problem is the inequality of social and economic power,” that African-Americans and Korean immigrants suffer, says Rose. They are the “targets” of oppression by the dominant white culture, she says.

Regardless of education and income, blacks continue to experience discrimination in every aspect of American life, according to the National Research Council’s recent report on the status of blacks in America, “A Common Destiny.”

Black poverty rates continue to be two to three times higher than rates for whites, the report said. The reason is “the negative attitude held toward blacks and the . . . actual disadvantaged conditions under which many black Americans live,” said the report. “These two consequences reinforce each other. Thus, a legacy of discrimination and segregation continues to affect black-white relations.”

As immigrants and nonwhites, Korean-Americans also experience discrimination and exclusion from the economic mainstream. Usually well-educated urbanites in their former country, Korean immigrants typically suffer a loss of status in America. They often work long hours in menial jobs for low wages. Their difficulty mastering English keeps them from the mainstream and segregated in Koreatowns. When they are able to start their own businesses, it’s usually in poor, minority areas where rents are cheap, crime high, and the social status of the neighborhood low.

Each group directs its frustrations, its feelings of relative powerlessness in the safest way it can--toward the other, explains Rose.

In this volatile environment, reality seems to have only one hue: blue, the color of vitriol.

‘Get Out of My Store’

“ ‘You stupid, you don’t do nothing, don’t work, you stupid. Get out of my store,’ ” one Korean-American merchant allegedly yelled at Iola McClinton.

The 33-year-old woman, a legal secretary for the Los Angeles County Worker’s Compensation Department, is seated in the living room of her apartment in the Mid-City section of Los Angeles, just east of Crenshaw Boulevard near Pico Boulevard.

Many of the store owners in the area are Korean immigrants. The residents are mostly black and Latino.

McClinton, who says she avoids Korean-owned businesses because “I have so many negative experiences with them,” went recently to one retailer to return a dress she had received as a gift.

The dress was too big. The purchase had been made three days earlier. She had a receipt. She gave it to the store owner and said she wanted to exchange the dress. The owner told her “ ‘No refund, (after) 24 hours,’ ” she recounts in mocking, broken English.

“I told him it was outrageous to enforce a 24-hour exchange policy and told him that it doesn’t say that on the receipt.” That’s when he told her to “Just get out!” and began calling her “stupid,” she claims.

“I’ve heard them (Korean merchants) call black people all kinds of stuff under their breath,” asserts Claire Ausbie, a 34-year-old medical claims examiner. She is one of eight people who have gathered in McClinton’s living room one recent evening after work.

What was to be a one-on-one interview with McClinton (in response to a letter she filed with the County Human Relations Commission charging mistreatment by Korean merchants) turns into a mini-neighborhood meeting. She has informed neighbors that a reporter is coming; they want to vent their concerns.

Theirs is the steady, clean-cut, solid-citizen demeanor one would expect to find among a group in Rosa Parks’ living room in Montgomery, Ala., in the 1950s. They make reference to Jesus Christ and Martin Luther King Jr. as models all people should follow in their daily interactions.

Grass-Roots Group

Three of the eight people present are members of OMNI, the Organization of Mutual Neighborhood Interest, an embryonic, grass-roots association planning to target and boycott merchants accused of unfair business practices and discriminatory behavior toward blacks.

The boycott is planned for Nov. 15, at the start of the holiday shopping season, says Ward Wesley, the 36-year-old owner of a Los Angeles janitorial service.

“When you ask if you can see the merchandise, they bark ‘No, no touch!’ They never want you to touch anything. Yes, that’s a big one, ‘Never touch! Don’t touch!’ ” says Wesley, again in mocking tones.

Ausbie observes: “It reminds me of . . . Texas. I’m from a black-white society. When I was a little girl and we went to buy clothes (blacks) couldn’t try them on. It’s the same thing with the Koreans. And I’m telling you . . . we don’t need any new Massa’s.”

In an intense but even voice, Wesley says: “The system--white people--is allowing drugs into our community. Then you’ve got gangs. That makes it an already volatile situation and when you bring in another element (Korean merchants) taking a person’s money and treating them less than human no matter how green your money is. . . .”

He stops, then continues: “I mean some (black) people, after years of struggle are making $70,000. They may stop in a Korean merchant’s store, get disrespected, called a name, and, after years of all that hard work, you really feel ready to kill somebody. We are already killing each other in the black community we are just one step away. . . .”

He pauses again. “I don’t want to see anything bad like that happen,” he says later, explaining he does not believe in violence. “But that’s how bad the sentiment is running. I know these young Crips running around feel that way, and, as dangerous as they are, no telling what they may start doing.”

‘Things Are Bad’

Wesley does not exaggerate, say members of the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission. “Things are bad,” says Larry Aubry, a member of the Commission and its black representative to the Black Korean Alliance (BKA). The alliance was formed in 1986 after three Korean-American merchants were killed by blacks during robberies in South-Central Los Angeles. “At least there have been no murders of merchants since the alliance was formed. In that sense, things are better,” he says.

Jai Lee Wong, the commission’s Korean-American representative to the BKA, nods grimly when she is told of Wesley’s assessment. “I know,” she says. She knows the anger on both sides. She echoes Aubry, “It’s bad.”

During the meeting in McClinton’s living room, Wesley repeats what other groups of blacks have demanded before of Asian-American merchants in the inner city: hire blacks, support the community by contributing funds to economic development projects or scholarships for black youth.

The group adds that it doesn’t like the blatant display of pornographic materials, “the first thing you see when you and your kids walk into many of these Korean-owned convenience stores,” says Debra Harrison, 37.

“They have all this drug paraphernalia there, too. That’s the last thing we need or want in our community,” says Wesley. “It shows a lack of respect. They just think we are animals. And they get that idea both before they come here and when they get here . . . from the way whites unfairly portray black people in the media.”

It is difficult to find Korean-American merchants who will discuss their conflict with blacks. Some fear their point of view will not be accurately portrayed by the media. Even the co-chairman of the Black Korean Alliance, Chung Lee, was reluctant to be interviewed. Only a surprise appearance by a reporter, engineered by Wong of the Human Relations Commission, resulted in an interview with Lee.

He does not speak English fluently, so his thoughts are conveyed through an interpreter. But his body language--eyes that seem to peer beyond the mere appearance of things, shoulders that shrug with a pragmatist’s acceptance of reality--already suggests what his translated words confirm.

If he had been sitting in Iola McClinton’s living room, “I would not have defended the Korean merchants. As there are good blacks and bad blacks, there are good Koreans and bad Koreans. It is true that Korean merchants have used derogatory words, racial epithets, toward blacks . . . and been rude to customers. We have to acknowledge that this is wrong,” says Lee, the president of the Korean Small Business Assn. in South-Central Los Angeles.

“I try to tell this to other merchants but their behavior is not changing at a fast enough pace.”

Unfortunately, says Lee, the Black Korean Alliance is not well-known. “People aren’t aware that they can call the BKA for help in resolving disputes.”

Lee suggests that before the group decides to picket or boycott a business that they take a list of demands to the store owner and give him the opportunity to correct the problems. “And if it is necessary, the merchant should also make a public apology,” he says. “If the Korean merchant insists on continuing in the same way, well . . . Then people have to do what they have to do.”

Depending on the situation, “I might even join them on the picket line,” says Lee.

By all means, if any Korean-American merchant is treating customers unfairly “employ every nonviolent means of direct action to put that particular business out of business,” says Mark Ridley-Thomas, executive director of the Los Angeles chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “But the same standard needs to be applied to others, irrespective of ethnicity.”

Ridley-Thomas adds: “I have lived in the African-American community all my life. I know only too well what the level of service is by African-Americans to African-American consumers and that those merchants are not called to accountability.”

Why the double standard?

“I’ve found that most of the sentiments aimed toward merchants who are from other parts of the world are born of the frustrations African-Americans experience generally. It may or may not have to do directly with the particular merchant. It has more to do with the history of exclusion around economic opportunity for African-Americans. And that is compounded by the long-standing xenophobia that characterizes . . . most Americans irrespective of ethnicity.”

Indeed, virtually all forms of interethnic conflict among minority groups are the result of oppression by the dominant culture, emphasizes Rose, the expert on cross-cultural communication.

‘Unlearning’ Racism

She conducts workshops on “unlearning” racism throughout the United States and has done so for most of the UC and Cal State campuses as well as the San Jose police and fire departments.

When Korean immigrants and blacks come into conflict, that is not racism, says Rose. It is the manifestation of “internalized oppression, which is different from the oppression itself.”

She points to the oppression of children--which she dubs adultism --by way of analogy. As children, “we were not allowed to vent the mistreatment we received. If we did, we’d get slapped for it and hurt” by parents or teachers--whoever was in power. “And we were too smart for that. So we adapted, established patterns for coping for survival.”

But those frustrations, those emotions must go somewhere. Since the oppression doesn’t allow children any power at all, they learn early that it can go two places, she says. It can be directed “against ourselves and against members of our own group. And if there’s any kind of imbalance of power, it will be against members of other groups.”

The pattern continues in all oppressed groups, she says.

In the eyes of many blacks, Korean merchants are not an oppressed group. They make money in the black community “and should put some of that money back in the community,” says Wesley.

But UCLA sociologist Harry Kitano points out that even when Koreans become entrepreneurs, “it is a constant struggle to lower labor costs in order to survive, and the struggle can lead to poor work conditions and to the overuse of family, extended family and other relatives.”

These immigrants face problems similar to those of other poor and minority people: absence of child care, latchkey children and domestic violence stemming from economic stress.

These pressures, aggravated by their loss of status in a new society where they are now minorities, leads to classic scapegoating, Rose and others say. Their targets are those lower on the social and economic totem pole: blacks, who then cry “No new Massa’s!”

When blacks demand that Korean merchants hire from the African-American community, they don’t realize how difficult that is to do, Lee says: “Most of the businesses are on a small scale. Other people may look at a store and say it’s big enough to have four or five people working, but in reality it’s usually just the husband and wife doing the work of four people.”

And when blacks are hired, or anyone outside of the family, “the loyalty is not the same. If you own your own store, there are higher expectations. So that becomes a difficult situation.”

Further, the idea that Korean-American merchants are so rich they can afford to invest in the black community “is wrong. It may seem that (we are rich) to outsiders. But if your whole life is working 15-16 hours a day and you get a nice car and a nice home, is that not an understandable human ambition?”

Lee suddenly laughs. “Of course, we are talking about the first wave of immigrants. Working those long hours won’t go on forever. My kids are like other American kids. They don’t want to work 16-hour days, either.”

He points out, “We are in the very early stage of our immigrant history in this country. For Koreans to develop this pattern of (hostility) toward blacks and for blacks to perceive Korean merchants in so terrible a light is bad.”

The success of Koreans and other minorities in America is due to the earlier struggles of blacks, he says.

Black people “have marched, gone to prison, been tortured and suffered to improve opportunities. As minorities who have come here at this point, we are very appreciative of what blacks have done,” he says. “I tell the history of our black customers to people around me. They are people we must respect.”