Inglewood Opens the Wal-Mart Wars

The defeat of the proposed Wal-Mart supercenter in Inglewood was a great victory for the community. But I’m afraid it was just the opening salvo in a war that’s going to intensify in the months ahead as the world’s largest corporation continues to expand from its rural and suburban roots into urban areas across the country.

Already, the company has shown that it’s willing to play tough in the process -- cynically wooing the support of African American leaders with a liberal sprinkling of cash as it moves into the cities.

Wal-Mart’s targeting of blacks started long before it put its initiative on the Inglewood ballot. During this year’s celebration of the Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday, for instance, Wal-Mart saturated black-themed TV shows on cable and network stations with a torrent of ads. The ads showed smiling, cheerful black shoppers praising Wal-Mart for selling top-quality goods at bargain-basement prices and for being a leader in revitalizing shamefully underserved black communities.

Wal-Mart has also ladled out millions for scholarships to teacher groups, the 100 Black Men, the United Negro College Fund and the Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund.

Four years ago, Wal-Mart gave $300,000 to the NAACP. Much of that money went for youth business-training programs, and thousands of dollars more went to local NAACP chapters. The group, in return, rewarded Wal-Mart with its Pacesetter award for its support of the NAACP’s activities. And Wal-Mart donated another $150,000 to the NAACP at the group’s annual conference in Miami Beach in 2003.

An NAACP official reciprocated the compliment and called Wal-Mart a friend and a corporation that shares its vision.

This is not to suggest that there’s anything wrong with giving money to business-training programs and scholarships. But it’s important to be realistic about just what the company is doing. Wal-Mart officials know that they will face opposition in black communities and that it will help if they’ve already built good relationships with opinion makers and political leaders.

Indeed, in the Inglewood Wal-Mart ballot battle, the silence from mainstream black organizations -- such as the NAACP and Urban League -- that have been recipients of Wal-Mart largess was deafening.

Although black activists, liberal black church leaders and some local politicians opposed the initiative, the top black organizations were nowhere to be found. This despite the fact that, in the last year, Wal-Mart has been relentlessly hammered for its union-busting tactics, stung by adverse court rulings for unfair labor practices and slapped with racial and sexual discrimination lawsuits.

Of course, some African American leaders had legitimate, thoughtful reasons for supporting Wal-Mart that go beyond the company’s willingness to fill their coffers. With its promise to bankroll private development in economically depressed areas without asking for a dime of taxpayer dollars, thereby creating thousands of new jobs, the company appears on the surface to be the answer to the desperate plea that black leaders have made for years to banks, corporations and government to pump massive investment dollars into decaying urban communities. This has been a long-standing sore spot in L.A., where city officials and major corporations have largely failed to keep the mountain of promises they made, after the 1992 riots, to bring major business to the area.

Then there’s the high unemployment rate among young black males. According to a recent Labor Department report, more than 35% of young black men are unemployed, more than double the rate for young white men. Jobs, like those being offered by Wal-Mart, are desperately needed. So it’s no surprise that many black leaders were drawn to the prospect of hundreds of new Wal-Mart jobs -- even nonunion and low-paying jobs. Some argue that they are better than nothing.

But as the people of Inglewood ultimately recognized, Wal-Mart is not the answer. Its well-documented record of labor and environmental abuses, and a much-deserved reputation for corporate arrogance, made this exactly the wrong company to be exempted from local government scrutiny and from environmental and land-use laws.

Wal-Mart has shown that it will use its money, ad muscle and PR skill to woo, court and buy the silence or support of black leaders and sell the message that it is the best corporate friend that blacks have. Despite its crushing defeat in the Inglewood supercenter fight, that’s a message that we’ll probably continue to hear from Wal-Mart.