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Overview
Hollywood and the news media have repeatedly depicted the inner-city retail store as a scene of racial conflict and acrimony. Civility in the City uncovers a quite different story. Jennifer Lee examines the relationships between African American, Jewish, and Korean merchants and their black customers in New York and Philadelphia, and shows that, in fact, social order, routine, and civility are the norm.
Lee illustrates how everyday civility is negotiated and maintained in countless daily interactions between merchants and customers. While merchant-customer relations are in no way uniform, most are civil because merchants actively work to manage tensions and smooth out incidents before they escalate into racially charged anger. Civility prevails because merchants make investments to maintain the day-to-day routine, recognizing that the failure to do so can have dramatic consequences.
How then do minor clashes between merchants and customers occasionally erupt into the large-scale conflicts we see on television? Lee shows how inner-city poverty and extreme inequality, coupled with the visible presence of socially mobile newcomers, can provide fertile ground for such conflicts. The wonder is that they occur so rarely, a fact that the media ignore.
Synopsis
Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnographic research, Lee (sociology, U. of California-Irvine) delves into inter-ethnic conflict and cooperation among African-America, Jewish, and Korean merchants and their black customers in five predominantly black neighborhoods in New York City and Philadelphia. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Publishers Weekly
Conflicts between Korean store owners and inner-city black customers have become a familiar symbol of American racial tensions, yet these clashes are really quite rare, argues University of California-Irvine sociology professor Jennifer Lee. Her study Civility in the City: Blacks, Jews, and Koreans in Urban America examines the relationship between African-American, Korean and Jewish store owners and their black customers in New York and Philadelphia. Interviewing merchants and customers and analyzing the economics of small-business ownership, she shows that the parties on both sides of the counter strive to make interactions pleasant and routine, yet she also examines how and why tensions can periodically escalate. (Sept.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Editorials
Los Angeles Times
A brighter and more surprising picture of life in California is painted by sociologist Jennifer Lee in Civility in the City, a remarkable book that focuses on the mom-and-pop businesses in the inner city as a laboratory where we can study how blacks, Jews and Koreans actually perceive and deal with each other. Lee's conclusions contradict what we were shown in Spike Lee's film Do the Right Thing or the news footage of the 1992 Los Angeles riots: "Civility prevails in everyday life because merchants and their employees actively work to preserve it."
— Jonathan Kirsch