Election Thread

[Occhidiangela]

This has been another Asian immigrant offering a detailed explanation of his opinion. Thanks for reading!

I enjoyed your post.

I wish I had a copy of one of the commentaries I read in the early 1990's about "Asian immigrants" in California (it pointed mostly to Koreans). The gist of it was that local Korean communities were very good at internal networking, favor sharing, and at finding and acquiring working capital. The article seemed to imply a sort of "farmer's co-op" approach to families in the newtork. There was a hint to "reachback" into the Korean mother land, but I don't recall the author pinning his points on that.

The author pointed to a void in the (California) black community, as he saw it, in both the networking (particularly in raising capital) and in the entrepeneureal spirit. His theme was that micro economic development (the exam question being answered in the article) was not a failed attempt to re-energize some inner city blight, but a good idea that had not been given enough time to gestate, to nurture the attitude and world view that modest success (running a convenience store, opening a small business, opening a delivery franchise, running the local shoe store) was still a success to be proud of. At the time Atlanta was seeing a bit of a black-owned business boom, and I recall being less than impressed with the article's applicability beyond California.

The context is important. This was during the discussion of "are you better off now than four years ago," and the attendant accusation of the "American Dream" skipping parts of America, as well as looks into the root causes of this perception, and the various bits of reality that pointed to it.

I don't think it was a William Raspberry column, but it might have been.

Was the observation on the co-op method of raising capital accurate, to your knowledge?

Occhi