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208 18. Dinkins’s First Months Mayor Dinkins was in office for only two weeks when his administration faced a new racial confrontation.On January 18,1990,at Bong Jae Jang’s Red Apple green grocer store in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood, a Haitian immigrant woman accused Jang and two of his employees of assaulting her for allegedly stealing. The Korean merchants denied Giselaine Fetissainte’s charge and countered that she became angry when they asked her to pay for three dollars worth of fruit.1 Months before this skirmish, art imitated life. A scene in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing depicted tense relations between Korean immigrant merchants and black customers. A language barrier caused misunderstandings, and a real one now occurred at Red Apple on Church Avenue. The argument spread like wildfire when activist Sonny Carson led a black boycott of Red Apple and the Korean-owned grocer across the street. Media reports at that time reminded consumers that Robert (Sonny) Carson was a former Dinkins campaign worker (and target of Giuliani campaign attacks) and a convicted kidnapper.2 Some black radio shows openly endorsed the boycott and urged listeners to participate. But the city’s leading black newspapers kept a cautious distance. The Amsterdam News sought to convey the boycotter’s point of view without engaging in cheerleading.3 The June 9 lead headline, “Rallies Are Not Anti-Asian but for Justice, Organizers Say,” tried to lend credibility to the activists’ claims without openly endorsing them. The Harlem-based weekly also published guest editorials written by boycott leaders or advocates that included Carson and Alton Maddox.4 The City Sun used its pages to castigate the mainstream media for biased coverage of the boycott. The May 23–29 column “And So It Goes: Maintaining the Myths about Race” read in part: The Flatbush boycott story is being used as a counterweight to Bensonhurst (they’ve never shown as much emotion over Bensonhurst as over this boycott). The story takes some of the spotlight off Bensonhurst and, at the same time, lets the white media preachers say,“Look, there are black racists, too, not just the white ones.We’ve all got to work at brotherhood .” . . . The New York City white media are a case study in the use Dinkins’s First Months 209 of media power to define racial issues in a way that protects the status quo. Then they try to force the rest of us to live with their definitions.5 “Bensonhurst” referred to the Brooklyn neighborhood and the summer 1989 slaying of black teenager Yusef Hawkins by a white mob. Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz wrote that the Red Apple incident was a minor altercation that escalated. But the New York Post made a big deal of the clash. The tabloid played the story big for days and scolded its competitors for not doing the same. TV news cameras showed up at Church Avenue and Carson, and a few dozen demonstrators were able to act out before thousands of viewers.6 The protesters denounced Dinkins on camera for failing to end the boycott. An element missing from the story frame was that many neighborhood blacks believed the Korean grocers were set up as scapegoats. The City Sun remained more critical of the mainstream media coverage of the boycott than it was enthusiastic about the boycott itself. A few of its editorials mildly disparaged the boycotts.“More Heat than Light in East Flatbush,” on May 16–22, lamented the boycott’s “ineffective, confused leadership .”Yet City Sun news coverage,like that of the Amsterdam News,treated the Red Apple boycott as legitimate political activity in pointed contrast to the mainstream media coverage.7 Dinkins behaved ineffectively, equivocally, and timidly during this demonstration. Both shop owners obtained civil court injunctions that ordered demonstrators to remain at least fifty feet away from the shop entrances. Police officials appealed the instructions and said that enforcing the fifty-foot rule would drive demonstrators across the street to gather in front of a church,where potentially they could incite violent confrontations. The mayor did not instruct police to enforce the order. Instead Dinkins appointed a commission to review his handling of the incident. The commission criticized the district attorney for not vigorously investigating and prosecuting the Haitian shopper’s original complaint. A prominent newsweekly praised the mayor’s conduct.8 As the boycott wore on for months, Korean American leaders saw their constituents as pawns caught between black...

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