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Civility in the City : Blacks, Jews, and Koreans in Urban America
Civility in the City Blacks Jews and Koreans in Urban America Author:Jennifer Lee 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,... more » in fact, social order, routine, and civility are the norm. 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. "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, Los Angeles Times« less