Civility in the City: Blacks, Jews, and Koreans in Urban America

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.)