2018 Black Friday Brooklyn Beefing Ad
A Nail Salon Brawl Opened a Racial Rift Online. In Brooklyn, the Mood Is Calmer.
Tionna Smalls does not remember when tensions between black residents and Korean-American merchants rocked her Brooklyn neighborhood decades ago. But when she saw a video of Asian nail salon workers attacking African-American customers last week, she said she knew exactly what she was seeing.
"I'm tired of the disrespect in the black community," said Ms. Smalls, 33, a former star of the VH1 reality show "What Chilli Wants."
The video of the melee went viral. Ms. Smalls took to Twitter to call for protests. People from around the country flooded the website Yelp to denounce the salon, calling its workers racist, often in incendiary language.
It was an old-school flare-up along New York's ethnic fault lines, eerily reminiscent of a corrosive 1990 conflict between an Asian-American grocer and African-American and Caribbean-American residents. And it was a new-school demonstration of the power of social media to turn a Friday night fight into a national spectacle.
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But there was one element missing: Instead of escalating, the conflict seemed to be calming down.
Even as online outrage bubbled, many in the neighborhood described an isolated episode involving only one store in an area where relations between Asian-Americans and Caribbean-American and African-Americans were largely harmonious.
"My customers know me," said Stacy Teo, who works at Nostrand Nail nearby, where customers took her side against the picketers. "I've never had that before."
Denise Benn, 66, a black woman who was getting a manicure at a nearby shop called Beautiful Red Apple Nails, blamed the conflict on the customers, not the salon workers. "These people don't bother anybody," she said. "They work hard, 12 hours seven days a week, my God, and the people come in there and they don't want to give them a tip."
The trouble began Friday night, when a dispute between workers and customers at 888 Happy Red Apple Nails in the largely black East Flatbush section of Brooklyn turned violent. A video of the brawl, showing a salon worker hitting customers with broomsticks, quickly reached 750,000 views. A worker and a customer were arrested.
On Monday, demonstrators forced the salon to shutter its storefront, with the police escorting the workers to a van, and picketed other nail salons nearby. Videos of the protests, in turn, circulated online, adding to the air of conflict.
For some residents, the video had stirred familiar grievances. Stacy Ann Thomas, 35, who is black, said a reckoning was past due. "They just see dollar when they see you," she said of the Asian-owned businesses in the neighborhood. "They don't see a person. They don't see you, me — they just see the money."
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That accusation dates back at least to 1984, when African-Americans held a yearlong boycott of several Asian-owned businesses on West 125th Street in Manhattan, causing at least one store to leave the neighborhood. A second boycott, of a Korean-owned fish market in Jamaica, Queens, a largely black neighborhood, was settled amicably.
Then the conflict moved to Brooklyn in 1990 — to a Korean-owned grocer not far from the current pickets, coincidentally also called Red Apple. This time the news media helped fan the flames, aided by the activist Sonny Carson, whose intransigence and highly charged rhetoric sapped the resources of David N. Dinkins, the city's first African-American mayor.
Mr. Carson knew his street theater.
"In the future," he said, "there'll be funerals, not boycotts." The store owner eventually sold to another Korean merchant, and the boycott ended.
But by then, the tensions were national.
The following year, after a Korean-American grocer in Los Angeles was given no jail time for fatally shooting a black teenager, the rapper Ice Cube answered Mr. Carson's rhetoric in the song "Black Korea," threatening: "Pay respect to the black fist / Or we'll burn your store right down to a crisp."
When African-Americans in Los Angeles rose up the next year after the beating of Rodney King, a black motorist, by police officers, Korean-owned stores appeared to be singled out for destruction.
More recently, the Asian-American community in New York has contended that it has been targeted and overlooked. Protests and cries of scapegoating followed the 2016 conviction of a Chinese-American police officer, Peter Liang, for killing an unarmed African-American man, Akai Gurley, in Brooklyn. Asian-Americans pointed out that white police officers had often not been prosecuted in killings of black men.
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In June, calls by Mayor Bill de Blasio to change the admission process for the city's elite high schools, where Asian-American students make up a disproportionate share of the student body, were met with what Jo-Ann Yoo, executive director of the Asian-American Federation, called "tremendous anger among parents around the lack of engagement prior to the announcement."
Asians remain the poorest immigrant group in the city.
Claire Jean Kim, author of "Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City," said that the potential for conflict is heightened now because a new group of entrepreneurial Asian immigrants is fiercely opposed to affirmative action, which Asian-Americans have long supported.
"For people like the nail salon proprietors, they feel, 'We come to this country, we're working hard, providing a service at low cost, you should not take your frustrations out on us,'" Dr. Kim said.
By Tuesday morning in Brooklyn, as Ms. Smalls and others were calling for more demonstrations, 888 Happy Red Apple Nail Salon, also known as New Red Apple Nails, remained shuttered. Handwritten signs read "Black Women Matter!!" and "It's time for us to come together and unite as one."
Carol Branche, a real estate broker, propped broomsticks against the shop window as reminders of the attack.
Nearby, other Asian-owned salons were back to business as usual, with African-American customers getting their regular treatments.
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At Nostrand Nail, Aretha Alexander, 49, said she did not see tensions between blacks and Asians in the neighborhood. "I've never experienced that anywhere," she said. Instead, she blamed the heat. "Summertime, it's always a lot of conflict. Gunshots, people fighting, I don't know why."
Kelly Yang, 50, who owns a beauty supply store a few doors down from 888 Happy Red Apple Nails, said a black man walked into her store on Monday and demanded she close her shop. But Ms. Yang, who is Korean, said she wasn't intimidated and told him he was discriminating against her. Ms. Yang said she understood why people were upset but said Asian workers in the community shouldn't be targeted for the actions of workers at one store.
"We are all human beings, we are all neighbors," she said. "I hope this doesn't expand any racial problem."
The demonstrations could still grow. A protest on Tuesday night at a nearby nail salon drew about 50 people, with the police looking on. The store shut early, and the police escorted workers who were leaving into a van.
Kyeyoung Park, a professor of anthropology and Asian American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has written about black-Asian tensions for two decades, said the specifics of the current situation gave her pause.
"It's not the same thing as the 1990s," she said. "Over all, I would say the tension has been contained," she said.
But Dr. Park said she worried that the nail salon fight opened a new front for conflict, because past episodes had involved retail settings where customers had only brief contact with workers. At nail salons, she said: "Customers have to stay there for some time. It gives them a chance for dialogue. But when you have dialogue, it doesn't always lead to a nice conversation."
And, she added: "Maybe social media changes everything."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/07/nyregion/brooklyn-nail-salon-brawl-protest.html