WHAT WAS Andrew Young thinking?
The civil rights icon turned corporate pitchman last week gave up the ultimate gig -- national urban liaison for Wal-Mart -- after accusing Jewish, Korean and Arab small-business owners in South L.A. of selling inferior goods to black customers. Young was in town to do some selling of his own, which is why he had a meeting with staffers at the Los Angeles Sentinel, the West Coast's oldest black newspaper. The Sentinel published the controversial remarks as part of a lengthy interview with Young in which he argued the merits of bringing more Wal-Mart stores into the 'hood.
Turns out it was the last such argument he'll be paid to make. Wal-Mart was so horrified that the former U.N. ambassador it hired to shore up ethnic relations was besmirching Jews and Koreans that it eagerly accepted his resignation. A day after the story broke, Young quit. As everybody in Hollywood knows -- Mel Gibson comes to mind -- grace usually goeth before the fall.
But when I ask what Young was thinking, I'm not referring primarily to his boneheaded racial remarks. I'm referring to his boneheaded move of taking the Wal-Mart job in the first place.
Young has worked for multinational corporations for years, notably Nike, and has endured plenty of criticism for it. But heading up the happy-sounding Working Families for Wal-Mart seemed particularly ill-timed. The biggest company in the world has grown ever-more unpopular as its worldwide exploitation of workers, including a determination to keep unions away that can be described as fascist, has become more well known.
After sapping the local economies of rural and semirural America, Wal-Mart set its sights on the urban market -- corporate-speak for big, diverse cities like Chicago and Los Angeles that are densely populated with middle- to low-income black and Latino consumers. It swooped into Inglewood two years ago and put an initiative on the ballot that would have allowed one of the first Wal-Mart Supercenters in the state to be built -- and would have allowed Wal-Mart to do it with virtually no city oversight. Inglewood voters rightly rebuffed the measure, rejecting Wal-Mart's pitch that $5 T-shirts and $7-an-hour jobs would be the most transformative thing to happen to downtrodden black folk since the civil rights movement.
In such a context, bringing in former civil rights hero Young to do damage control, to belatedly lend some black credibility to the "urban" effort, seemed like a bad joke. Wal-Mart obviously missed the irony. The famously suave Young didn't blink an eye.
