Former Atlanta mayor, congressman and United Nations ambassador Andrew Young has been in the news recently due to remarks he made in Los Angeles earlier this month. He was quoted as saying: "Those are the people who have been overcharging us — selling us stale bread, and bad meat and wilted vegetables. And they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they've ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it's Arabs, very few black people own these stores."

Since then, he has felt compelled to apologize to the Jewish, Korean and Arab communities for what was condemned as racist comments. Conservative commentators had a field day tearing Mr. Young to shreds while liberals insisted he make amends. In retrospect, even Young himself claimed he could haves spoken more, well, diplomatically.

But what was the real crime here? It is hardly a secret, especially within the black community that small, non-black owned mom-and-pop stores have been grossly over-charging their black customers and/or selling them sub-standard goods for decades. The backdrop for this debacle was Wal-Mart, the gargantuan mega-store that has been putting small shops out of business for many years. But regardless of that issue, years before Young made these comments, when I first moved to Oakland in 1991, I noticed that in all of Oakland’s so-called “flatlands” (Oakland’s predominantly black neighborhoods), that it was a very rare occasion to see a black-owned business. 95% of the time they were owned and operated by Asians and Arabs, who DID overcharge them, sold them shoddy merchandise AND were routinely rude and dismissive to their customers.

What does all this mean in the larger picture? When non-blacks run small businesses in black neighborhoods, the combination of emotional detachment and cultural ignorance doesn’t just mean that racism creeps in, it charges in brutally, like a bull in a china shop. Does mean that ALL non-black shop owners are racist? Of course not. But it does expose, once again, the underbelly of capitalism, where blacks have traditionally been at the bottom rung and to this day, there are those who ardently wish to keep it that way. I have seen cases where Africans have run small shops and display the same contempt for American blacks that these other groups have displayed.

Mr. Young’s comments have shed light again on the sad fact that black neighborhoods are the only ethnic communities that by and large, do not have people running business who look like them. Nearly all white, Latino and Asian neighborhoods do. His comments predictably opened yet another Pandora’s box of over-heated rhetoric.

I hope that if nothing else, this incident opens up a sorely needed dialogue between various communities and individuals. Many will be hesitant to engage in said dialogue since it will almost certainly be a clumsy dialogue at best. But I would still prefer a clumsy dialogue to no dialogue at all.