Andrew Young caught being hypocritical

It's Mel Gibson all over again. This kind of gaffe is known as "stepping on one's dick."

Quoting the International Herald-Tribune:

Andrew Young, the American civil rights leader who was hired by Wal- Mart Stores to improve its public image, has resigned from that post after telling an African-American newspaper that Jewish, Arab and Korean shop owners had "ripped off" urban communities for years, "selling us stale bread, and bad meat and wilted vegetables."

 In the interview, published Thursday in The Los Angeles Sentinel, a weekly, Young said Wal-Mart should displace mom-and-pop stores in urban neighborhoods.

"You see those are the people who have been overcharging us," he said of the owners of the small stores, "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."

Young, 74, a former mayor of Atlanta and a former U.S. representative at the United Nations, apologized for the comments and retracted them in an interview late Thursday. Less than an hour later, he resigned as chairman of Working Families for Wal-Mart, a group created and financed by the company to trumpet its accomplishments.  

"It's against everything I ever thought in my life," Young said. "It never should have been said. I was speaking in the context of Atlanta, [what exactly does that mean?] and that does not work in New York or Los Angeles."

***Explaining his comments about Koreans, Jews and Arabs, Young said he was referring to the history of retail ownership in the neighborhood where he lives in southwestern Atlanta.  

"The only thing I can do," Young said Thursday before he resigned, "is to ask that people judge me about a life of working together with people who are different and bringing people together without violence and without rancor. I would hope that would count for something." [That depends: is he willing to extend the same forgiveness to others? I doubt it.]

Suggested reading: Shelby Steele's newest book, White Guilt, provides an excellent perspective on the way people like Andy Young have perverted the civil rights movement, to the detriment of all races.

tags: wal mart  race hustling  hypocrisy  

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