Why do indians own so much damn business? We need to take notes

[#1 pick]

Most immigrants come here poor, fukk that, they sent the best here. The best ain't leaving their country where they are treated like kings to come to bullshyt America. They get chips to play the game from the gov't and banks. Blacks don't get those chips. Even us West Africans don't get those chips. We gotta do the education and professional fields hustle unless we go back home. I can't speak for the East Africans tho.

 

[#1 pick]

Been some reaaaaal airy, bs, and rhetoric filled replies in here since last night.
If its not about the inital barriers to entry for business ownership, your answer is wrong.

They don't hear you but as one mention. Where the fukk are the Black angel investors? The Blacks who can give loans on reasonable prices. shyt, I know Indians just off the boat and getting into a small town business. nikkas gotta have EVERYTHING so damn hard. Not everyone can do hard shyt, some ppl are great with help. This is the biggest issue for Blacks in America. The barrier of entry is impossible for most not to mention, the assimilation into white society while getting very little perks.

That reminds me, I need to finish up my report but this gets me thinking before church tomorrow when I am sleep.

 

[The Amerikkkan Idol]

Tim Wise.org
http://www.timwise.org/2002/10/con-fusion-ethic-how-whites-use-asians-to-further-anti-black-racism/
Con-Fusion Ethic: How Whites Use Asians to Further Anti-Black Racism
Posted on October 7, 2002
Published as a ZNet Commentary, October 7, 2002

It happened again, for what seems like the millionth time. Once again, in response to something I said about ongoing racism in the United States, someone (a white male, naturally) pulled out the all-too-common conservative race card (oh yes, they have one), which they believe disproves the existence of racial injustice. It sounds a bit like this:

“If racism is such a big deal in America, then why have Asians done so well? Why is Asian income higher than white income? And doesn’t this prove that the real problem with blacks is their own lack of effort?”

Offered this challenge most recently by a disgruntled county employee in Minneapolis who resented having to sit through a speech I had given, I rolled my eyes, took a deep breath and considered the irony of the query (ironic because it always comes from whites who insist on their “color-blindness”) before replying.

As I pondered my response, I thought about the Asian women working twelve hours a day in sweatshops both abroad and in places like L.A. to make clothes for people like this guy’s kids; and I wondered, in what sense were they doing so well? I thought about Vietnamese youth in California who are profiled as gang members by police, for wearing the “wrong” colors; and I wondered, in what sense were they doing so well? I thought about the Asian families whose members have to put in eighty hours a week just to keep their heads above water; and I wondered, in what sense were they doing so well? I thought about the Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi taxi drivers who endure crappy working conditions, customers who get pissy about their accents or “attitudes,” and cops who are responsible for nearly eighty percent of all anti-South Asian attacks in places like New York — often against these same taxi drivers — and I wondered, in what sense were they doing so well? I thought about the demonization of Wen Ho Lee, and Chinese American political contributors during the Clinton Administration; and the beating death of Vincent Chin; and the persistent refrain that the Japanese are “buying up America,” and I wondered, in what sense were they doing so well? But instead of getting into those things, which likely wouldn’t have been seen as responsive by my detractor, I offered the following.

First, I noted that the Asian “model minority” myth has long been a staple of white conservative race commentary, though rarely have members of the various Asian communities in the U.S. pushed the notion themselves. The genesis of this argumentation goes back to the 1950s and ’60s, when prominent magazines ran articles lauding the “hard-working” Chinese or Japanese, and explicitly contrasting their “success” with the “failure” of African Americans. That they offered such a contrast at the height of the modern civil rights movement — as if to say to black folks, “stop complaining about racism and just work harder” — should not be lost on anyone. Of course, none of these magazines ever editorialized in favor of lifting immigration restrictions that had kept Asian populations small in the U.S. from the 1880s until 1965, despite their respect for the “model minorities.” Neither did any such admirers speak out against internment of hard-working Japanese Americans during World War Two, or the killing of hard-working Southeast Asians during the Vietnam War.

Secondly, I explained that comparisons between blacks and Asian Pacific Americans (APAs) overlook a number of differences between them. Whereas the black population represents a cross-section of background, the APA community is highly self-selected. Voluntary migrants from nations that are not contiguous to their country of destination tend to have the skills and money needed to leave their home country in the first place. As many scholars have found, Asian immigrants are largely drawn from an occupational and educational elite in their countries of origin.

Indeed, Asian success in the U.S. relative to others is largely due to immigration policies that favor immigrants with pre-existing skills and education. As the Glass Ceiling Commission discovered in 1995, between two-thirds and three-quarters of the highly educated APA community already had college degrees before coming to the U.S., or were in college upon arrival. Thanks to preferences for educated immigrants, APAs are two-thirds more likely than whites and three times more likely than blacks to have a college degree. More than 8 in 10 Indian immigrants from 1966-1977 had advanced degrees and training in such areas as science, medicine or engineering.

Pre-existing educational advantages are implicated in Asian success, but hardly indicate genetic or cultural superiority. After all, to claim superior Asian genes or culture as the reasons for achievement in the U.S. requires one to ignore the rampant poverty of persons from the same backgrounds in their countries of origin. There is no shortage, after all, of desperately poor Asians in the slums of Manila, Calcutta and Hong Kong: testament to the absurdity of cultural superiority claims for Asians as a group.

Indeed, if one examines ethnic Koreans in Japan and the Burakumin there — a minority treated much like the Dalits and other lower caste persons in India — one finds the same kind of consistent underperformance relative to the dominant Japanese in terms of education and employment status. Both are targets of discrimination, and although they are culturally and genetically indistinguishable from other Koreans or Japanese, they are consistently found at the bottom of Japanese society, and do worse than others in Japan and Korea. Not only does this debunk the notion of pan-Asian cultural superiority, it also suggests that a group’s caste status influences group outcomes: much as with blacks in the U.S., whose position has been similar to the Burakumin and ethnic Koreans in Japan.

The primary argument put forth on behalf of the model minority myth is that APA income in the U.S. is higher than the average for other people of color and even whites. As such, it is suggested, racial discrimination must be long gone. But data showing Asians doing better than whites is family and household data, not per capita income data. This is important because APA households and families tend to have more family members (thus, slightly higher incomes have to cover more persons), and more earners per family (thus, it takes more folks working so as to earn only slightly more than whites, with fewer income earners). The average Asian household size, for example, is 3.3 persons, compared to only 2.5 per household for whites. Likewise, Asian American families are more likely than white families to have two income earners, and nearly twice as likely to have three earners. So while Asian household and family income is higher than that for whites, the median income per person is lower for Asians: as much as $2000 less annually.

An additional reason why the average income of Asian families is higher than that of whites is because Asians are concentrated in parts of the country that have higher average incomes and costs of living. The three states with the largest Asian populations and a disproportionate share of the overall Asian population (California, New York and Hawaii), rank 13th, 4th, and 16th in terms of average income: all within the top third of states. Whereas 76 percent of Asian Americans live in the higher-income regions of the West and Northeast, only 41 percent of whites and 28 percent of blacks are in these regions. Over half of all APAs in the U.S. live in just five major U.S. cities (Honolulu, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City): all of which have higher than average household incomes, and much higher costs of living than most of the U.S.

According to the Census Bureau, in 1996, median household income was $35,500. But in states with disproportionate shares of Asians (NY and Hawaii, for example), median household income was $39,000 and $42,000 respectively. This means that APA median income will be skewed upward, relative to the rest of the country, but given cost of living differences, actual disposable income and living standards will be no better and often worse.

More importantly, claims of Asian success obscure the fact that the Asian American child poverty rate is nearly double the white rate, and according to a New York Times report in May of 1996, Southeast Asians have the highest rates of welfare dependence of any racial or ethnic group in the United States. Nearly half of all Southeast Asian immigrants and refugees in the U.S. live in poverty, with annual incomes in 1990 of less than $10,000 per year. Amazingly, even those Southeast Asians with college degrees face obstacles. Two-thirds of Lao and Hmong-American college graduates live below the poverty level, as do nearly half of Cambodian Americans and over a third of Vietnamese Americans with degrees.

Indeed, Asian “success” rhetoric ignores the persistent barriers to advancement faced by Asians relative to whites. On average, APAs with a college degree earn 11 percent less than comparable whites, and APAs with a high school diploma earn, on average, 26 percent less than their white counterparts. When Asian American men have qualifications comparable to white men, they still receive fewer high-ranking positions than those same white men. APA male engineers and scientists are 20 percent less likely than white men to move into management positions in their respective companies, despite no differences in ambition or desire for such positions.

Beyond statistics, there are other points to be made. First, if whites truly believe that Asians are culturally superior and add to the quality of schools and workplaces, then why aren’t these folks clamoring for a massive increase in immigration from Asian nations? Why not flood the borders, since we could all benefit from a little more Asian genius? Why not have white CEOs step down from their positions and let Japanese managers take their place?

Secondly, whites who trumpet the model minority concept would be the first to object if Asian Americans began to bump their own white children from college slots, even if they did so by way of higher test scores and “merit” indicators. Just ask yourself what would happen if next year the top 3500 applicants to U.C.-Berkeley, in terms of SAT score and grades, happened to be Asian Americans, especially since there are only 3500 slots in the freshman class. Would the regents allow the freshman class at the state’s flagship school to become 100 percent Asian? Or for that matter even 80 percent or 70 percent? How would white Californians react to such a development, including those who praise hard-working Asian kids for their educational excellence and scholarly achievements? How would white alums react if their favorite “model minorities” were suddenly seen as taking slots not from black and Latino youth, but from their own white children? To ask the question is to answer it.

And finally, to argue that “Asians have made it, so why can’t blacks,” is to misunderstand the issue of moral and ethical responsibility to correct the harm of wrongful actions. Even if we accept that groups victimized by racism can “make it” without affirmative action or reparations, that would not deny (or indeed speak to in any way) the fact that society has an obligation to compensate the victims of injustice. After all, if my leg is blown off in an industrial accident, it hardly matters that many people with only one leg go on to succeed. The issue of compensatory justice remains, irrespective of what gains one can make without compensation.

I have little reason to think that any of this made a difference to the individual who chose that day to trumpet Asian success as a way to denigrate blacks. Given some of his other comments — that black promiscuity was to blame for AIDS in Africa, and that he resented the “fact” that his black son (presumably adopted) has more opportunity in life than his white son, despite the fact that the former is unemployed and the latter in college — his ability to rationally decipher much of anything seems doubtful. Nonetheless, challenging the model minority myth is a worthwhile enterprise, especially when one considers how many decent, well-meaning individuals often fall for it.

Those who trumpet “Asian values and culture” (based on stereotypical understandings of both, not unlike the white guys who covet mail-order Asian brides for their anticipated “docility”), do Asians no favors. If anything, they set them up in a way that not only harms the groups against which they are contrasted, but in a way that harms Asians as well. To be considered a group filled with math and science geniuses and passive, sensual, and willing female companions, not only objectifies Asian Pacific Americans, but results in a special stigma for those in the various Asian groups who aren’t good in school, don’t know how to fix your computer nor care to do so, or who don’t fit the sexist stereotypes that are so comforting to Western male tastes.

The model minority myth, in other words, is a setup: a carrot offered to certain groups so long as they don’t get out of line, assert their rights, strike for better wages, or try to determine their own sexuality. And as with all carrots, there is an even bigger stick, ready to throttle those who don’t go along with the game. Ultimately, justice and equity will remain elusive so long as whites feel no compunction about using one group of color against another group of color, in an attempt to make fools of both

 

[The Amerikkkan Idol]

Black Like Them
Posted April 29, 1996 by Malcolm Gladwell & filed under Personal History, The New Yorker - Archive.

Through the lens of his own family’s experience, the author explores why West Indians and American blacks are perceived differently.

1.

My cousin Rosie and her husband, Noel, live in a two-bedroom bungalow on Argyle Avenue, in Uniondale, on the west end of Long Island. When they came to America, twelve years ago, they lived in a basement apartment a dozen or so blocks away, next to their church. At the time, they were both taking classes at the New York Institute of Technology, which was right nearby. But after they graduated, and Rosie got a job managing a fast-food place and Noel got a job in asbestos removal, they managed to save a little money and bought the house on Argyle Avenue.

From the outside, their home looks fairly plain. It’s in a part of Uniondale that has a lot of tract housing from just after the war, and most of the houses are alike–squat and square, with aluminum siding, maybe a dormer window in the attic, and a small patch of lawn out front. But there is a beautiful park down the street, the public schools are supposed to be good, and Rosie and Noel have built a new garage and renovated the basement. Now that Noel has started his own business, as an environmental engineer, he has his office down there–Suite 2B, it says on his stationery–and every morning he puts on his tie and goes down the stairs to make calls and work on the computer. If Noel’s business takes off, Rosie says, she would like to move to a bigger house, in Garden City, which is one town over. She says this even though Garden City is mostly white. In fact, when she told one of her girlfriends, a black American, about this idea, her friend said that she was crazy–that Garden City was no place for a black person. But that is just the point. Rosie and Noel are from Jamaica. They don’t consider themselves black at all.

This doesn’t mean that my cousins haven’t sometimes been lumped together with American blacks. Noel had a job once removing asbestos at Kennedy Airport, and his boss there called him “******” and cut his hours. But Noel didn’t take it personally. That boss, he says, didn’t like women or Jews, either, or people with college degrees–or even himself, for that matter. Another time, Noel found out that a white guy working next to him in the same job and with the same qualifications was making ten thousand dollars a year more than he was. He quit the next day. Noel knows that racism is out there. It’s just that he doesn’t quite understand–or accept–the categories on which it depends.

To a West Indian, black is a literal description: you are black if your skin is black. Noel’s father, for example, is black. But his mother had a white father, and she herself was fair-skinned and could pass. As for Rosie, her mother and my mother, who are twins, thought of themselves while they were growing up as “middle-class brown,” which is to say that they are about the same shade as Colin Powell. That’s because our maternal grandfather was part Jewish, in addition to all kinds of other things, and Grandma, though she was a good deal darker than he was, had enough Scottish blood in her to have been born with straight hair. Rosie’s mother married another brown Jamaican, and that makes Rosie a light chocolate. As for my mother, she married an Englishman, making everything that much more complicated, since by the racial categories of my own heritage I am one thing and by the racial categories of America I am another. Once, when Rosie and Noel came to visit me while I was living in Washington, D.C., Noel asked me to show him “where the black people lived,” and I was confused for a moment until I realized that he was using “black” in the American sense, and so was asking in the same way that someone visiting Manhattan might ask where Chinatown was. That the people he wanted to see were in many cases racially indistinguishable from him didn’t matter. The facts of his genealogy, of his nationality, of his status as an immigrant made him, in his own eyes, different.

This question of who West Indians are and how they define themselves may seem trivial, like racial hairsplitting. But it is not trivial. In the past twenty years, the number of West Indians in America has exploded. There are now half a million in the New York area alone and, despite their recent arrival, they make substantially more money than American blacks. They live in better neighborhoods. Their families are stronger. In the New York area, in fact, West Indians fare about as well as Chinese and Korean immigrants. That is why the Caribbean invasion and the issue of West Indian identity have become such controversial issues. What does it say about the nature of racism that another group of blacks, who have the same legacy of slavery as their American counterparts and are physically indistinguishable from them, can come here and succeed as well as the Chinese and the Koreans do? Is overcoming racism as simple as doing what Noel does, which is to dismiss it, to hold himself above it, to brave it and move on?

These are difficult questions, not merely for what they imply about American blacks but for the ways in which they appear to contradict conventional views of what prejudice is. Racism, after all, is supposed to be indiscriminate. For example, sociologists have observed that the more blacks there are in a community the more negative the whites’ attitudes will be. Blacks in Denver have a far easier time than blacks in, say, Cleveland. Lynchings in the South at the turn of this century, to give another example, were far more common in counties where there was a large black population than in areas where whites were in the majority. Prejudice is the crudest of weapons, a reaction against blacks in the aggregate that grows as the perception of black threat grows. If that is the case, however, the addition of hundreds of thousands of new black immigrants to the New York area should have made things worse for people like Rosie and Noel, not better. And, if racism is so indiscriminate in its application, why is one group of blacks flourishing and the other not?

The implication of West Indian success is that racism does not really exist at all–at least, not in the form that we have assumed it does. The implication is that the key factor in understanding racial prejudice is not the behavior and attitudes of whites but the behavior and attitudes of blacks–not white discrimination but black culture. It implies that when the conservatives in Congress say the responsibility for ending urban poverty lies not with collective action but with the poor themselves they are right.

I think of this sometimes when I go with Rosie and Noel to their church, which is in Hempstead, just a mile away. It was once a white church, but in the past decade or so it has been taken over by immigrants from the Caribbean. They have so swelled its membership that the church has bought much of the surrounding property and is about to add a hundred seats to its sanctuary. The pastor, though, is white, and when the band up front is playing and the congregation is in full West Indian form the pastor sometimes seems out of place, as if he cannot move in time with the music. I always wonder how long the white minister at Rosie and Noel’s church will last–whether there won’t be some kind of groundswell among the congregation to replace him with one of their own. But Noel tells me the issue has never really come up. Noel says, in fact, that he’s happier with a white minister, for the same reasons that he’s happy with his neighborhood, where the people across the way are Polish and another neighbor is Hispanic and still another is a black American. He doesn’t want to be shut off from everyone else, isolated within the narrow confines of his race. He wants to be part of the world, and when he says these things it is awfully tempting to credit that attitude with what he and Rosie have accomplished.

Is this confidence, this optimism, this equanimity all that separates the poorest of American blacks from a house on Argyle Avenue?

CONTINUED IN NEXT POST. . .

 

[The Amerikkkan Idol]

2.

In 1994, Philip Kasinitz, a sociologist at Manhattan’s Hunter College, and Jan Rosenberg, who teaches at Long Island University, conducted a study of the Red Hook area of Brooklyn, a neighborhood of around thirteen or fourteen thousand which lies between the waterfront and the Gowanus Expressway. Red Hook has a large public-housing project at its center, and around the project, in the streets that line the waterfront, are several hundred thriving blue-collar businesses–warehouses, shipping companies, small manufacturers, and contractors. The object of the study was to resolve what Kasinitz and Rosenberg saw as the paradox of Red Hook: despite Red Hook’s seemingly fortuitous conjunction of unskilled labor and blue-collar jobs, very few of the Puerto Ricans and African-Americans from the neighborhood ever found work in the bustling economy of their own back yard.

After dozens of interviews with local employers, the two researchers uncovered a persistent pattern of what they call positive discrimination. It was not that the employers did not like blacks and Hispanics. It was that they had developed an elaborate mechanism for distinguishing between those they felt were “good” blacks and those they felt were “bad” blacks, between those they judged to be “good” Hispanics and those they considered “bad” Hispanics. “Good” meant that you came from outside the neighborhood, because employers identified locals with the crime and dissipation they saw on the streets around them. “Good” also meant that you were an immigrant, because employers felt that being an immigrant implied a loyalty and a willingness to work and learn not found among the native-born. In Red Hook, the good Hispanics are Mexican and South American, not Puerto Rican. And the good blacks are West Indian.

The Harvard sociologist Mary C. Waters conducted a similar study, in 1993, which looked at a food-service company in Manhattan where West Indian workers have steadily displaced African-Americans in the past few years. The transcripts of her interviews with the company managers make fascinating reading, providing an intimate view of the perceptions that govern the urban workplace. Listen to one forty-year-old white male manager on the subject of West Indians:

They tend more to shy away from doing all of the illegal things because they have such strict rules down in their countries and jails. And they’re nothing like here. So like, they’re like really paranoid to do something wrong. They seem to be very, very self-conscious of it. No matter what they have to do, if they have to try and work three jobs, they do. They won’t go into drugs or anything like that.

Or listen to this, from a fifty-three-year-old white female manager:

I work closely with this one girl who’s from Trinidad. And she told me when she first came here to live with her sister and cousin, she had two children. And she said I’m here four years and we’ve reached our goals. And what was your goal? For her two children to each have their own bedroom. Now she has a three bedroom apartment and she said that’s one of the goals she was shooting for. . . . If that was an American, they would say, I reached my goal. I bought a Cadillac.

This idea of the West Indian as a kind of superior black is not a new one. When the first wave of Caribbean immigrants came to New York and Boston, in the early nineteen-hundreds, other blacks dubbed them Jewmaicans, in derisive reference to the emphasis they placed on hard work and education. In the nineteen-eighties, the economist Thomas Sowell gave the idea a serious intellectual imprimatur by arguing that the West Indian advantage was a historical legacy of Caribbean slave culture. According to Sowell, in the American South slaveowners tended to hire managers who were married, in order to limit the problems created by sexual relations between overseers and slave women. But the West Indies were a hardship post, without a large and settled white population. There the overseers tended to be bachelors, and, with white women scarce, there was far more commingling of the races. The resulting large group of coloreds soon formed a kind of proto-middle class, performing various kinds of skilled and sophisticated tasks that there were not enough whites around to do, as there were in the American South. They were carpenters, masons, plumbers, and small businessmen, many years in advance of their American counterparts, developing skills that required education and initiative.

My mother and Rosie’s mother came from this colored class. Their parents were schoolteachers in a tiny village buried in the hills of central Jamaica. My grandmother’s and grandfather’s salaries combined put them, at best, on the lower rungs of the middle class. But their expectations went well beyond that. In my grandfather’s library were dikkens and Maupassant. My mother and her sister were pushed to win scholarships to a proper English- style boarding school at the other end of the island; and later, when my mother graduated, it was taken for granted that she would attend university in England, even though the cost of tuition and passage meant that my grandmother had to borrow a small fortune from the Chinese grocer down the road.

My grandparents had ambitions for their children, but it was a special kind of ambition, born of a certainty that American blacks did not have–that their values were the same as those of society as a whole, and that hard work and talent could actually be rewarded. In my mother’s first year at boarding school, she looked up “Negro” in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. “In certain . . . characteristics . . . the negro would appear to stand on a lower evolutionary plane than the white man,” she read. And the entry continued:

The mental constitution of the negro is very similar to that of a child, normally good-natured and cheerful, but subject to sudden fits of emotion and passion during which he is capable of performing acts of singular atrocity, impressionable, vain, but often exhibiting in the capacity of servant a dog-like fidelity which has stood the supreme test.

All black people of my mother’s generation–and of generations before and since–have necessarily faced a moment like this, when they are confronted for the first time with the allegation of their inferiority. But, at least in my mother’s case, her school was integrated, and that meant she knew black girls who were more intelligent than white girls, and she knew how she measured against the world around her. At least she lived in a country that had blacks and browns in every position of authority, so her personal experience gave the lie to what she read in the encyclopedia. This, I think, is what Noel means when he says that he cannot quite appreciate what it is that weighs black Americans down, because he encountered the debilitating effects of racism late, when he was much stronger. He came of age in a country where he belonged to the majority.

When I was growing up, my mother sometimes read to my brothers and me from the work of Louise Bennett, the great Jamaican poet of my mother’s generation. The poem I remember best is about two women–one black and one white–in a hair salon, the black woman getting her hair straightened and, next to her, the white woman getting her hair curled:

same time me mind start ‘tink
’bout me and de white woman
how me tek out me natural perm
and she put in false one

There is no anger or resentment here, only irony and playfulness–the two races captured in a shared moment of absurdity. Then comes the twist. The black woman is paying less to look white than the white woman is to look black:

de two a we da tek a risk
what rain or shine will bring
but fe har risk is t’re poun’
fi me onle five shillin’

In the nineteen-twenties, the garment trade in New York was first integrated by West Indian women, because, the legend goes, they would see the sign on the door saying “No blacks need apply” and simply walk on in. When I look back on Bennett’s poem, I think I understand how they found the courage to do that.

 

[The Amerikkkan Idol]

3.

It is tempting to use the West Indian story as evidence that discrimination doesn’t really exist–as proof that the only thing inner-city African-Americans have to do to be welcomed as warmly as West Indians in places like Red Hook is to make the necessary cultural adjustments. If West Indians are different, as they clearly are, then it is easy to imagine that those differences are the reason for their success–that their refusal to be bowed is what lets them walk on by the signs that prohibit them or move to neighborhoods that black Americans would shy away from. It also seems hard to see how the West Indian story is in any way consistent with the idea of racism as an indiscriminate, pernicious threat aimed at all black people.

But here is where things become more difficult, and where what seems obvious about West Indian achievement turns out not to be obvious at all. One of the striking things in the Red Hook study, for example, is the emphasis that the employers appeared to place on hiring outsiders–Irish or Russian or Mexican or West Indian immigrants from places far from Red Hook. The reason for this was not, the researchers argue, that the employers had any great familiarity with the cultures of those immigrants. They had none, and that was the point. They were drawn to the unfamiliar because what was familiar to them–the projects of Red Hook–was anathema. The Columbia University anthropologist Katherine Newman makes the same observation in a recent study of two fast-food restaurants in Harlem. She compared the hundreds of people who applied for jobs at those restaurants with the few people who were actually hired, and found, among other things, that how far an applicant lived from the job site made a huge difference. Of those applicants who lived less than two miles from the restaurant, ten per cent were hired. Of those who lived more than two miles from the restaurant, nearly forty per cent were hired. As Newman puts it, employers preferred the ghetto they didn’t know to the ghetto they did.

Neither study describes a workplace where individual attitudes make a big difference, or where the clunky and impersonal prejudices that characterize traditional racism have been discarded. They sound like places where old-style racism and appreciation of immigrant values are somehow bound up together. Listen to another white manager who was interviewed by Mary Waters:

Island blacks who come over, they’re immigrant. They may not have such a good life where they are so they gonna try to strive to better themselves and I think there’s a lot of American blacks out there who feel we owe them. And enough is enough already. You know, this is something that happened to their ancestors, not now. I mean, we’ve done so much for the black people in America now that it’s time that they got off their butts.

Here, then, are the two competing ideas about racism side by side: the manager issues a blanket condemnation of American blacks even as he holds West Indians up as a cultural ideal. The example of West Indians as “good” blacks makes the old blanket prejudice against American blacks all the easier to express. The manager can tell black Americans to get off their butts without fear of sounding, in his own ears, like a racist, because he has simultaneously celebrated island blacks for their work ethic. The success of West Indians is not proof that discrimination against American blacks does not exist. Rather, it is the means by which discrimination against American blacks is given one last, vicious twist: I am not so shallow as to despise you for the color of your skin, because I have found people your color that I like. Now I can despise you for who you are.

This is racism’s newest mutation–multicultural racism, where one ethnic group can be played off against another. But it is wrong to call West Indians the victors in this competition, in anything but the narrowest sense. In American history, immigrants have always profited from assimilation: as they have adopted the language and customs of this country, they have sped their passage into the mainstream. The new racism means that West Indians are the first group of people for whom that has not been true. Their advantage depends on their remaining outsiders, on remaining unfamiliar, on being distinct by custom, culture, and language from the American blacks they would otherwise resemble. There is already some evidence that the considerable economic and social advantages that West Indians hold over American blacks begin to dissipate by the second generation, when the island accent has faded, and those in positions of power who draw distinctions between good blacks and bad blacks begin to lump West Indians with everyone else. For West Indians, assimilation is tantamount to suicide. This is a cruel fate for any immigrant group, but it is especially so for West Indians, whose history and literature are already redolent with the themes of dispossession and loss, with the long search for identity and belonging. In the nineteen-twenties, Marcus Garvey sought community in the idea of Africa. Bob Marley, the Jamaican reggae singer, yearned for Zion. In “Rites of Passage” the Barbadian poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite writes:

Where, then, is the ******’s
home?
In Paris Brixton Kingston
Rome?
Here?
Or in Heaven?

America might have been home. But it is not: not Red Hook, anyway; not Harlem; not even Argyle Avenue.

There is also no small measure of guilt here, for West Indians cannot escape the fact that their success has come, to some extent, at the expense of American blacks, and that as they have noisily differentiated themselves from African-Americans–promoting the stereotype of themselves as the good blacks–they have made it easier for whites to join in. It does not help matters that the same kinds of distinctions between good and bad blacks which govern the immigrant experience here have always lurked just below the surface of life in the West Indies as well. It was the infusion of white blood that gave the colored class its status in the Caribbean, and the members of this class have never forgotten that, nor have they failed, in a thousand subtle ways, to distance themselves from those around them who experienced a darker and less privileged past.

In my mother’s house, in Harewood, the family often passed around a pencilled drawing of two of my great-grandparents; she was part Jewish, and he was part Scottish. The other side–the African side–was never mentioned. My grandmother was the ringleader in this. She prized my grandfather’s light skin, but she also suffered as a result of this standard. “She’s nice, you know, but she’s too dark,” her mother-in-law would say of her. The most telling story of all, though, is the story of one of my mother’s relatives, whom I’ll call Aunt Joan, who was as fair as my great-grandmother was. Aunt Joan married what in Jamaica is called an Injun–a man with a dark complexion that is redeemed from pure Africanness by straight, fine black hair. She had two daughters by him–handsome girls with dark complexions. But he died young, and one day, while she was travelling on a train to visit her daughter, she met and took an interest in a light-skinned man in the same railway car. What happened next is something that Aunt Joan told only my mother, years later, with the greatest of shame. When she got off the train, she walked right by her daughter, disowning her own flesh and blood, because she did not want a man so light-skinned and desirable to know that she had borne a daughter so dark.

My mother, in the nineteen-sixties, wrote a book about her experiences. It was entitled “Brown Face, Big Master,” the brown face referring to her and the big master, in the Jamaican dialect, referring to God. Sons, of course, are hardly objective on the achievements of their mothers, but there is one passage in the book that I find unforgettable, because it is such an eloquent testimony to the moral precariousness of the Jamaican colored class–to the mixture of confusion and guilt that attends its position as beneficiary of racism’s distinctions. The passage describes a time just after my mother and father were married, when they were living in London and my eldest brother was still a baby. They were looking for an apartment, and after a long search my father found one in a London suburb. On the day after they moved in, however, the landlady ordered them out. “You didn’t tell me your wife was colored,” she told my father, in a rage.

In her book my mother describes her long struggle to make sense of this humiliation, to reconcile her experience with her faith. In the end, she was forced to acknowledge that anger was not an option–that as a Jamaican “middle-class brown,” and a descendant of Aunt Joan, she could hardly reproach another for the impulse to divide good black from bad black:

I complained to God in so many words: “Here I was, the wounded representative of the negro race in our struggle to be accounted free and equal with the dominating whites!” And God was amused; my prayer did not ring true with Him. I would try again. And then God said, “Have you not done the same thing? Remember this one and that one, people whom you have slighted or avoided or treated less considerately than others because they were different superficially, and you were ashamed to be identified with them. Have you not been glad that you are not more colored than you are? Grateful that you are not black?” My anger and hate against the landlady melted. I was no better than she was, nor worse for that matter. . . . We were both guilty of the sin of self-regard, the pride and the exclusiveness by which we cut some people off from ourselves.

4.

I grew up in Canada, in a little farming town an hour and a half outside of Toronto. My father teaches mathematics at a nearby university, and my mother is a therapist. For many years, she was the only black person in town, but I cannot remember wondering or worrying, or even thinking, about this fact. Back then, color meant only good things. It meant my cousins in Jamaica. It meant the graduate students from Africa and India my father would bring home from the university. My own color was not something I ever thought much about, either, because it seemed such a stray fact. Blacks knew what I was. They could discern the hint of Africa beneath my fair skin. But it was a kind of secret–something that they would ask me about quietly when no one else was around. (“Where you from?” an older black man once asked me. “Ontario,” I said, not thinking. “No,” he replied. “Where you from?” And then I understood and told him, and he nodded as if he had already known. “We was speculatin’ about your heritage,” he said.) But whites never guessed, and even after I informed them it never seemed to make a difference. Why would it? In a town that is ninety-nine per cent white, one modest alleged splash of color hardly amounts to a threat.

But things changed when I left for Toronto to attend college. This was during the early nineteen-eighties, when West Indians were immigrating to Canada in droves, and Toronto had become second only to New York as the Jamaican expatriates’ capital in North America. At school, in the dining hall, I was served by Jamaicans. The infamous Jane-Finch projects, in northern Toronto, were considered the Jamaican projects. The drug trade then taking off was said to be the Jamaican drug trade. In the popular imagination, Jamaicans were–and are–welfare queens and gun-toting gangsters and dissolute youths. In Ontario, blacks accused of crimes are released by the police eighteen per cent of the time; whites are released twenty-nine per cent of the time. In drug-trafficking and importing cases, blacks are twenty-seven times as likely as whites to be jailed before their trial takes place, and twenty times as likely to be imprisoned on drug-possession charges.

After I had moved to the United States, I puzzled over this seeming contradiction–how West Indians celebrated in New York for their industry and drive could represent, just five hundred miles northwest, crime and dissipation. Didn’t Torontonians see what was special and different in West Indian culture? But that was a naïve question. The West Indians were the first significant brush with blackness that white, smug, comfortable Torontonians had ever had. They had no bad blacks to contrast with the newcomers, no African-Americans to serve as a safety valve for their prejudices, no way to perform America’s crude racial triage.

Not long ago, I sat in a coffee shop with someone I knew vaguely from college, who, like me, had moved to New York from Toronto. He began to speak of the threat that he felt Toronto now faced. It was the Jamaicans, he said. They were a bad seed. He was, of course, oblivious of my background. I said nothing, though, and he launched into a long explanation of how, in slave times, Jamaica was the island where all the most troublesome and obstreperous slaves were sent, and how that accounted for their particularly nasty disposition today.

I have told that story many times since, usually as a joke, because it was funny in an appalling way–particularly when I informed him much, much later that my mother was Jamaican. I tell the story that way because otherwise it is too painful. There must be people in Toronto just like Rosie and Noel, with the same attitudes and aspirations, who want to live in a neighborhood as nice as Argyle Avenue, who want to build a new garage and renovate their basement and set up their own business downstairs. But it is not completely up to them, is it? What has happened to Jamaicans in Toronto is proof that what has happened to Jamaicans here is not the end of racism, or even the beginning of the end of racism, but an accident of history and geography. In America, there is someone else to despise. In Canada, there is not. In the new racism, as in the old, somebody always has to be the ******.


© 2014 Malcolm Gladwell.

 

[How Sway?]

bump. interesting stuff..

 

[wheywhey]

http://lafocusnewspaper.com/?p=1104

High School Job Leads to Chick-Fil-A Franchise for Ashley Derby
Written by lafocus on January 8, 2013. Posted in 2013, LA Focus Issue 01, Past Issues

If you would have asked me three years ago, ‘Where do you think you’re going to end up?’ this probably would have been the last city on the planet I would’ve thought,” says the owner/operator of the downtown L.A. Chick-Fil-A, located on the USC campus.

“God works in mysterious ways and presents opportunities behind some doors that you just have to be bold enough to walk through.”

Since moving to L.A about a year and half ago to open the eatery, Ashley Derby says that she has fallen in love with the city. But more than an opportunity to establish herself in a new city, Derby sees her position as a chance to make a difference.

“I love being able to provide someone with an income,” says Derby, “to provide someone with their first job, and being able to help mold and grow them.”

Interestingly, Derby could be describing her own growth with the fast food chain. The Spelman alum, who’s been with Chick-Fil-A since she was fifteen, turned that preverbal first, low-on-the-totem pole job into an opportunity that launched her career as an entrepreneur.

“My job description was pretty much taking orders on the registers and cleaning up in the dining room,” Derby says of her start with the company.

At that early age, she learned “the basics” of making a better future for herself: coming to work on time, wearing the proper uniform, and doing what was asked of her.

“It was an invaluable thing that a lot of kids don’t get today, but I really benefitted from,” says Derby.

The Atlanta-native stayed with Chick-Fil-A through high school and into college during which time she was promoted to the supervisory role of team leader. Seeing her strong work ethic and drive, the restaurant’s operator asked her if she’d ever considered owning her own Chick-Fil-A.

“Oddly, I’d never even thought that was something that I could do,” says Derby. “I didn’t know that was an opportunity available to me.”

After explaining to her what it took to do his job, the restaurant operator stressed that she should think long and hard on whether or not this was something she wanted to do. It would take a big time commitment. But he also offered to help her.

She decided to go for it and switched her major from theatre to economics.

“After I graduated from college, I started working fulltime, dedicated to getting my own store,” Derby explains. “I went through an intern program for about a year and a half where Chick-Fil-A sends you out to run some of their corporate-owned stores around the country."

Next came a round of over ten different interviews before she was given the green light to start the process of purchasing her own store, which would cost an initial investment of only $5,000. A colleague suggested that she look into opening a store in Los Angeles.

Derby was reluctant to leave her hometown.

“I was like there’s no way I’m moving to L.A. That’s crazy.”

After doing her research and talking it over with her husband, with whom she celebrates her two-year anniversary this month, Derby made the leap. It proved a wise decision. As one of the few Chick-Fil-A locations in the county, the SoCal market is rife with potential.

“If it weren’t for [the restaurant] operator that I worked for, I would never be in this business,” says Derby. “If he hadn’t seen something in me.”

Now the 28-year-old looks to pay the opportunities she received forward to her own employees.

“I know that most of my team isn’t going to be with me in the long term,” she says. “A lot of them have their own aspirations and dreams to become doctors and EMTs and lawyers. I’m here to support them 110% just like I was supported. That was something that was given to me and I feel to obligated now give back in return.”

Recently, Derby’s story has come full circle as a young man she mentored for a year is now taking part in training program to become a Chick-Fil-A operator.

Says Derby, “It’s really great to be able to provide that expertise and guidance for someone who wouldn’t have it otherwise. It’s very rewarding.”

 

[Scientific Playa]

i saved this story for this thread to show about the hustle and getting some luck in life. not indian but immigrant determination.

Step by step, Badia Spices built its empire
BY JOSEPH A. MANN JR.
Special to the Miami Herald

Joseph “Pepe” Badía didn’t start out to become Miami’s spice king.
“I wanted to be a dentist,” said Badía, president of Doral-based Badia Spices. As a young man, he had studied at Miami-Dade Junior College at the end of the 1960s, after a stint in the U.S. Army.

But once he tasted success while managing the family business, his ambition grew. Because of that, Badia Spices Inc. — a company that today ranks as one of the largest in the business — blossomed. Once a seedling, the business has become a towering figure in the world of spices. And now its products have been sold and savored in 78 countries, including all corners of the United States.

As Badía reflected recently on his company’s roots, he was surrounded by the infrastructure that helps nourish its success: a 100,000-square-foot production facility, 10 production lines, huge stores of raw materials, a fleet of trucks and a team of 187 employees. The company also has a 70,000-square-foot distribution center nearby. Badia today ranks as one of the country’s major spice companies, competing with concerns like McCormick & Co., the country’s largest spice producer, and Goya Foods. Its dollar sales last year “reached nine figures” for the first time, Badía said, and are poised to increase 20 to 25 percent this year. (The family name has an accent, but the company name does not.)

At the Doral production facility — while standing among tall shelves packed with bagged garlic from China, pepper from India, and other products from Vietnam and California — Badía described the company’s journey. Open and friendly, he conversed easily about the complexities of the spice business and the steps he took over the last four decades to grow his company. While clearly proud that Badia Spices has become an important supplier of products to domestic and international markets, he is modest about his accomplishments and never fails to give credit to his employees.

As he tells it, the roots of the company’s success lie in the wave of Cubans who fled to the United States after Fidel Castro took power. Among them were young Pepe, who at age 14 had been sent to Miami in 1960. He was then sent to New Jersey to live with friends and family. Later, his father, José, and mother, Azucena, arrived in Miami, and the family moved to Puerto Rico. In 1967, the elder Badía, who had been in the hardware business in Cuba, started a new career in Miami, this time in a tiny store at the corner of Southwest First Street and 22nd Avenue — the original Badia Spices. There he packaged garlic, pepper, vanilla and a variety of other spices, selling them to about 30 bodegas around the city.

Working part time, Pepe, as he is still widely called, helped his father mix and package 30 to 40 bottles a day of spices by hand. And by 1970, when the elder Badía needed a full-time employee to help manage the daily operations, he offered the job to his 23-year-old son who was fresh out of the Army.

“If I worked full time with the spice business, I could earn $100 a week. That was pretty attractive back then, so I accepted the job,” said Badía, now 68. “We had a very small business. But as the Cuban community grew in Miami, so did we.”

Pepe Badía and his father, José, worked together closely until the elder Badía’s passing in 1995.

Part of what has driven Badia Spices’ success was luck: It entered the Miami market at just the right time to meet a burgeoning demand. After the first large numbers of Cubans arrived in Miami, the city’s Hispanic community expanded even more in later years as tens of thousands came from Mexico and Central and South America. Immigrants brought with them a taste for the strong flavors and piquant dishes of their homelands. Demand for a broad range of spices increased across South Florida.

Badia capitalized on that by expanding into South Florida supermarket chains within and beyond the Hispanic community; using quality products with competitive pricing; broadening the product line; taking risks by entering new national and international markets; making steady investments; and hiring a first-class team of employees.

“And hard work didn’t hurt,” Badía said. Even after the tiny operation acquired its first mechanical packaging equipment early on, he continued to arrive before dawn to mix and package spices and get them ready for delivery: “I’ve done it all — mopping floors, filling bottles, running machines, driving trucks and selling our products.”

THE EARLY YEARS

To build the company, the Badías took several initiatives:

In the late 1960s and ’70s, Pepe Badía concentrated on expanding the customer base among bodegas, working until 3-4 a.m. to fill containers at a tiny store in Miami. Later, he used his station wagon to deliver packets of spices, chorizo and even brooms to clients during the day.

Meanwhile, Sedano’s — which today is the largest Hispanic-owned U.S. supermarket chain — was adding new stores in Miami at the time. Badía reached out to Sedano’s, placing its products in some of the chain’s earliest stores around 1970.

“We opened our first store in Hialeah in 1962, and started selling Badia products around 1970 with our second or third store,” said José Herrán Jr., Sedano’s COO. “We first carried small pouches and blends — people then sent them back to Cuba, as ‘care’ packages. We were definitely the first market chain to carry their products, and when competitors saw this, they started carrying them too.”

As Sedano’s added new stores, Badia products appeared on their shelves. Today, Sedano’s has 34 stores, and Badia spices are sold in all of them, as are products from its competitors, including McCormick. “We sell Badia products 10-to-1 against McCormick,” Herrán said. “Like any business, you cater to your customers. When Pepe and his father started, they knew what was missing in the market.”

EXPANDING IN ’80s

By the mid-1980s, Badia Spices began selling its products outside of the mainland United States. Pepe Badía saw sales opportunities in Puerto Rico in 1985 and launched his product line there in several Winn-Dixie supermarkets and other outlets. This was the company’s first foray outside Florida. Later in the decade, it sold to the Netherlands Antilles (Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire) and found other markets in the Caribbean and Latin America.

Another major growth spurt for Badia came after Publix supermarkets introduced its products to a broader consumer market during the decade. “Publix began carrying Badia products in 1989,” said Nicole Krauss, media and community relations manager for the Miami division of Publix Super Markets. “They first appeared in a store in Miami Lakes and expanded eight months later to 12 stores.”

Today, Publix has 1,077 stores in Florida and five other states, and all stores are authorized to carry Badia products, depending on local demand.

The most popular Badia products sold at Publix are mojo marinade, garlic powder, complete seasoning ( sazón completa), herbal teas and minced garlic in oil. “At the time, only the Hispanic neighborhood stores carried this product,” Krauss said. “Bringing them to our stores allowed us to better serve our diverse customer base and provide them with the products they are interested in.”

’90s: MAKING INROADS

From 1990 onward, Badia steadily expanded its reach in the United States, launching products in the Tampa Bay area and Atlanta and selling Mexican chiles and spices in Texas. It also moved into the New York-New Jersey area and made new inroads overseas.

Badia reached out to the large Hispanic communities in the New York and New Jersey areas. It began working with Wakefern Food Corp., a regional food distributor to ShopRite and PriceRite stores in New Jersey, New York and adjoining states.

“Badia Spices has been a supplier for Wakefern Food Corp. for 25 years,” said Joe Gozzi, the company’s director of food service. “Wakefern is a cooperative made up of 50 members — all family-owned business, just like Badia. This makes for a natural partnership.

“The Badia brand has grown more mainstream over the years as more and more people explore the flavors of Latin American cuisine. In fact, what was originally offered in about 50 ShopRite stores has now expanded to a wide array of Badia products in more than 250 ShopRite stores and 56 PriceRite stores,” Gozzi said.

As the company grew, Badia also saw opportunities to sell a wider range of products. “We’re not just a spice company,” Pepe Badía said. “We also sell olive oil, hearts of palm, sauces, coconut water, tea, herbs, nuts, seed, toppings and specialty items.”

In the United States, the company has been riding a trend to spice up American cooking. “The spice market in the U.S. is growing by 5 percent per year,” Badía said. “Spices are universal. They’re used in all types of cuisines. Our sales even improved during the recession, since many people cut down on eating at restaurants, cooked more at home and bought more spices.”

 

[Scientific Playa]

A U.S. Department of Agriculture report supports this: “Rising domestic use of spices reflects growing Hispanic and Asian populations, a trend toward the use of spices to compensate for less salt and lower fat levels in foods, and heightened popularity of ethnic foods from Asia and Latin America.”

NEW MARKETS OVERSEAS

In recent years, the company has also expanded to Latin America, Africa and Europe. In Latin America, Badia is negotiating with Walmart to place products in hundreds of its stores in Mexico and Costa Rica.

“The key to expanding anywhere is to find a good distributor and salespeople,” Badía said. Distributors in the United States and overseas typically buy from manufacturers or wholesalers and sell to retailers. They have established relationships with supermarket chains, local markets and other types of stores, and are critical for opening up new markets. “I’m only as good as my distributors,” he said.

Badia representatives meet with distributors, assess their market reach and sign agreements with them. Often distributors come directly to Miami to meet with company executives and look over its products and pricing, Badía said. Company representatives also travel to other parts of the U.S. and overseas to meet potential distribution partners at trade shows or in person.

Sometimes, serendipity plays a role in the company’s expansion. That was how Badia came to be distributed in Ghana — its first foothold in Africa, where it is now expanding to Nigeria and other markets.

A woman from Ghana was visiting a family in New Jersey, Badía said, and tasted a chicken prepared by her hostess. The cook had used Badia’s complete seasoning, and the visitor liked it so much she contacted Badia Spices and began selling its products when she returned home.

“I didn’t go to Ghana — Ghana came to me,” Badía said.

FOCUS: TASTE, PRICE

Other elements that have been key to Badia Spices’ success — quality products, competitive prices and modern production capacity — will also likely determine its future.

“We offer an attractive, quality product at prices 30 to 50 percent below the competition,” Badía said. The company buys some raw materials from U.S. suppliers, but most of its spices come from overseas because many spices are not produced in the United States. China, India, Vietnam and Sri Lanka are major suppliers.

Recently, for example, Badia garlic powder, one of its most popular products, retailed at a local Publix for 38 percent an ounce below the same product sold by McCormick, Badia’s biggest competitor. Badia paprika, another big seller, costs Publix customers $1.10 an ounce, compared to $2.49 an ounce for the McCormick brand. Badia’s packaged product — labeled in English and Spanish — is 56 percent cheaper than McCormick’s brand.

Badia and McCormick buy the same quality raw materials, often from the same countries overseas. Badia, though, can sell at lower prices because it accepts lower margins than publicly traded McCormick, the company said. Also, it has lower overhead than market leader McCormick, including marketing and advertising expenses.

Asked if McCormick was concerned about Badia’s growth in the U.S. Hispanic market, Lori Robinson, McCormick’s vice president for corporate branding and communications, said: “McCormick has been in business for 125 years and we are accustomed to competition. Approximately 17 percent of our total sales for herbs and spices come from Hispanic buyers.” The company is not only the spice market leader in the United States, but also leads among Hispanic consumers, with a 41.2 percent value share, she said.

Robinson said that McCormick’s Lawry’s line has the No. 1 seasoned salt and garlic salt among Hispanic consumers. “We believe the Hispanic community is a promising market for our business, and with that in mind, we are developing new products such as the Galeo line of Hispanic spices available in select stores in the Miami area,” she said.

McCormick also sees strong growth ahead in the spice and herbs market. “The retail spice market is showing robust growth and is certainly an expanding market,” Robinson said. “The dry spice category is strong across both the general market and Hispanic market. Both markets grew herb and spice category dollars by 11 percent ($266 million) from 2011 to 2013. We are seeing growing influences from regions around the globe, including chiles and Mexican-inspired flavors, and anticipate that the market for flavor will only continue to grow as consumers expand their palates to include new, bolder flavors.”

While Badia’s lower prices attract many consumers, others say it’s the taste that counts.

Carolyn Wilson, a U.S. Postal Service employee who lives in Coconut Creek and shops at Publix, has been buying Badia spices for about 10 years. “I cook for a large family, and their spices are to my taste,” Wilson said. “They have more flavor than the other brands. For people who cook, it’s not about the price, it’s about the taste.”

Daisy Díaz, the chef and owner of Sabores Restaurant in Doral, buys Badia spices for her restaurant and home. “I use Badia Spices because they have amazing flavors,” said Díaz, who is from Ecuador. “I’ve tried other brands, but I prefer Badia — it’s the only spice I use. I make my own dressings, sauces and desserts at Sabores, and they have spices from all over the world, so their products are very important for my cuisine.”

LOOKING TO FUTURE

Badia also is investing in the future.

In the early years, Pepe Badía financed the company’s first steps with savings and, eventually, cash flow. To buy delivery trucks and costly equipment to process, blend and pack spices and sauces, he obtained bank credit and other financing.

As demand for the company’s products increased, Badía moved his business to larger buildings, acquired new equipment and expanded and trained his workforce. Last year, the company invested about $3 million for new X-ray equipment to detect any tiny bits of metal in imported raw materials, and to expand its product line.

Badía expects capital investment to be even higher in 2014 to expand the company’s Doral production center, add new air-conditioned spaces with state-of-the-art dust control systems, acquire 19 forklifts, and build new spice-blending facilities.

The company also is committed to sharing its success with the community. Badia donates a share of sales of different products to several charities, including the Dan Marino Foundation, the National Breast Cancer Foundation and Here’s Help, which assists young adults with drug problems. (What little TV and radio advertising the company does is usually linked to its charitable activities.) Badia contributes to a culinary school to help train young people at Here’s Help. It also provides scholarships at Florida International University. Last year, total dollar donations were in the high six figures.

Badía does not see himself as the only force behind a company that has grown to $30 million, $50 million and now around $100 million in annual sales. He works hard to provide a good work environment for employees and gives each one a $250 bonus for birthdays, a $500 bonus for Thanksgiving and $1,000 at Christmas.

“Our employees are why we are here,” Badía said. “I didn’t do this alone.”

The spelling of the Sedano's COO was incorrect in earlier versions of this article.





Badia Spices Inc.




Business: Using imported and domestic ingredients, Badia blends, packages and sells a wide range of spices, sauces, marinades and other food products throughout the United States and in 67 other countries. Customers include consumers at neighborhood stores and supermarkets, chefs, food service companies and supermarket and restaurant chains.



Headquarters: 1400 NW 93rd Ave., Doral.



Founded: 1967.



President: Joseph “Pepe” Badía, born in Santiago de las Vegas, Cuba. He built on the tiny, neighborhood spice business started by his father, José Badía.



Founder: José Badía, who was born in Spain, moved to Cuba and co-owned a hardware store there. After briefly living in Miami, he relocated to Puerto Rico in 1966 and began selling spices for a local company. In 1967, he moved his wife, Azucena, and family back to Miami, and started his own spice business. (Pepe was already in the U.S. Army at the time.)



Ownership: Joseph “Pepe” Badía (majority) and his three daughters, Claudia Kirby, Bianca Badía and Dakota Badía.



Employees: 187, including more than 10 who were added last year.



Sales: Badia’s dollar sales reached nine figures for the first time in 2013, and the company is on track for a 20 to 25 percent increase in dollar sales this year, Pepe Badía said.



Product line: More than 120 individual products sold in about 700 presentations, from quarter-ounce plastic packets to large containers for commercial customers.



Website: www.badiaspices.com.



Source: Badia Spices







Spicing up the competition




In less than five decades, Doral-based Badia Spices has become an important player in the intensely competitive U.S. spice market, challenging larger companies with much longer histories.



In supermarkets and corner groceries all over the country, Badia goes up against concerns like McCormick & Co. Inc., which was founded in 1889 and is the country’s largest spice producer by far, and Goya Foods, which was founded in 1936 and ranks as the largest Hispanic-owned food company in the U.S.



According to a report done by BeaconUnited, a national association of food brokers that tracks grocery trends, spice sales to U.S. retail grocery stores in its sample were estimated at nearly $1.2 billion for the 12 months ending in mid-January 2014.


Sales were split among a host of competing brands, including McCormick, which is headquartered in Maryland; Goya, based in New Jersey; Badia and hundreds of other companies and brands.



Badia’s biggest competitor is McCormick, which operates in 125 countries and territories and has 10,000 employees worldwide. In contrast, Badia, founded in 1967, has 187 employees and operates in 68 countries.



Despite being around far less time than McCormick and Goya, Badia has evolved from a small local company into a national and international supplier ranked among the top U.S. spice vendors on supermarket shelves and now competes with the big spice boys.



Badia notes that the report doesn’t tell the whole story since it only provides a partial estimate of U.S. spice sales. The sample used doesn’t include all local food markets and supermarket chains, or other important markets such as restaurant chains, food service companies (supplying schools, hospitals, etc.) and processed food (industrial) producers.



Nonetheless, BeaconUnited provides some interesting data. Dollar sales for the entire sample group rose 5 percent during the period covered by the survey, while unit sales increased by 4.9 percent.



Badia’s sales growth outstripped its biggest competitors both in dollar and unit terms. The Doral company’s dollar sales increased 15.7 percent over the previous year, while its unit sales rose 15 percent.



In contrast, dollar sales for the McCormick brand alone (not including its other brands) rose by 2.9 percent while unit sales increased by 3.2 percent. Spice Islands, another top contender, saw a 2.1 percent increase in dollar sales and a 0.2 percent decline in units sold.



Goya’s dollar sales rose by 2.4 percent and its unit sales by 1.7 percent.



Of course, McCormick’s dollar sales far outstripped everyone else, reaching $474.3 million for its main brand alone. This was followed by $285.3 million for a group made up of hundreds of private label spice companies, $51.2 million for Spice Islands, $49.8 million for Badia and $48.1 million for Goya.



McCormick’s presence in the U.S. market is enormous. It sells not only its own leading brand, but owns several others, such as Old Bay, Schilling, Zatarian’s, Lawry’s and El Guapo. So no one will be overtaking McCormick’s market dominance anytime soon.



JOSEPH A. MANN JR.










A product sampler




Badia sells more than 120 individual products in about 700 packaging and size presentations.



Complete seasoning (Sazón completa) is the company’s most popular product. This mixture of garlic, cumin, onions and other herbs is often favored by cooks who want to add Latin flavor to their dishes. It can be used with poultry, fish, meat, stews, sauces, salads and vegetables.



“Complete seasoning accounts for a large share of our sales,” company president Joseph “Pepe” Badía said. “And from the letters we receive from customers, it’s very popular outside the Latin community.”



The other top-selling Badia products are garlic (garlic powder, garlic salt and granulated garlic), ground black pepper, paprika and onions (onion powder, onion salt and chopped onion flakes).



Badia makes product sizes for home cooking, restaurants and food service companies ranging from quarter-ounce packets of spice to large containers for commercial use. It also offers a line of higher-priced premium products as well as organic spices, spice blends with no MSG and specialty products.



Some other Badia products:



Allspice



Basil leaves



Bay leaves



Chiles (ancho, arbol, California, cascabel, chipotle, guajillo, monita, New Mexico, pasilla, puya, red chili pepper)



Coriander



Marjoram



Star anise



Teas (cat’s claw, chamomile, eucalyptus, green, linden leaves, mint, natural herbs, star anise, yerba mate)



Olive oil



Italian seasoning



Garam marsala



Herbes de Provence



Louisiana Cajun



Red pepper



White pepper



Adobo



Barbecue seasoning



Chili powder



Marinades and sauces (Caribbean heat, chimichurri, lemon juice, Louisiana Cajun hot sauce, meat tenderizer, mojo, sour orange, sriracha)



Nuts and seeds



Almond extract



Arrowroot



Cinnamon sticks



Sprinkles (chocolate, rainbow)







Some local vendors of Badia products



Sedano’s



Publix



Walmart



Winn-Dixie



Presidente Supermarkets



Target



Costco Wholesale



Dollar Tree



BJ’s Wholesale Club



Badia products also appear as private label brands at Longhorn Steakhouse, Olive Garden and Red Lobster and can be purchased through Amazon.com, eBay and other online sites.

 

[Scientific Playa]

Badia Spices Inc.



Business: Using imported and domestic ingredients, Badia blends, packages and sells a wide range of spices, sauces, marinades and other food products throughout the United States and in 67 other countries. Customers include consumers at neighborhood stores and supermarkets, chefs, food service companies and supermarket and restaurant chains.



Headquarters: 1400 NW 93rd Ave., Doral.



Founded: 1967.



President: Joseph “Pepe” Badía, born in Santiago de las Vegas, Cuba. He built on the tiny, neighborhood spice business started by his father, José Badía.



Founder: José Badía, who was born in Spain, moved to Cuba and co-owned a hardware store there. After briefly living in Miami, he relocated to Puerto Rico in 1966 and began selling spices for a local company. In 1967, he moved his wife, Azucena, and family back to Miami, and started his own spice business. (Pepe was already in the U.S. Army at the time.)



Ownership: Joseph “Pepe” Badía (majority) and his three daughters, Claudia Kirby, Bianca Badía and Dakota Badía.



Employees: 187, including more than 10 who were added last year.



Sales: Badia’s dollar sales reached nine figures for the first time in 2013, and the company is on track for a 20 to 25 percent increase in dollar sales this year, Pepe Badía said.



Product line: More than 120 individual products sold in about 700 presentations, from quarter-ounce plastic packets to large containers for commercial customers.



Website: www.badiaspices.com.



Source: Badia Spices






Spicing up the competition



In less than five decades, Doral-based Badia Spices has become an important player in the intensely competitive U.S. spice market, challenging larger companies with much longer histories.



In supermarkets and corner groceries all over the country, Badia goes up against concerns like McCormick & Co. Inc., which was founded in 1889 and is the country’s largest spice producer by far, and Goya Foods, which was founded in 1936 and ranks as the largest Hispanic-owned food company in the U.S.



According to a report done by BeaconUnited, a national association of food brokers that tracks grocery trends, spice sales to U.S. retail grocery stores in its sample were estimated at nearly $1.2 billion for the 12 months ending in mid-January 2014.



Sales were split among a host of competing brands, including McCormick, which is headquartered in Maryland; Goya, based in New Jersey; Badia and hundreds of other companies and brands.



Badia’s biggest competitor is McCormick, which operates in 125 countries and territories and has 10,000 employees worldwide. In contrast, Badia, founded in 1967, has 187 employees and operates in 68 countries.



Despite being around far less time than McCormick and Goya, Badia has evolved from a small local company into a national and international supplier ranked among the top U.S. spice vendors on supermarket shelves and now competes with the big spice boys.



Badia notes that the report doesn’t tell the whole story since it only provides a partial estimate of U.S. spice sales. The sample used doesn’t include all local food markets and supermarket chains, or other important markets such as restaurant chains, food service companies (supplying schools, hospitals, etc.) and processed food (industrial) producers.



Nonetheless, BeaconUnited provides some interesting data. Dollar sales for the entire sample group rose 5 percent during the period covered by the survey, while unit sales increased by 4.9 percent.



Badia’s sales growth outstripped its biggest competitors both in dollar and unit terms. The Doral company’s dollar sales increased 15.7 percent over the previous year, while its unit sales rose 15 percent.



In contrast, dollar sales for the McCormick brand alone (not including its other brands) rose by 2.9 percent while unit sales increased by 3.2 percent. Spice Islands, another top contender, saw a 2.1 percent increase in dollar sales and a 0.2 percent decline in units sold.



Goya’s dollar sales rose by 2.4 percent and its unit sales by 1.7 percent.



Of course, McCormick’s dollar sales far outstripped everyone else, reaching $474.3 million for its main brand alone. This was followed by $285.3 million for a group made up of hundreds of private label spice companies, $51.2 million for Spice Islands, $49.8 million for Badia and $48.1 million for Goya.



McCormick’s presence in the U.S. market is enormous. It sells not only its own leading brand, but owns several others, such as Old Bay, Schilling, Zatarian’s, Lawry’s and El Guapo. So no one will be overtaking McCormick’s market dominance anytime soon.



JOSEPH A. MANN JR.








A product sampler



Badia sells more than 120 individual products in about 700 packaging and size presentations.



Complete seasoning (Sazón completa) is the company’s most popular product. This mixture of garlic, cumin, onions and other herbs is often favored by cooks who want to add Latin flavor to their dishes. It can be used with poultry, fish, meat, stews, sauces, salads and vegetables.



“Complete seasoning accounts for a large share of our sales,” company president Joseph “Pepe” Badía said. “And from the letters we receive from customers, it’s very popular outside the Latin community.”



The other top-selling Badia products are garlic (garlic powder, garlic salt and granulated garlic), ground black pepper, paprika and onions (onion powder, onion salt and chopped onion flakes).



Badia makes product sizes for home cooking, restaurants and food service companies ranging from quarter-ounce packets of spice to large containers for commercial use. It also offers a line of higher-priced premium products as well as organic spices, spice blends with no MSG and specialty products.



Some other Badia products:



Allspice



Basil leaves



Bay leaves



Chiles (ancho, arbol, California, cascabel, chipotle, guajillo, monita, New Mexico, pasilla, puya, red chili pepper)



Coriander



Marjoram



Star anise



Teas (cat’s claw, chamomile, eucalyptus, green, linden leaves, mint, natural herbs, star anise, yerba mate)



Olive oil



Italian seasoning



Garam marsala



Herbes de Provence



Louisiana Cajun



Red pepper



White pepper



Adobo



Barbecue seasoning



Chili powder



Marinades and sauces (Caribbean heat, chimichurri, lemon juice, Louisiana Cajun hot sauce, meat tenderizer, mojo, sour orange, sriracha)



Nuts and seeds



Almond extract



Arrowroot



Cinnamon sticks



Sprinkles (chocolate, rainbow)





Some local vendors of Badia products



Sedano’s



Publix



Walmart



Winn-Dixie



Presidente Supermarkets



Target



Costco Wholesale



Dollar Tree



BJ’s Wholesale Club



Badia products also appear as private label brands at Longhorn Steakhouse, Olive Garden and Red Lobster and can be purchased through Amazon.com, eBay and other online sites.

 

[Michael's Black Son]

You can own a business that doesn't mean it will be profitable

this. a bunch of indians here in NY own TONS of Subways and Dunkin Donuts, only employ their own but don't appear to me caking off that shyt. This one Subway by my crib closed down and reopened a year later and it seemed like it just transferred from one Indian dude to another. The shop has TONS of space but its like they don't know what to do with it and the other food place near by are KILLING them in terms of customers. the only way they are profitable is if they are washing $ in that place

 

[alpo]

Look, if the best of ours say Obama, Ben Carson, Robert Johnson, etc. . . all had to leave Amerikkka to find opportunities, then we'd be taking over somebody else's country too.

You'd be seein' nikkaz like "Damn, Black folks always owning businesses or doing something".

Just think about it. If the "culture" of those countries are so damned great, then what the hell are they coming here for?

And don't say it's the government because people get the government they deserve.

We only see the best of them, whereas we see the good, the bad, and the ugly of each other, which is why Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans don't have "model minority" status.

There's too many of us in too many different walks of life for them to idealize us, but they can idealize a few Indians, Nigerians, Arabs, etc. . . because they're not a threat to the status quo as a whole. There's too few of them to make a difference culturally and politically. All they can do is play the game the way the the White man wants them to play it, and for that, they're rewarded with that "model minority" status.

You see how Donald Sterling HATED Blacks and Latinos, but LOVED Koreans and other Asian ethnic groups. Why? Because they're not a threat. The Koreans he meets aer there to placate him and appeal to his sensibilities, because they know that they're foreigners in his country and have to play by his rules.

But who was he scared of? BLACKS. That's why he didn't want his triflin' ass girlfriend around Matt Kemp and Magic Johnson and other big, strong, Black men. We're a threat to people like him. We can change shyt with a speech like MLK, Malcolm, Frederick Douglass, etc. . .And we've proven physical dominance over White folks for so long that people forget that at one point just 50 or 60 years ago, people thought Black people didn't have the capabilities to be great athletes either.

But the minute a minority poses a threat to White folks due to sheer numbers or culture, like the Irish used to be or the Italians or now the Mexicans who cross the boarder, all that "model minority" shyt goes out the window.

To me, Tim Wise and Malcolm Gladwell both tackled this "model minority" shyt WAYYYYY better than I ever could. Look them up.

Real talk

 

[BrandonBanks]

this is whats frustrating about this place....nikkas can speak eloquently about rappers...nba free-agency....how hoes aint loyal

....but ask about anything of substance....all i see is cant cant cant cant cant...............

EXACTLY.