No Fire Next Time: Black-Korean Conflicts and the Future of America's Cities

Why did black-Korean tensions result in violent clashes in Los Angeles but not in New York City? In a book based on fieldwork and on a nationwide database he constructed to track such conflicts, Patrick D. Joyce goes beyond sociological and cultural explanations. "No Fire Next Time" shows how political practices and urban institutions can channel racial and ethnic tensions into protest or, alternately, leave them free to erupt violently. Few encounters demonstrate this connection better than those between African Americans and Korean Americans. Cities like New York, where politics is noisy, contentious and involves people at the grassroots, have seen extensive black boycotts of Korean-owned businesses (usually small grocery stores). African Americans in Los Angeles have sustained few long-term boycotts of Korean-American businesses - but the absence of "routine" contention there goes hand in hand with the large-scale riots of 1992 and continuous acts of individual violence. In demonstrating how conflicts between these groups were intimately tied to their political surroundings, this book yields practical lessons for the future. City governments can do little to fight widening economic inequality in an increasingly diverse nation, Joyce writes. But officials and activists can restructure political institutions to provide the foundations for new multi-racial coalitions.

About the Author :

Patrick D. Joyce has taught government and politics at Harvard University, Wellesley College, and the College of the Holy Cross.

Some of Joyce's major findings have important policy implications because they teach local community leaders, government officials, and politicians a lesson about how to transform latent intergroup tensions into less violent forms of conflict.

In No Fire Next Time, Patrick Joyce offers another possible approach to conflict resolution: He asks the unasked question, what is wrong with conflict? Overall, Joyce offers a fresh perspective on an old, yet unresolved issue that continues to shape relations among native-born and immigrant minority groups in America.... Joyce's book is a long-awaited study that finally offers a complex analysis of community activism among Black Americans within the context of local politics in New York and Los Angeles.... Joyce's book fills a vacuum in current literature and proposes innovative and promising solutions for mediating interminority tensions.

Joyce calls attention to local political institutions as important and under-analyzed actors. Future students of urban politics and conflict should heed that call.

The central argument here is that interracial conflicts between blacks and Koreans are more likely to be channeled into nonviolent resolutions in cities with strong urban political institutions that better connect city residents to their community and their government.... This book represents a contribution to the growing literature on race relations in America. Of potential interest to academic libraries, as well as public libraries serving diverse populations.