Books in Brief: Ethnic Enterprise in America: Business and Welfare among Chinese, Japanese and Blacks

Ethnic Enterprise in America: Business and Welfare among Chinese, Japanese and Blacks, by Ivan H. Light (California, 209 pp., $7.95) Lest you think this book must be like comparing bamboo shoots, mandarin oranges and black-eyed peas, be advised: it is a remarkably successful and intriguing study marred only very occasionally by High Sociologese jargon and low socio-illogicality. UCLA Professor Light emphasizes institutional factors accounting for the vast disparity between American Oriental and Negro achievement in business. He stresses such things as kinship and Old World regional ties as of vital significance in keeping the Chinese and Japanese off the public dole, and the absence of such connections as factors putting disproportionate numbers of Negroes on welfare. Dr. Light appears to be nearly as conversant with East Asian mores as with the Negro experience in America, and in both areas he writes confidently, intelligently and with simultaneous compassion and reserve—admittedly, a rare combination among academics nowadays. To my knowledge, Light’s is the best study thus far showing convincingly how the difference between international and interstate migration touched crucially on the differences in the Oriental response to America and the Southern Negro’s response to his sojourn in the North. Although he throws in a dash of the expected and conventional—“Like other Americans, Chinese have been disgusted and horrified by the U.S. military rampages in Indochina”—he generally avoids that sort of stuff and, in fact, offers enough that is unconventional so that he might emerge as a minor Banfield, that is, persecuted on campus for heresy.