"Working Families for Wal-Mart"

[xmatt]

So there's a fake grassroots advocacy organization called "Working Families for Wal-Mart." They, well, I guess they try to convince people that Wal-Mart is somehow good for working class people. Anyway, the chair of this group is former civil rights leader Andrew Young. In an interview with the Los Angeles Sentinel, he had this say when asked to

Comments

[curiouscliche]

Anything essentialist is automatically ignorant, stereotyped and inaccurate.

Essentialism as it relates to sociology is the idea that everyone in a group of people can be assumed to share common attributes beyond those directly related to the definition of the group. More concretely, individual members of a group cannot differ in respect to the supposed "essence" of the group.

Of course, Young's statement isn't exactly cut and dry essentialism, but some aspects are pretty indicative.

"Those are the people who have been over-charging us". By “those” he's referring to "mom and pop stores" (although he further specifies this accusation later). This statement is triply essentialist. It implies that not only are mom and pop stores the only stores who over-charge working class/black people and that all mom and pop stores do so, it also implies that every working class/black person's experience is the same in this regard. Then he essentializes again by stating "they sold us out and moved to Florida". Next, he throws out three more essentialist statements about Jews, Koreans, and Arabs (not to mention the fact that specifying an order is essentialist). Finally he essentializes on a more grandiose and (absurd) scale by implying that all of these groups are the same vis a vis working class/black people, (over-chargers, Jews, Arabs, Koreans, Floridians, and mom/poppers) when in fact, none of these groups share any "essential" characteristics with any other.

I've probably missed several other essentialist implications, but really livejournal doesn't have to be about precision, does it?

Simple answer, I know his generalizations are baseless. I also know that Andrew Young should have died about two or three decades ago while he was still cool and before he became an apologist for Nike sweatshops in Vietnam and Wal-Mart monopolism.