American cinema has conditioned audiences to expect conflict involving middleman-minority stores

Evidence

We have become in some senses conditioned to this conflict through American cinema and culture. Remember the scene in Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing, for example, when a mob is on a rampage after the police choke the life out of Radio Raheem. They lay their eyes on the Korean store in the neighborhood and are ready to burn it down as the Korean shopkeeper yells, “Me no white, me black!” and the people in the mob start to laugh, deciding to leave the Korean man and his store alone. (Koreans and Arabs are the two most common middlemen minorities in New York City today.) — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 475

Categorization

• SHARE: The Korean shopkeeper’s ‘Me no white, me black!’ scene in Do the Right Thing and how the mob laughs and spares him would land with anyone writing about racial triangulation on screen.
• BMF: The store owner straddling two categories and surviving by a defiant claim of blackness echoes Changez’s self-positioning between worlds in The Reluctant Fundamentalist and the shopkeeper-as-visible-stranger dynamics. Real resonance, though loose.