Money Talks

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San Diego’s racial-economic milieu offers a mixed bag of hopeful signs for most of the county’s minority groups. Nearly all who responded to the exhaustive series of questions in the San Diego Magazine survey could point to areas where conditions have changed for the better. Some Native American tribes have found renewed economic hope in casinos. Asians and Pacific Islanders generally are as financially secure as many whites. And Latinos, an up-and-coming political and economic force, are finding new footing after the Supreme Court repealed controversial and divisive Proposition 187, the voter-approved 1994 initiative that would have banned most government services for illegal immigrants.

However, African-Americans—6 percent of the county’s population—remain the most disenfranchised group in San Diego. Be it police profiling, past discrimination, lack of quality education or economic mistreatment, African-Americans say they’re still getting the short end of society’s stick. The police slaying of former NFL player Demetrius DuBose in Mission Beach in 1999 remains a sore point in the African-American community. More recently, Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante’s unwitting use of the word “nigger” at a Black History Month dinner in February outraged some Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, who didn’t buy his explanation that his use of the slur was “a grievous slip of the tongue.”

But if you’re looking for rage, a little anger and a dose of racial venting, don’t bother knocking on the glass doors of the Southeastern Economic Development Corporation, anchoring the heart of a 37-company business park as pristine and vibrant as any in Sorrento Valley. SEDC leaders don’t have time to, as they call it, “yell racism.” They’re too busy cobbling multimillion-dollar redevelopment deals, such as the new $10 million Costco store on Gateway Center Drive and the nearby $32 million Imperial Market Place project, site of a new Home Depot store slated for completion this year.

Mentions of the area once conjured images of suburban squalor, with run-down rental houses, graffiti-tagged fences and men slurping booze wrapped in brown paper bags. Today, people can be seen walking or biking to work inside the tree-lined business park. In fact, 28 percent of the people working here live nearby—one of the best records in the county in terms of employing local residents.

“People are surprised when they come here,” says Carolyn Y. Smith, president of SEDC. “They wonder, ‘Is this an oasis?’ No, it’s not.”

Indeed, a couple of miles away, SEDC is putting the finishing touches on the Southcrest Redevelopment Project Area between Highway 15 and Interstate 805, where the state had plowed over 66 acres for yet another freeway nearly 30 years ago, only to be halted by community protest. SEDC has spent the last 15 years repairing the damage. The work included rebuilding with a mix of homes and businesses.

The highlights:

Southcrest Park Plaza, home to Albertsons supermarket, the first major supermarket to locate in Southeastern San Diego in more than 25 years

Parts USA, a national auto parts chain

Southcrest Park Estates, a planned development of 34 low-cost family homes

Plans for a 9.5-acre park

Chavez Elementary School, which opened in the fall of 1997

Sitting in a corner office at SEDC headquarters, Marc Randolph, director of communications, points out the window, waving at the entire area. “If we keep replicating this scene,” he says, “someone will take notice.”

Randolph and Smith eschew discussion of institutional racism, economic racism or just plain, everyday, on-the-street racism. Nonetheless, Smith drops her guard momentarily to offer one complaint. “Some of the challenges we face are regulatory. It shouldn’t take two to three years for a project to get approval,” she says, referring to the amount of time it took to get the okay from the city for the Home Depot project off Imperial Avenue. “You’d think that if it’s an economic development project, there’d be some consideration.”

Randolph and Smith know all too well that economic racism exists. But they choose not to dwell on the subject, instead detouring conversation to the SEDC’s many accomplishments. Where they demur, however, Dr. JoAnne Cornwell gladly picks up the baton.

Cornwell, an associate professor of Africana studies and French at SDSU, is the owner of Sisterlocks, her trademarked form of natural hair braiding. She battled the state Board of Cosmetology—she calls it the “cosmetology gestapo”—for more than two years, warring for the right to braid hair for African-American clients without the costly training and licensing the state required. She prevailed in 1999, but not before confronting what she deems in-your-face institutional racism. During the marathon court case, she also gained clarity about how self-worth is tied to beauty, and how notions of beauty have been reinforced by regulations drafted by “white guys” decades ago.

“We’re a race of people who have been told that our physical characteristics are subhuman,” Cornwell says while braiding hair for a friend and colleague at her Clairemont home. Straight hair and light skin have been proffered as the ideal aesthetic—an aesthetic that has created an identity crisis for legions of African-Americans, she says. During court depositions, Cornwell says she was amazed at the racist language codified in state cosmetology law. “There would be words to describe African-American hair as ‘overly’ this or ‘extremely kinky’ that,” she says.

Although Cornwell prevailed in the case, the state still requires beauticians who want to work at a salon open to the public to jump through the regulatory hoops. That’s why she and other practitioners of African-American hair braiding do it mostly from their homes. Furthermore, if an African-American wants to perform hair braiding—and only hair braiding—in a public salon, the state still requires that he or she learn straight-hair styling techniques.

“You still have to work on a straight-haired person [during the testing] to get a cosmetology license in this state,” Cornwell says. She stands back, points to her friend and adds, “I couldn’t bring her for the test. If that ain’t racism, I don’t know what is.”

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