Reading Eagle business story dances around bank-loan discrimination issue

Headlines in the Reading Eagle’s Business Weekly:

Latinos on the move

The Hispanic boost

Latino entrepreneurs are starting businesses

and adding jobs and money to the Berks economy

So the editors just noticed this? This is the news? They need to write a story to prove this? It goes with a series of stories about noticing Latino-Hispanics living outside Reading. The stories sort of treat them as strange but generally friendly creatures we can peer upon with curiosity. A bit like our earlier model of other, the Plain People of Berks County.

First, how about defining Latino. Is it anybody who speaks Spanish? Somebody from a Spanish-speaking country except Spain? Somebody whose parents or grandparents are from a Spanish speaking country except Spain?

Immigrants identify with their native countries much more closely than with a shared language. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie shows in her novel “Americanah,” Africans aren’t black until they come to America.

[The Eagle reporters dug up some great statistics, which should have been made into charts rather than the lame graphics the story had.]

Why not examine issues, rather than people. How does the Reading School District teach English as a second language? Do non-whites have more trouble getting business loans in Berks than whites?

In the same edition, editor Dan Fink presses Carl W. Staples, a vice president at Brentwood Industries, on what it’s like to be a black man in the upper leadership of a big company in Berks.

This is the most honest local treatment I’ve seen of this subject, handled with sensitivity by interviewer and interviewee.

Staples: We live in a community that is at the higher levels of organization still very Caucasian.

BW: It's white men, essentially.

Staples: Essentially. And when they look for their replacements or people to come into their company, they look for people that look like them people [sic] who you think share the same values and the same beliefs that you do.

Another story writes about a micro-loan program geared toward minorities and women. The story doesn’t mention Reading’s very own micro-loan program. I’d like to know how that’s going. Why do we need two? What’s the difference between them?