The Movement for Black Lives stemmed from a long lineage of struggles against the carceral and police state, especially after the murder of Trayvon Martin by vigilante George Zimmerman in 2012, and erupted into a nationwide movement following the killing of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri. The Black Lives Matter hashtag originated from queer Black activist Alicia Garza, along with Patrisse Cullors and Opal [Ayọ] Tometi.20 In this chapter, when I talk about Black Lives Matter, I’m talking about not only the hashtag or the foundation, but the broader movement, including an array of organizations and actors who regularly block freeways, occupy police stations, and disrupt everyday life, calling for everything from police reform and
punishment of police misconduct to police and prison abolition. In many ways, the movement represents the twenty-first-century iteration of a decades-long battle between politicians, nonprofit organizations, celebrities, professional organizers, academics, and activists.21
At first, it seemed like Black Lives Matter’s focus on shopping centers was simply a matter of timing. Since Darren Wilson’s non-indictment in 2014 closely preceded the holiday season, it made sense that protesters would disrupt the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade,22 hold nationwide protests on Black Friday,23 and conduct die-ins at retail giants H&M and Forever 21.24 Over the course of 2015, though, retail spaces continued to be a key protest target, including Black Friday actions in Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, Portland, and Seattle, as well as a national call to boycott Black Friday altogether. The Chicago Tribune reports that protests cost stores 25–50 percent of Black Friday sales.25 In Maryland, Mondawmin Mall served as ground zero for the 2015 Baltimore riots, when police shut down the local bus system and stoked the anger of Black youth who gathered at the space following the funeral of Freddie Gray, who died in police custody.26 In an interview with PBS NewsHour, historian N. D. B.
Connolly commented:
This mall is where the riots began [on April 27]. It’s the Mondawmin Mall, here in Northwest Baltimore. It’s just across from Frederick Douglass High School, and it actually sits in the middle of three big narratives about the city’s history. One is the most recent riot. The second is the story of prices and the everyday life of living in Baltimore and what this mall represents for everyday people trying to shop here. And the third is that this mall actually began as one of the city’s first shopping malls that used to primarily serve white customers. And it suffered white flight and had to basically repurpose itself to deal with a black clientele. And so, the history of segregation, the history of price gouging, and the more recent history of the riot are all built here, around the Mondawmin Mall.27
Connolly’s interview points to the social and political history of retail.
Indeed, as historian Traci Parker demonstrates in her book Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement, retail was central to the twentieth-century civil rights movement, creating a nexus of struggle around labor and consumption. Depression-era “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns—which responded to widespread layoffs of African Americans following the stock market crash—set the groundwork for department store movements of the 1930s and 1940s. Many campaigns in this movement promoted fair hiring practices and pushed against discrimination and segregation of consumers. During this era, multiple riots
—including those in Detroit and Harlem in 1943—saw looting of white- owned or openly discriminatory businesses. Parker argues that the metamorphosis of retail from high-end department stores to mega shopping malls and super-centers was not based on economics alone. The move from public downtown shopping districts to privately owned suburban spaces attempted to squash retail’s political potential.28
That transformation was, according to urban theorist Mike Davis, “an especially disturbing guide to the emerging liaisons between urban architecture and the police state.”29 At the neighborhood level, malls, department stores, and shopping areas are key nodes of capitalist restructuring, regularly justifying sweeping gentrification.30 Keeping these areas safe and clean for consumers—meaning free of those deemed dangerous or surplus—often relies on quality-of-life policing, which leads to increased incarceration, police violence, and death.31 Each day I exited the subway to work in Manhattan, I encountered NYPD vans, cruisers, and mobile surveillance towers, highlighting so clearly the non-spectacular, mundane ways in which twenty-first century policing and consumer capitalism go hand in hand.
Stores also overtly profile shoppers, utilizing the police’s stop-and-frisk tactic to protect these sanctified sites of consumption. In 2015, Zara faced ridicule when a survey by the Center for Popular Democracy revealed they used the term “special order” to verbally mark suspicious customers; 46 percent of workers surveyed claimed that “Black customers were called special orders ‘always’ or ‘often.’”32 One of my interviewees agreed: “I’m sure you’re aware but loss prevention was a lot of times a pretty racialized thing. Keep your eyes on the Black girl dressed a certain way. Or Black girls period.” As I discussed in the last chapter, workers themselves are
regularly criminalized, subjected to bag checks, and tracked through biometric monitoring and big data surveillance.
Digital policing and surveillance have not replaced human control, but evolve alongside it.33 Other scholars note that digital surveillance is itself a form of profiling, by sorting human bodies into discrete categories.34 We should not be surprised by these connections, given that algorithms contain the biases of humans who create them.35 These combinations of crudeness and sophistication, of analog and digital methods of capture and collective refusal, can be seen in actions against the BLM movement. Arguably, one of the most dramatic politicizations of retail occurred at the Mall of America.