Black Lives Matter and the Mall of America.

Today people who were too young for the civil rights era have a golden opportunity to participate in a historic movement for equality that will make their grandchildren proud. Hundreds of thousands of Americans across the country have made that decision in the last four months, including 3,000 who held a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest at the Mall of America on December 20, 2014. Unfortunately there are other Americans who seem bent on playing the part of the Jim Crow era angry white mobs and power elites who upheld the status quo. Mall of America in Bloomington Minnesota decided to join the latter when it prohibited a Black Lives Matter gathering, amassed a police force in riot gear to meet the protesters and shut down part of the mall. Now MOA is talking of suing participants for lost revenue that resulted from those actions. This will not only increase their demonic profile in the history books, it is suicidal. The revenue lost in one afternoon will be nothing compared to a wide-scale boycott of the mall. It didn't have to be like this. The MOA could have embraced the event, individual stores could have made the decision to put Black Lives Matter signs in their windows, ( or participate like the employees of Lush did) and three thousand protesters would have become three thousand more shoppers. The economic costs could multiply, affecting not just Mall of America, but businesses across the state. If a Minnesota court decides in favor of the MOA, we could see a statewide boycott like happened to Arizona in 2010, when they passed SP 1070, the law that made racial profiling imperative, giving police the right to stop anyone they thought looked undocumented. The boycott was devastating to the Arizona economy, which is why it is now in the process of being dismantled. A court decision in favor of MOA would only highlight Minnesota’s abysmal statistics for racial inequality in arrest, incarceration, police harassment and brutality, as well as gaps in education, employment, housing, and other social and economic indices, worse than Arizona or any other southern state. It is not too late for the Mall and politicians to declare a truth and reconciliation and reparation conference, to forgive the trespassing charges, to apologize for misunderstanding the meaning of a peaceful protest, and to recognize that a business that receives huge tax subsidies is not private.