This Is America: Target™ Reparations

Originally published via Armageddon Prose Substack:

 

“This Is America” explores the cultural undercurrents pulling Western civilization into the abyss.

After a lengthy amends for all of the culture war slop I’ve shoveled you people, it’s with equal parts enthusiasm and contrition that I’ve got more feed in my bucket for you pigs — this time, in the form of an urban individual of the colored persuasion, inspired (in her own words) by Rosa Parks, attempting a strong-arm robbery at an Ohio Expect More. Pay Less. Target™.

Related: 12-Foot Statue of Obese Black Woman Appears in Times Square

I bring this moving tale of perseverance in the face of white supremacist oppression to your attention not just because of its inspirational motif, but because it encapsulates quite succinctly the current state of BIPOC culture in my homeland.

Here we go.

The bullet points, all captured on surveillance video and police bodycams:

· A large urban woman enters her local Expect More. Pay Less. Target™

· She loads her shopping cart with $1,000 in merchandise

· At the checkout line, she demands that the manager gift her said merchandise because of systemic racism

· The manager politely refuses and offers her a PR phone number she can call to make the request

· Instead of taking the number and giving up her clearly well-planned heist, the urban woman assaults the manager

· Loss prevention approaches the woman to inquire as to why she’s bullying staff

· Urban woman chases loss prevention officer all the way to his office and corners him, at which point he hits her in the face in self-defense

· Police arrive

· Urban woman explains that they’re all witness to her “Rosa Parks moment” and warns the cops not to “play with her”

· Urban woman performs black power salute

· Police arrest urban woman, who becomes indignant

https://youtu.be/dM-WS_4VWXM

While the hubris to try to rob Ohio Expect More. Pay Less. Target™ as a novel form of slavery reparations might seem delusional at first blush, we should consider the context.

This was just two years after rioters in Minneapolis looted and then arsoned an Ohio Expect More. Pay Less. Target™ for some reason that ostensibly had something to do with the fentanyl overdose of George Floyd days prior.

https://youtu.be/ljS_W-pRxeA

Then you have the line that BLM ran with for years that retail theft is, in fact, reparations because people need Gucci bags to “feed their kids.”

If you think that Gucci bags for slavery is so outlandish that it must be an uncharitable interpretation of the argument, here it is:

https://youtu.be/X3UH9XVXMCs

Related: BLMers Launch GoFundMe For Subway Stabber, Charlotte Mayor Urges Video Censorship

But, you understand, as an axiomatic belief, nothing can ever be the fault of any BIPOC, either as an individual or a culture.

Thus, when retailers resort to securing even relatively low-value, everyday items that urban Americans tend to be most interested in stealing behind lock and key, actually they just did it because they’re systemically racist.

https://youtu.be/eDHqY3LuSgg

All that to say: the urban lady at the beginning of this story simply internalized all of that messaging and, in a way, acted not entirely irrationally when she decided to have her “Rosa Parks moment” at that Ohio Expect More. Pay Less. Target™.

It’s simple social conditioning at work — if you will, and please understand I mean this purely as an innuendo-free adage: monkey see, monkey do.

Benjamin Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile (now available in paperback), is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

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