Making a Hashtag of It 0
Elie Mystal comments on the Mall of America’s attempt to prevent a #BlackLivesMatters protest. A snippet (emphasis added):
And Mall of America certainly can’t ban black people from coming into it. They can’t restrict the activity of protesting until, at the very least, people actually start doing it. Otherwise you are just banning black people for something they might do, which is pretty damn racist.
Of course, Mall of America doesn’t want to ban black people. Black people can spend money too! They just don’t want black people to voice… anything of substance inside the mall, or disrupt other people’s attempts to spend money in the mall.
The concept that a mall is private space is morally, if not legally, flawed. In many communities, malls are for all practical purposes the downtowns of yesteryear, at least in the relatively few places where they have not yet been supplanted by big boxes. They want to be seen as public spaces, with shops and restaurants and recreation sometimes even exhibits of various types, as long as the public remains docile and compliant. Otherwise, otherwise.
And now for the rest of the story.
