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This is amazing content. It hits differently when you see it than when you only read it. The $20 thing is so visceral because the amount of routine theft that everyday white people did and do is impossible to measure. Impossible. https://twitter.com/theblackdetour/status/1353847694549282816
I’m not that old & i have these same stories. I clearly remember buying some Day’s Work from a convenience store for my auntie. I was a smart 9 or 10 year old. Quiet in front of authority but smart (shut up). I remember counting the change a white cashier gave me for the purchase
He had crumpled the bills up and shoved them in my hand. I was smoothing them to count them. And he got red and started screaming at me. Screaming. Because I was counting the change he knew he had just shorted me. Just everyday violence and theft.
I also think about the unflagging generational inheritance of brand loyalty among Black people, like that Esso example. The one shop or store or brand that half treated us human one time becomes an institution.
Until the day they closed, my mother and grandmother were this way about Loehmann’s. The store had apparently allowed us to try on the clothes and that was enough for three generations of loyalty.
This is also why you never ever interrupt an old Black person doing their change counting ritual. My great grandmother would hold up the Piggly Wiggly line for ten good minutes, making a show of counting her change. You let them because it is about dignity.
I still see the habit in young Black people and kind of smile. They inherited the ritual and you can tell. A young Black man at a convenience store making a show of putting away the change for his blunt papers will always make me smile a little
