Remember that our national leaders have been saying for weeks that tens of thousands more people should die of coronavirus for the sake of retail stores. Remember also that black people would be much more likely to die of the virus for the sake of retail stores. #Minneapolis

Remember that corporate stores in working-class neighborhoods are economically extractive: they take more money out of the community than they put into it. Remember that white-owned businesses in black neighborhoods have been especially guilty of this economic colonialism.

Remember that, for hundreds of years, black human beings in the US were given the legal status of property. Violence against their bodies was treated as a property crime rather than assault or murder. Even escaping slavery was, to the law, theft: black people stole themselves.

Remember that, after emancipation, black people who couldn’t prove their employment or who didn’t have a certain amount of cash in their pockets were arrested for “vagrancy” and leased out as forced labor to white landowners and white-owned businesses.

Remember that the oppressive white culture of the United States has taught us all to devalue the lives of black people, to equate black life with property, and to prioritize property claims over the lives of black people.

Remember that the United States imprisons far more people than any other country in the world, that we imprison black people at rates far higher than demographics explain, that our prisons are run for profit, and that imprisoned people are coerced into making retail products.

Remember that, along with murdering black people in cold blood, police are the point of entry to a prison-industrial complex that destroys lives and families by locking black people in for-profit prisons where they are paid $2 an hour to make products for stores like Target.