Asian & Middle Eastern shop-owners who have businesses in Black neighborhoods & then choose to call the cops over petty shit (a conterfeit $20 = petty shit) DO have a degree of complicity in this murder. Any cashier knows bad money is a relatively common occurrence, why escalate?

Most people using small counterfeit bills aren’t doing it on purpose & are genuinely surprised as anyone w/cashier experience knows. Just put it to the side in the drawer, to call the cops is to knowingly put lives of your customers at unnecessary risk. Is your “protocol” deadly?

If you run a business in a neighborhood you know full well the economic conditions of some of your customer base. If you've ever heard the #blacklivesmatter hashtag and you have, you know full well the risk you are putting your Black customers' lives in over essentially nothing.

I'd like to see mosques lead efforts to have shop-owners make community contracts (expanding @MuslimARC antiracist contracts or what IMAN does) to NOT escalate & call the cops over petty shit. Penalize businesses that call the cops over petty shit even if (hopefully!) no one dies

I’d love to give a khutba on the hadith about how the desperation of poverty approaches/resembles kufr, very timely--if what is happening at Target looks like “looting” to you but not what the billionaires are doing (profiting during a pandemic) you’ve missed the Prophet’s point

Allahu Alam but this is how I understand it. Where do you assign blame and responsibility? Remember what Malcolm X said “If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”