On the occasion that we would go to Bon Marche for something, you could tell that poor mall was on its way out. There would be surprisingly few shoppers milling about, and a growing number of poor black people. White people started to think of Bon Marche as the "black mall," notwithstanding that middle-class black people shopped at Cortana. Over time, the housing development next door, which, according to the Deadmalls.com history of Bon Marche's death, was built for yuppies, turned into a crime-infested ghetto.You'll never guess where he's going with this.
If a mall gets known among white people as "the black mall" -- or, I suppose, in a regional variation, as "the Mexican mall" -- they just won't go to it. Stuff White People Hate? Right-minded white people will deplore the trend, but the kind of liberal, educated white people who deplore this kind of thing aren't the kind of white people who would be caught dead actually shopping in the black mall. They're embarrassed by other white people who won't shop there, and who don't feel bad about it.It seems brother Rod doesn't want to come right out and say that black people ruin malls, so he hits an available secondary target, liberals. (Surely he doesn't count himself one of the "liberal, educated white people.") In his view they're worse than the rest of their race, because they're hypocritical. (It's an old gambit of his.)
I marvel that no one told him that we don't go to malls, but to boites and boutiques run by our friends the homosexuals.
He does ask if there has been "academic work on the role of class and ethnicity in driving the success and failure of malls," so there's a chance he may once again find a scholarly reason to keep away from black folks.
UPDATE. Maybe Dreher should solicit the opinions of some of the posters to this police bulletin board, discussing the Black Friday unpleasantness at the Green Acres Mall in Long Island. No guilty white liberals they!
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