My wife, Rahnee, watched through our kitchen window as cars pulled up hastily and randomly in front of the 7-Eleven storefront below our condo. People jumped out of their cars and left the engines running. They hustled into the store, hustled back out with armloads of goods, jumped back in their cars, and sped away.
Earlier in the day, a massive protest march ended with a rally at Federal Plaza in downtown Chicago, three blocks from where we live. Rahnee attended briefly. Her sign was a T-shirt that read #Justice4Stephon—a reference to Stephon Clark, a twenty-two-year-old unarmed Black man killed by Sacramento police in March 2019—stretched over a poster board.
She tried to stay on the periphery of the crowd in the interest of social distancing, but the crowd kept expanding so she didn’t stay for very long.
Throughout the rest of the evening, we heard a steady stream of sirens in the distance, and helicopters above.
I went out the next morning to assess the damage around us. The 7-Eleven was boarded up and closed. Down the block, the independent bookstore Sandmeyer’s had no damage at all, even though there are several racks of books right inside the window.
So maybe there was a strategy to all of this. Maybe only the corporate chain establishments were hit and not the “mom and pops.” Or maybe nobody wanted books. But at the end of the block is a knitting store called Yarnify and the gaping, jagged hole in their window was covered by two strands of yellow CAUTION tape forming an X. What the hell was that about? Did people hustle out of there with armloads of yarn and knitting needles?
The hamburger joint that is also in a storefront of our building was boarded up, too. The cash register was stolen. It, too, is just a family-owned place. The guy who runs it must be heartbroken. He was just coming back from shutting down for several weeks due to the pandemic. I wonder if he’ll just give up and close down for good now.
It’s a good question to ask because nobody deserved this—not even the 7-Eleven.
Who did it? Were the people who looted the 7-Eleven the same people who attended or organized the rally? I doubt it. Some people say it was white supremacists trying to corrupt the message of the protests. Maybe so. Who knows?
Why did it happen? That’s easy to answer. It happened because once again we all witnessed a white police officer killing a Black person. Whether the destruction was motivated by rage or opportunism or all of that and more, that’s why it happened. It wouldn’t have occurred without that viciously racist act. Fair or not, it is what it is.
And if we don’t want this kind of stuff to happen around here again, then we have to be involved in the fight to make sure that kind of stuff doesn’t happen anywhere again. If people are feeling aggrieved, I think that’s the best way to respond.