The Heart of Darkness in the Hood
By: Maryam Ismail
Tags: George Floyd, Racial Justice, BlackLivesMatter, Muslims In America, Racism

“Asian and Middle Eastern shop-owners who have businesses in Black neighborhoods and then choose to call the cops over petty shit (counterfeit $20 = petty sh-t). OK you are not direct murderers but you DO have a degree of complicity in this murder insofar as you continue to have or defend the protocol of escalating to the police. 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.”

Zareena Grewal, a Yale professor, wrote this angry post on her Facebook page. She has since retracted this statement and apologized for it, after a reading a post from Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian American activist, who stated she also was the daughter of store owner, and that it was not fair that the shop owner was being targeted, in response to the Floyd murder. She then went on to to say, there were some facts that needed correcting. This was a clear an effort to save the shop owner, also, a Palestinian whose life is being threatened. So, where is her alliance with George Floyd? She also said, that racists within the Arab community did exist, but Mikey, the owner of Cups, wasn’t one of them. Recognizing racism, is not the same as taking action to change it.

One of the facts that Sarsour posted was, the owner, Mahmoud “Mikey” Abumayyaleh was not at the store with the event took place, he arrived later on. Adding, “When I saw what was happening, I said call the cops on the cops,” this seems pretty lame. And he knew it. Afterwards, he wrote on his FB page, “I and my PR crew, were Bamboozled, by NBC.” He has a PR crew? He was clearly trying to save face. Luckily for him, he has Sarsour to plead his case.

Among her list of ‘facts’ was his teenage employee was following the statewide “practice protocol,” which was to call the police when any counterfeit money came their way. During his NBC interview, he mentioned this protocol several times, as if he and his employees were doing the right thing.

Responses to Grewal’s post had similar, ‘did the right thing’ stories in the comments. These were stories of how former workers in these shops faced threats and abuse from their customers whose goal was to cop some free stuff. This was under the guise of providing ‘nuance’, but they were also making excuses for calling the cops on their customers, who were most likely, African American.

Many see African Americans by nature as threatening. There are even times, some African Americans, myself included, use their Blackness as a power. But other than a momentary show of bravado, it means nothing more than that. As we can see, it can not stop them from getting systematically arrested, shot, and killed.

Photo by redens desrosiers on Unsplash

What this inadvertently exposed is not just the tensions between the police and African Americans but that of the immigrant, merchant, class who plant their businesses in the middle of these communities. This situation has been made even more complicated by Abumayyaleh, who maintains that his employee followed the “practice protocol,” which means calling 911 on a person passing off fake $20. Even more telling is, his statement in a NBC interview, that Floyd, a regular customer, whom he knew. So, why call the cops?

The situation definitely escalated beyond his expectations. Which is a risk anytime anyone calls the police. Which why he is trying to distance himself from the cops who killed Floyd.

Despite Abumayyaleh being in the ‘hood’ as he claimed for three decades, what he understood, was there was a difference between him and the people who came in his store.To his credit, many of his customers on his Facebook page defended him, but this can be broken down to African American culture, where, the “He is cool by me,” sentiment goes a long way.

Yet, the real social dynamics are much sinister as exposed by Grewal’s post’s comments, is, that there an entire class of people, who claimed to have learned how to handle Blacks. Franz Fanon’s Concerning Violence, describes this situation as that of the settler and native:

“The settler-native relationship is a mass relationship. The settler pits brute force against the weight of numbers. He is an exhibitionist. His preoccupation with security makes him remind the native out loud that there, he alone is master.”

The shop owner and others who think that they can use their position of privilege, be it from their status, wealth, or skin color, plays a role as a settler against that of the native.

If this seems to make no sense, well, this is how it works in the settler/native system. As Fanon also states, “Where individuals are concerned, a positive negation of common sense is evident.” What we keep seeing over and again is the madness of a racialized system.

As people start to parse out the episodes of George Floyd’s life, one can see like many strangled by structural racism, caste and class, there are who commit ‘economic crimes’ where people are just trying to make it. Yet, if you lived in what sociologist, Terry Williams calls ‘zones of indifference’ where there are little jobs and if there are any, then, they are not for you.

Places like Newark, New Jersey, where many of workers and professionals are not Black and do not live in the city. Where they are often hidden from the view of the locals because there is a network of tunnels, bridges, and minibuses, that ferry them to and from parking lots, and the local railways. Creating a lack of viable job opportunities and making seem as if there is no way out. One journalist called it ‘insidious architecture’. Imagine the frustration, the anger and hopelessness this causes.

As Kenneth Clarke, in Dark Ghetto, remarked in 1964, “The Negro has been in danger of becoming the permanent proletariat, because he has been left out of the swelling prosperity and social progress of nation as a whole.” This was 56 years ago and with the ratio of African American wealth to that of Whites being 41% to 71%, this has only change by a margin.

Then, add to that, some newcomers who seem to be able to just lay down a tens of thousands of dollars and open up a store on your block. At first they will hire a few locals, may be some kids, or some women, but after a while, this will change to staff that looks more like the owners.

The truth is, when it comes to these corner stores like Cups Foods, in African American communities, regardless of which immigrant owns them, they seem to see the local community as outside themselves. I have even seen this within the Muslim community where, there is supposed to be no racism. Yet, racism can be vicious there too, even when Africans, Arabs, West Indians, and African Americans all live together. So, when Grewal also, called for the mosque to take care of this race problem, it was quite unrealistic.

These merchants are more like overseers, on the plantation. Some may pretend to be one of the locals, but are many part of a settler class. Who will give a few people whom he is good with a job, but is not interested in doing much other than that. He is not interested in improving the neighborhood, nor does he have ability to. But that’s another story.

A more savvy shop owner, Ruhel Arshad, seems, a local celebrity, whose restaurant caught fire during the protest, took another view. “Let it burn. He said, let justice prevail.” Of course this when viral was highlighted in the New York Post. Since his daughter posted her father’s words on FB, his customer base, which is mostly White, have started a fundraising account and he will be ok; offers of services and money are pouring in from all over the country. Here we can see again how the settlers support each other, just like those who came to Abumayyaleh’s defense.

I have lived in neighborhoods where these bodegas thrive. I have seen the kind of understanding that goes on between these communities. It is a sort of tug of war, where each side tries to get as much out of the other as they can. However, it is the native, that ends up with the shorter end of the stick.

Sudhir Venkatesh, in Gangster for a Day, his on ethnography of a Chicago neighborhood, documents his observations on how these relationships play out. It is often times the case, were the men working in these shops entice local women, with free stuff in exchange for a ‘friendship and other benefits’. This works out fine until, the Arab guy gets his fill of the locals, then goes to the motherland to get married or chooses a local bride of the same culture and religion.

More than once, I have seen, face to face, the yelling and screaming of those jilted lovers, sometimes, baby mamas.This is just what happens. Sometimes they make each other honest, which is why Abumayyaleh was happy to say, he has a nephew who is ‘half Black’.

This creates something similar to the plantation sexual system where these merchants take access to local women and this thereby, creates a fissure between African American men and these store owners. Add to this mix a bunch of social ills, like extreme structural poverty, economic abandonment, and substance availability and addiction, not to mention with the past ten years of fragmented education, this is no doubt a lethal formula.

No, there will not be any sort of a social contract between Arab/Muslim/Asian merchants who run bodegas in predominantly poor, African American neighborhoods. Instead as we have seen, there will only be a defense of Abumayyaleh and others like him. Where the practice protocol is to call the cops on a regular customer.