Louis Vuitton? Really?

Commercial media cannot be trusted. According to them, “Riots, Protests, and Covid-19 Shutter Downtown Portland.” (I’m not linking to the story because I don’t want to give more clicks to these liars.) It is internet shopping and Covid-19 that shuttered many of the downtown shops in Portland, but commercial media, sponsored by corporate interests, loves to blame protests and “rioters.” 

Sue and I spent Saturday afternoon seeing for ourselves what’s going on downtown. Spontaneous street art created by protesters has been removed, and many of the most exclusive shops (such as Louis Vuitton, Tiffany’s, and Gucci) have put up new plywood covers for their windows and have commissioned artists to create less incendiary messaging that appears to express solidarity without actually demanding policy change. Behind the plywood, brightly-lit high-end stores continue doing business. We wandered into a couple of stores that claimed to be celebrating the new “Juneteenth” holiday with sales. We found that we could buy a Balenciaga T-shirt, originally $1250, for only $890. A Juneteenth bargain!

Sadly many of the smaller brick and mortar shops have closed forever: not because of riots or protests but because of Covid and internet shopping. Amazon has done really well while all the little shops closed.

Many Black activists are furious about the new holiday. Bree Newsome tweets, “Mainstreaming Juneteenth means there’s now massive amt of inaccurate messaging—“it marks end of slavery”—and it’s very clear it’s being used to push a false idea of “progress” instead of a call to dismantle white supremacy.”

Cori Bush tweets, "On this Juneteenth, remember that millions of incarcerated Black people are still in bondage and that the 13th Amendment still permits slavery."