“We’ve always been at the center of the theft.” – Andrew Salkey
Six months into the catastrophe of my grandmother’s death, her car was broken into three times. The last time they took her notebooks and my favorite shoes. Before that, they hadn’t taken anything and I was left to figure out what to do with broken windows. What to tell my mother. Where to go to get them fixed, how to navigate the emotional and financial cost of the repairs coupled with the car note.
The last time, I broke too. I went around the neighborhood in a frenzy, knocked on every door. Asked folks if they’d seen anything. I interviewed and interrogated everyone I saw. I noted which cars I hadn’t seen before, which ones had collected dust and tickets. Which ones were sparkling clean.
At one house, a Black woman answered the door and when I asked if she’d seen anything, she slowly started closing it. I blocked it from closing with my foot and asked her in a raised voice if anyone else in the house might have information. Two weeks before that I’d taken groceries and toys to the house for her grandchildren. We’d had tea together. I acted like I didn’t know her and that is my fault.
But I wanted my grandmother’s notebooks back. I wanted to always have a piece of her and her ashes weren’t enough. Stories about her weren’t enough. Her old lipstick had long ago melted. The loss was turning me inside out.
I spiraled further. I searched all the dumpsters near my house and nearby neighborhoods. I put up signs threatening the thief with cameras and a promise to fuck them up if I ever saw them again. I hinted at getting the police involved. Said I knew who they were, even though I didn’t.
My commitment to abolition was forgotten and at the same time, the contradictions laughed in my face. All of the things I said I was about disappeared in the midst of loss. I am embarrassed of how I acted and yet, it’s necessary to talk about if I want to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
The rampant militarism and humiliation Black families are exposed to was everywhere when I was growing up. We got used to police coming into houses without warrants and taking folks we loved into custody, with no Miranda Rights read, under little to no protest from whomever’s house we were at.
We went on short walks to house parties and never came home. Our parents would go to police stations to file missing person’s reports and be laughed out the door. They’d get a call from the morgue the next day asking someone to come down and identify the body. Kids around us were killed and then their murders justified.
Most things are jailable (and murderous) offenses if you’re Black. The law is not ours. It is not for us. It has never been for us. I know that and still I did these things. I criminalized an entire neighborhood because I was so lost in grief, in not having what I wanted, that I ignored reality. A reality I live every day but a reality that I am more resourced to navigate:
Black folk don’t break into cars and houses because they have things. They break into these spaces because they don’t.
***
I loved going to the liquor store near my elementary school to purchased Doritos and bathe them in nacho cheese sauce. Then the store owner started making us enter three at a time. We had to place our backpacks on the counter before we could look through the aisles and we had to have our money on the counter before we knew what we were getting. If we took too long in the aisles, we were kicked out. If we refused to take off our backpacks we weren’t allowed entry.
We had to open up the pockets of our jackets and pants to show nothing was in them before we left. Not every student had to do this, but we did. The owner, a Latinx man, claimed to be cool with everyone, but he wasn’t. Even though it was clear children like me weren’t welcome, I kept visiting because it was the closest.
Under capitalism, stores are prisons, no matter what kind. Department stores, supermarkets, warehouses, discount stores, mom and pops, butcher shops, thrift stores, convenience stores, malls… All prisons. All invested in profit, destruction, loss of life. There’s someone monitoring the merchandise and planning on what comes next if anyone attempts to take it. There are surveillance, logs, breaks, plastic cuffs, police sitting in cars outside. All assuming we’ll take even when we don’t.
You know the store down the street is a prison because of the smell. The wet, pissed stained cement and tired. A ground churning. The beautiful restaurant you visit is a barred getaway (or holding cell, depending on who you ask) with anti-homeless spikes in front. Metal detectors are doors. Security guards who look like you say nothing. Loss prevention experts disguised as shoppers continue, intent on locating “suspicious” looking customers.
Instead of providing folks with resources, these stores destroy and break items to make sure they can’t be used again. Undesirable food, display items and discontinued products are thrown away.
Though the institution of whiteness is reliant on (and founded by) generations of theft, Black folks are readily expected to foot the bill. This extractive truth is stained in industries, job descriptions, social designations, class structures, housing, and relationships, but it is especially fatal to Black life.
On October 17th, 2017, 58 year old Linda Jo Neal went into cardiac arrest. She collapsed on her employer’s warehouse floor in Memphis, Tennessee. Despite pleas, the supervisor would not let another worker administer CPR. Earlier that day, Linda Jo mentioned not feeling well and was not allowed to leave the site because she needed to “complete her shift”.
After Linda Jo collapsed, her colleagues were told to continue working. She died on the warehouse floor while they packed up and carried boxes. When her co-workers came in the next day, they found Linda Jo’s blood congealing on the floor. The paramedics took her body away but left a pool of her blood on the floor. None of the supervisors thought to clean it up.
Conversations around theft always come from the standpoint of morality, but what is morality for Black folks who’ve been brutalized in an immoral world? Our blood stains the floor of this country. It remains in its veins, in the shutters, the brick and the structure. Entire governments have relied on our subjugation and death.
My aunt, little cousin and I were visiting the Walmart in Hilltop Mall the first time I got caught stealing. I was sixteen. We came into the store to buy Mother’s Day cards and a fan because it was too hot in Richmond and we couldn’t turn on the air conditioning because the PG&E bill was already too high.
I grabbed three Mother’s Day cards and slid one into the opening of the fan’s box. Before we left the store, a Black woman rushed us into a back room labelled: “Not an exit. Employees only. ” It was their loss prevention room.
My aunt took the fall and gave them her identification card because I was a minor and she’d just turned 18. I didn’t have an ID. She cradled my cousin and hummed as she signed paperwork and looked at me from the corner of her eye. We’re 18 months apart. The loss prevention staff worker said that she’d probably get a court date or that the store would have her pay a fine of $50. Told her to keep watch for mail and be ready for whatever comes.
We kept watch. Nothing came.
Last week I witnessed a Black man attempting to walk out of Target. He had a tent over each arm like hunting rifles and a portable chair over his chest. He looked glorious. Then, as the sun hit his pants, a tornado of bodies pulled him back into the store.
Four loss prevention agents and three construction workers held him against the line of red and silver shopping carts. The shopping cart nearest the commotion still had coffee in it when it was slammed into the man’s side continuously. He yelled, “Bruh, let me leave. I won’t do it again. I have three kids. Please, just let me go!”
When his arms were pulled behind the “stolen” bags they left hanging from his body, they used zip ties. I think, given their job description, they are particularly skilled at securing a body, while still making sure something weighs on it to prevent running. The man yelps in pain.
When I walk up to the folks and tell them to let the man go, that the items are still in the store and they can’t legally do this, they pretend not to hear me. And as if on cue, a white woman silently starts crying nearby, shielding her eyes and wringing her hands.
She keeps hold of her basket, rocks it back and forth as if it were a child. She sees this often, I can tell, and she’s not from here. She probably lives around the corner like me, probably ignores the man when he’s out on the street asking for money to feed his family. But she doesn’t say anything, doesn’t offer to pay for one of the tents.
I’m still trying to get them to let him go when an older Black woman comes near me and tells the man, “Relax, baby. You got caught. You got caught. Stop resisting. It’ll be better for you if you stop.”
His shoulders settle a bit. His head hangs. He stops talking about his children and then eventually stops talking altogether. Seven folks shuffle him into a back room.
Everyone in the store continues shopping.
The government that perpetuates the idea that Black folks are always begging for handouts is the same one that refuses to admit that white folks are its largest recipients. Whiteness in itself is the biggest handout.
So whenever I see someone stealing, even if it is from me, I’m reminded of how folks are just trying to survive in places of disaster. I think about how Black homeownership in Oakland dropped because of redlining. I think about how white economies were built to thrive from Black loss.
I don’t believe in Black folk stealing from each other, but I don’t believe in criminalizing each other for it either. When I went to all those doors after my grandmother’s car was broken into, I saw Black babies in need of food, mamas who hadn’t been to sleep yet, cars collecting dust and tickets from the city that would never be paid. The city knows it, and still continues to ticket, piling more hurdles on top of already established ones.
At one door I swear I saw my grandmother frowning back at me for going into a neighborhood that I claim to love and essentially announcing myself as police do. Imposing. Disrespectful. Callous.
The state’s constitutive terrorism on Black lives intentionally situates us as property, products, leeches, inevitable criminals and potential consumers. It first requires Black folk produce to maintain order. Then it places us in positions to oversee the work, rewarding us when we continue their legacies of carceral politics. Lastly, our souls and interconnectedness be completely snuffed out.
I refuse the forced narratives and expectations that Black folks, especially Black children, must be innocent in order to thrive. I refuse the conditions that require us to take from and/ or criminalize those that look like us. I will restructure my actions and commitments to ensure that even in the midst of the scariest things, engaging in anything resembling these systems is not even a last resort.
May the families and institutions who continue to profit from this inequitable world lose everything. May Black folks receive what we need and more. May those that require our rot burn and know that our spirits have always been alive and full.
May we live.
Amber Butts is a writer, educator and tenants rights organizer from Oakland, CA. Her work has appeared in Blaqueerflow, KPFA’s Women’s Magazine Radio and 6×8 Press. She is currently at work on an afro-futurist novel focused on themes of intergenerational trauma, imagination, Black survival and environmental racism. Amber’s writing challenges multiple systems of oppression through the use of queer and womanist frameworks. She works to amplify the stories of poor Black folks, with an emphasis on mamas, children and elders. She believes in asking big and small questions that lead to tangible expressions of freedom and liberation.
Amber likes cheese and comic books and sings louder than she needs to.
