George Floyd was killed after employees at a convenience store owned by a Palestinian American Muslim — with a Muslim prayer space in its basement — called Minneapolis police over a suspected counterfeit $20 bill.
The role that the store played in Floyd’s death May 25 and in all that followed has been a bitter pill to swallow for many Muslim and Arab communities.
This moment has also reignited ongoing debates in Muslim communities over the ethical duties of immigrants who own businesses in black neighborhoods, from when and if they call the police to the role they can play in creating healthier food ecosystems.
“We know now that escalating situations to the police almost always does more harm than good, even for something as harmless as a fake bill,” Mahmoud Abumayyaleh, owner of the Cup Foods store that called the police on Floyd, wrote in a Facebook post.
Cup Foods, which has served customers in a largely black neighborhood for three decades, will no longer involve the police in nonviolent incidents, Abumayyaleh said.
“By simply following procedure we are putting our communities in danger,” he said in his social media post. Instead, he urged, “Work within your communities to find alternatives to policing, until the point that local and state officials decide to seriously hold police accountable once and for all.”
Food and liquor stores, often owned by Arab and South Asian immigrants, are common in mostly black, low-income neighborhoods. But the relationships between these store owners and the communities they serve have often been fraught with racial tension.
Imam Makram El-Amin of Masjid An-Nur in Minneapolis said Floyd’s killing may open up store owners’ eyes and lead to a “watershed moment” in changing the relationship between store owners and the community.
“Everything is different in the air right now,” Al-Amin said in a virtual town hall held last week on the matter. “We know not all Arab store owners are bad actors, but there is a narrative around it. There has sometimes been a conflict and a rub relative to that relationship.”
Rami Nashashibi, center, speaks with an Inner-City Muslim Action Network crew in Chicago in 2017. Photo© John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation — used with permission
Rami Nashashibi, director of Chicago’s Inner-City Muslim Action Network, says a massive cultural transformation is needed for nonblack Muslim corner store owners to be allies for those they serve.
“There are many more productive ways of mediating disputes and we are grateful that this current store owner has publicly declared that (involving police) will not happen moving forward,” Nashashibi said in the town hall.
But, Nashashibi emphasized, “I think we have to recognize that that call did not happen in a vacuum.”
Since the police killing, IMAN has partnered with the Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative, a racial justice education organization, to launch “Corner Store Witnesses,” a new training curriculum aimed at nonblack Muslim business owners.
The aim, creators said, is to “organize for a new reality around corner stores.”
Margari Aziza Hill, director of MuslimARC, said the planned virtual culturally sensitive training for store owners will “provide the pathway for playing a role towards being just and righteous witnesses against the type of violence that we’ve seen.”
Already, the organization has hosted conversations on the ethics of doing business in black neighborhoods.
The new curriculum is an extension of IMAN’s ongoing campaign to defuse racial tensions between those communities, which Nashashibi argues is critical to solving inner-city neighborhoods’ food access crises.
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Source: Religion News Service
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