‘It’s a Window, Not a Life’: Restaurant and Shop Owners Grapple With Looting Losses and the Need for Justice

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‘It’s a Window, Not a Life’: Restaurant and Shop Owners Grapple With Looting Losses and the Need for Justice
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With protests against police brutality and anti-Black violence breaking out across the U.S., business owners attempt to balance personal loss with the need for systemic change

. But compared to the loss of actual lives, like those of Floyd’s or Taylor’s or Arbery’s? “There’s no way I’m going to prioritize my business or property over the life of a murdered Black man,” he told Eater.

“It echoes, in a lot of ways, our COVID response,” he said, noting that as of June 1, dine-in service is now allowed in Providence — but not in his restaurants. What it comes down to, according to Mark, is the decision to value material gain over the safety of his staff, his guests, and people’s lives in general. Restaurants can be rebuilt, he said. If that means being collateral damage, then so be it.

It is not “fair,” certainly, to ask people who have already had their livelihoods threatened by the economic devastation of the pandemic to continue to offer up their restaurants and shops for plunder on these nights of shattered glass and rubber bullets and tear gassing. But, really, is any of it fair?

For restaurants and other independent businesses to have emerged from the past three months in this state of heightened vulnerability, fighting for scraps from the government? For margins to be so thin, even in the best of times, that workers are easily underpaid or exploited or left without health insurance, because this nation lacks the social safety nets that would guarantee some measure of a dignified living for all? For some protesters to feel they have so little to lose that they —...

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