Can a Mall be Too White?
Articles like For Some, An Online Persona Undermines a Resume make me nervous because I really have a hard time judging what can and should be public. It’s not the ‘90s anymore and everyone has the ability to know everyone’s online business. It’s not like I’m posting debaucherous photos of myself (though I have no problem posting words that don’t exist in the dictionary. How can debaucherous not be a word?). I very much restrain myself, much more so now than say, seven years ago. I don’t badmouth, bare my soul (completely) or thankfully, my ass. I do talk about unimportant things and complain quite a bit but that’s hardly a cyber-crime.
Speaking of crime, it seems that malls are no longer safe havens for white folks. In the past week there has been two anti-white mall mentions in the news. Two, does not a trend make, so I’m waiting for the tipping point. The case for the White Plains mall murder that happened last summer is currently going to trial. "All I knew was she had blond hair and blue eyes and she had to die," isn’t really laughable (though it might be in another context) so I’ll leave that one alone.
But for some reason, the guy in Long Island who threw a boulder at a family in a minivan in a parking lot because the mall had become “too white” amuses me. Come on now, is there anything whiter than a mall? There’s no way anyone could argue that somehow Anglo-Saxons borrowed and/or misappropriated mall culture from African-Americans (but if you’d like to try, I’d love to hear it). Of all the things to get worked up over. But judging from the Sunrise Mall’s anchor stores: Wal-Mart, Sears and JC Penny and lack of any dining more upscale than food court offering Bourbon St. Grill, it doesn’t sound like much of a gentrified shopping center to me. Carl Graves really needs to get out more.
Admittedly, I don’t really get or know my Long Island neighborhoods. Like you hear about the Hamptons (I did have an ice cream cone there once while driving through) and clearly that’s rich white people. Then you hear about people tormenting Mexicans and that has to be trashy white people. But then, there are pockets that are seemingly not white at all and I’m guessing this is where the lovely Sunrise Mall might be located.
I vividly recall on perhaps my second weekend living in NYC, tagging along to Jones Beach in a borrowed car (the luxury!) with the girls I was staying with. On the way home we stopped at a Red Lobster in a mall parking lot in Baldwin. I’m pretty sure it was called Green Acres and there was a store with outside signage called Stern’s. I don’t think they have those anymore. But we were the only white diners, which was slightly jarring since this was very un-NW and I hadn’t even begun to acclimate to Brooklyn yet. At least no one threw chunks of concrete at us. (I wouldn’t have minded it if someone hurled a Cheddar Bay Biscuit at me because you can never have too many of those.)
I pitched a story about South American hot dogs (yes, South American hot dogs) on Tuesday and they want it by Monday, which is kind of pushing it even though it’s not exactly Pulitzer-level taxing. There’s no way I’ll be able to handle five restaurants tonight. Not to mention the fact that I don’t even like hot dogs (weird, right?). They’re one of the few foods, along with melon, potato chips, chili and spaghetti and meatballs that I could never eat again for the rest of my life and I wouldn’t be sad.
Follow
