Target, of course, isn’t the first big retailer to come under fire from the Black community for being absent. But this time it’s not for its lack of stores, but for its failure to stand by Black customers, businesses and the principles of economic justice the company claimed to care about. The boycott takes its cues from the segregation-era “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns, when Black people urged each other not to spend money in stores that refused to hire them. The message this time around is more subtle but still urgent: Don’t Spend Where You Aren’t Respected. 

Respect is an old cause that’s finding new traction among Black consumers today as the Trump administration continues to attack racial justice on all fronts. The call for respect started growing after 2020, when the national soul-searching prompted by Floyd’s murder made Americans more aware of history, especially how the work of enslaved Africans was key to building up the country’s enormous wealth. In that light, Target’s $2 billion pledge was not charity but an acknowledgement of the debt corporate America has always owed Black people. That’s why Target’s abrupt reneging on that debt feels so unacceptable to Black organizations and consumers. 

Rev. Jonathan Moseley, Western regional director with the National Action Network, one of the organizations leading the boycott, said that the lesson Black people are learning — or relearning — is that while a marquee retailer in the community is ostensibly a good thing, it is primarily there for profit, and to look after its own interests. 

“It’s important that Black people don’t become confused,” said Moseley. “These stores don’t want you there. They give you a few crumbs.” 

The real long-term solution, he said, is for Black people to build their own businesses that serve their own interests, as they did in earlier times of segregation, when they frequently had no choice. 

“We have more to offer than any Target,” he said. “We have to follow the blueprint of our own history.”

Black people also have to respond to  the massive MAGA energy driving Trump’s war on DEI that prompted Target and other corporate giants to abandon those principles in the first place. On Aug. 28th — the 62nd anniversary of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington — the National Action Network, founded by Rev. Al Sharpton, staged the March on Wall Street, a demonstration against Trump’s anti-Black agenda that drew thousands of people to Lower Manhattan from states across the country, including California. 

At the event, Sharpton drew the historical connection between the march and Occupy Wall Street, the grassroots 2011 movement that protested the fast-growing wealth gap in America. But unlike Occupy, the march’s main grievance was racial. 

“If we leave (Trump) unchecked on DEI … he will completely erase the freedoms our parents and our grandparents fought, bled and died for,” Sharpton told the crowd, adding that the event was also meant to highlight “the power of Black Americans and their dollars.”

Clearly more is at stake than just prevailing with Target and other companies that have shut down their diversity efforts, such as Walmart, PepsiCo and Amazon. But the Target boycott is complicated by the struggles of retail that weren’t on the horizon in ’92 but are now well known. The last three decades have seen the collapse or consolidation of department stores like the Broadway and May Co. — the original anchor tenants of the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, also known as the Crenshaw mall — and later, discount chains like Big Lots and the 99 Cent stores (the Target near Baldwin Hills fills the space once occupied by Fedco, which closed in 1999). 

Target is one of the only big retail chains still standing, one of the few familiar shopping destinations left in an urban landscape pocked again with shuttered storefronts that are oddly reminiscent of 1992. While Moseley’s call for more self-sufficiency makes a lot of sense, the reality is that there are no Black-owned retailers to take their place, and building Black businesses of the scale that’s needed is notoriously difficult. 

In 2021, when the local nonprofit organization Downtown Crenshaw Rising tried to purchase the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza — the biggest retail center in L.A.’s historically Black communities  — it encountered fierce resistance by the commercial retail establishment, even though it was prepared to bid over the asking price. The nonprofit’s vision of the sprawling but ailing mall involved not just retail, but community space, green space and other amenities the community had wanted since 1992. The mall was ultimately sold to a private company, and currently has only one modest-sized anchor tenant — TJ Maxx — after the departure of Macy’s, Sears and Walmart.  

The enduring question raised by the Target boycott is: Can Black people expect corporate America to ever do the right thing? Moseley said the boycott is less about reforming corporate priorities than it is about waking Black people up to their own power, economic and otherwise. The perilousness of the moment demands that they do just that. 

“The campaign going forward is not to bring back DEI — it’s to bring back the commitment Target made to Black people, pre-Trump,” he said. “If we can do that for us, what else can we do for us? Just imagine. We are stronger together than we are apart.”