Rantz: Black Lives Matter Seattle to boycott ‘white businesses’ but will they protest?

For the fifth straight year for Black Friday, Black Lives Matter Seattle announced they will “shop black only” and “boycott white businesses” they claim hurt the black community. Only, they provide no details on how, and they link to websites that help you shop only if you’re local to literally any major city, other than Seattle.

On Facebook, the group wrote a press release that’s not a very traditional one:

Their rollout is problematic.

Black Lives Matter Seattle offers no details on how the companies they mention hurt the black community in Seattle. Though the general argument is that they come to communities, and through gentrification, push out black residents and black businesses.

Perplexingly, the Seattle chapter’s first link on how to shop and find black-owned businesses has no mention of Seattle. Indeed, the Official Black Wall Street site (which they say is the largest platform for black-owned businesses) focuses on NYC, Oakland, DC, LA and other major cities for the event BLM-Seattle endorses — but not Seattle.

The Facebook page does note local businesses they presumably endorse, but few are relevant to Black Friday, like Down To Reiki!, Cosmopolitan Kids Daycare, Rainier Valley Community Clinic (which is misspelled on the website) or Solution Chiropractic.

They do indicate that they’ll boycott — and perhaps protest — the Seattle tree lighting event. In a tweet, BLM-Seattle simply wrote: “No tree lighting no work no school Just #ShopBlack.”

It should be noted that the press release was posted by one of two Black Lives Matter groups in the area — Black Lives Matter Seattle Original. It is not associated with Black Lives Matter Seattle-King County which splintered off from the original in early 2018.

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