By GaudiLab @ Shutterstock.com
It’s bad enough that big blue city minorities are denied decent educations and jobs. Now minorities are facing the aftermath of the “peaceful” protests in many of our Democratic-run cities.
Take Minneapolis. In large part, the city remains in ruins, reports the WSJ.
Boarded-up storefronts still display makeshift notices that read “black owned” or “minority owned” to ward off further destruction.
Local Residents Speak on the Record
Mohamed Ali, a native of Somalia.
“It’s been agony. I respect the public anger, but I think we carried it too far, to burn our city.
At the height of the chaos, rioters set a large fire in front of his apartment, which sits atop several street-side shops. He spray-painted desperate appeals onto plywood affixed to the storefront windows: “Don’t burn please . . . Kids live upstairs.”
“All these businesses are still boarded, and it’s over a month later. This was a thriving area. Now a lot of minority businesses are burned.”
Long Her, a Laotian immigrant.
Long Her operated a clothing store in St. Paul since 1991. When he surveyed his losses after the riots, he openly wept. Destroyed were his merchandise, cash register and other electronics. Many of his most valuable possessions, kept in a heavy-duty safe, were stolen, along with his U.S. citizenship papers.
A month later, he hasn’t heard anything from the authorities. “They don’t have the law to protect the people,” Mr. Her says. He never had to call the police in nearly 30 years until the riots erupted in late May—and officers still have not come to investigate: “They say no one available.” His store is open, but the door is boarded up and customers are scant: “They call me,” he says, referring to his largely Hmong clientele. “They say, ‘We would come, but we’re afraid.’ ” He’s had to lay off five employees and sleeps in the store every night, on guard against another possible riot.
Flora Westbrooks, owner for 34 years of a hair salon in North Minneapolis.
It had already been closed for several months due to Covid-19, but Ms. Westbrooks was planning to reopen on June 1. She’d already purchased sanitation supplies and prepared new protocols to comply with state and city regulations. On May 29, an arsonist burned the place down.
“Sometimes I’m like, OK, I gotta go to work. I gotta go do something at the shop. And then I forget—I don’t own anything anymore. Everything’s burned to the ground. I have nothing no more. Everything I worked for.”
Through her business, she earned enough money to buy a home, a car and a law-school education for her son: “My salon was everything to me.”
Where’s the Follow-up?
Ms. Westbrooks and a group of fellow shell-shocked small-business owners met briefly with Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, Gov. Tim Walz and other elected officials in a McDonald’s parking lot near the wreckage.
But there has been no follow-up. “I haven’t heard anything,” she says. “You know, it’s been a month now.”
Mass-produced “Black Lives Matter” signs dot the yards of countless leafy homes across the area. Ms. Westbrooks’s next-door neighbor, a white woman, displays one in her window. Ms. Westbrooks, who is black, does not.
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