Boyz n the Hood Contribute to This PageRalphs on Crenshaw closes with 25% off sale and residents who are sad to say goodbye to one of the community’s longest standing super markets. Ralphs officially says goodbye to Crenshaw with a notice on permanently shut sliding doors. Community supermarkets continue to shuffle On Monday, May 20, Ralphs on Crenshaw officially closed. The supermarket known as, once upon a time, Boy’s Market, which had been located on the Crenshaw and Rodeo for decades, was originally planned to close May 24. The Crenshaw corridor continues to play a game of musical chairs with grocery stores with some rumors evaporating while others came to pass. The longtime-standing, community grocery store has been a convenient location for many residents in the area for years. Rumors of the stores demise surfaced last year and it was alleged that demolition would start in early 2013. Months would pass until being glaringly confirmed on a banner that Ralphs would say goodbye to Crenshaw at the end of May.

The departure of the Ralphs means a 25 percent off sale, which has been bringing customers, far and near, by the groves. Inside the grocery market, empty aisles and stands frequently greet many as most products are gone by noon. Mixed feelings over the store’s departure fill the parking lot. Some will miss the store as it was close to home and had been fixture in the community for years. “I’m kind of disappointed it’s not coming back,” said local shopper, Clarence Williams. “The other [Ralphs] is probably about a mile down the road. I live right here in Leimert Park, so it’s really convenient for me. “It’s not a real issue but it’s harder. Sometimes, when I’m out walking, I can just walk to this one [Ralphs on Crenshaw].” “I don’t want Ralphs [on Crenshaw] to close,” said Irma. “I’ve enjoyed having it in the neighborhood for many years and I really hate to see them go.” All is not lost, as the Ralphs on Rodeo and LaBrea has been expanded and improved upon as the community’s new, go-to, Ralphs.

Still under construction, the store now boasts larger aisles, a large produce section and more variety in goods and services. Many welcome the new changes and a new, improved Ralphs in the neighborhood. Some shoppers had grown weary of the Ralphs on Crenshaw not being up to standard and offering poor choices in produce. “I will miss it [Ralphs on Crenshaw] but not really,” said shopper, Cherell Chappell. “They didn’t have the quality of food,” though despite not meeting her expectations, she said the Crenshaw Ralphs was “convenient.” As the grocery stores comings-and-goings continue, news about Trader Joe’s seems to have gone quiet.  Last year, a local official in Council District 10 had confirmed last year that the specialty store is eyeing the Crenshaw District. Target has been long rumored as the franchise that will soon call Crenshaw home and replace Ralphs. Fresh & Easy was another store aimed to take residence on Crenshaw and Jefferson. After Tesco, the British supermarket giant, pulled its chains from the U.S., many stores closed.

The Crenshaw Fresh & Easy fell victim to the pull out has become a Union Bank. Whether the newly revamped Ralphs on Rodeo and LaBrea can meet the challenge of multiple communities has yet to be seen. Most though will share in a fond farewell to a store most grew up with as it’s torn down in the coming months.fibonacci hoodie Photos by Brian W. Carteracnl hoodie designModern Day Emmett Tills: Jordan Davis, Trayvon Martin...puppia hoodie harness Emmett Louis Till was murdered in Mississippi in 1955 at the age of 14. corvette c4 hoodieWhile buying something from a small local grocery store, he reportedly called to the married 21-year-old white proprietor, "Hey baby." reggae hoodies nz

Till lived in Chicago and was visiting his relatives in Money, Mississippi, not knowing that his friendly greeting was a capital offense for a black male in the South. Roy Bryant, the husband of Carolyn Bryant, the proprietor, and his half brother J. W. Milam, kidnapped Till from Till's great uncle's house, took him to a barn where they beat him and gouged out one of his eyes, then shot him through the head, and before dumping his body in the Tallahatchie River, tied a 70 lb. cotton gin around his neck with barbed wireninja turtle hoodie 4t, a reminder that blacks were and always will be slaves in the minds of white racists. assassin's creed iii hoodie conner kenway black & red jacketTill's brutal torture and murder helped to spark the civil rights movement. Jordan Davis and Trayvon Martin, Renisha McBride and Jonathan Ferrell, Oscar Grant and so very many others ... they are modern day Emmett Tills.

"You're not going to talk to me that way!" -- Michael Dunn, before he fired ten shots at five black teens, killing Jordan Davis, while Davis and his friends sat in their car at a gas station. Playing their music too loud and not turning it down when told to by a white man. When he was found guilty of four counts of attempted murder but found not guilty of murdering Davis, Dunn held up his hands in shock as if to say, "How can this be?" He was no doubt thinking, "How can I be found guilty when I told them they were not going to talk to me that way? They brought this on themselves." Jordan Davis' fate was not determined by he and his friends playing their music too loud. Jordan Davis' fate was sealed when he didn't instantly obey a white man's command. And the jury trying Dunn were deadlocked, with two jurors convinced that Dunn was justified in murdering Davis, because, after all, let's be clear, Davis is black and Dunn is white. We need not say any more, as the right-thinking folks of this great country all nod their heads in silent agreement.

Nothing more needs to be said. We all understand: Davis is black and Dunn is white. Trayvon Martin's fate was sealed by being black while wearing a hoodie. To white racists everywhere, both those who are self-consciously racists and those many more who are unaware of their buried so deeply that it's-taken-for-granted-like-breathing-racism, George Zimmerman was justified in taking Trayvon's life. Because a 17-year-old black teen does not have the right to defend himself against a stalker, whereas a white man does, because a black person, especially a black male, is an existential threat. There is no "stand your ground" for blacks because they don't have any ground to stand upon to white racists of polite and impolite society. They are guilty by the fact of their blackness and they are especially guilty if they act as if they have the same rights as white people do. You can kill them for this and be found not guilty for it as the verdicts in the Zimmerman and Dunn case show unmistakably.

"These assholes always get away" muttered George Zimmerman, when he spotted Trayvon Martin walking in a gated community in which to Zimmerman, Trayvon "didn't belong." Zimmerman was a neighborhood watchman, making sure that those who "don't belong" are not allowed to stay alive as trespassers. Dunn was also a neighborhood watchman in the sense that he was also enforcing the unwritten rules about who belongs and who doesn't and what the social hierarchies are. When Renisha McBride was trying to get some help for a broken down car in Dearborn, Michigan, she made the mistake of thinking that she could knock on the door of a house in a lily white neighborhood and that she would be given assistance, instead of a rifle shot slamming directly into her face, killing her instantly. When Jonathan Ferrell had a car accident in North Carolina and he was walking towards a white policeman to seek his assistance, he made the mistake of thinking that a white police officer would not regard his walking towards him as just cause to shoot Ferrell ten times, killing him.

If you're black and you do things out of the natural order of things, then you're fair game to be killed. Judges and jurors have said so too. Some people thought and some people still think that electing a black president means that we're a colorblind society now. Some people think that having a billionaire talk show host who is black - Oprah - means that we have left racism behind. These notions and these people are wrong and they need to pay attention. It's open season on black people (and Latinos) in America. It's open season on those who authorities declare an existential threat like those that even and especially this black president executes with drones every week. There are those who think that Obama wants to do the right thing but the institutions keep him from doing the right thing. And though they are wrong about Obama's intentions, they are not wrong about the power of these institutions. The oppression of black people is practically in the DNA of many white people in this country.

(Indeed, if they look closely enough at their DNA they will see that black people are in many of them.) Imagine Obama intoning that line when he says, "We're not black America. We're not white America. We are the United States of America." We cannot continue to be the United States of America without the continued existence of virulent white racism. This is what so many of the Tea Party are so aroused about, for the wrong reasons. This is why they could call black representatives during the Obamacare vote "n*****s" and then deny that they did so. The USA without anti-black racism is as sensible as a peanut butter sandwich without the peanut butter is still a peanut butter sandwich. As Michelle Alexander points out in her book The New Jim Crow where she documents how the enslavement of black people continues in the form of mass incarceration and a racial caste system, racism against black people is intimately intertwined with this country's very nature: "It may be impossible to overstate the significance of race in defining the basic structure of American society" (Emphasis added

As I have previously pointed out, the fact that the highly aroused fascist social base - most evident in the Christian fundamentalists and much of the Tea Party - fear a "black planet" or the falling of whites from majority status into minority status and are ready and willing to take up arms to violently defend in a last ditch effort their long-standing privileges, tells you something profound about what the US has been and is in its essence. These people are not crazy in the sense that they see their privileges under threat of being diminished or disappearing. They recognize very clearly what it means to be a white American and how other groups are subordinated to that top tier privilege. The civil war ended slavery but it did not end the oppression of black people. The civil rights movement supposedly ended Jim Crow, which was how the oppression of black people was continued in the face of slavery's end. But the civil rights movement did not end Jim Crow because mass incarceration and its main justification, the Drug War, has replaced it with the New Jim Crow, a racial caste system in which blacks are guilty by their mere existence and appearance.