By Vincent L. Hall
I can’t stand to see the slaughter, but still, I eat the meat,
I can’t stand dishonest people, but still sometimes I cheat,
I can’t stand this air pollution, but still, I drive a car
Maybe them’s the reasons why, things are like they are!
Tower of Power – circa 1975
My PawPaw, Ed Hall, used to take me “down home” with him. We would venture down I-20 past Jefferson, Texas, and into the piney woods of Kellyville, where he grew up.
What? You didn’t know my folks were from East Texas? Quit Playin!
Prior to the new millennium, Dallas was nothing more than an East Texas transplant.
If you made everyone who had roots from Terrell, Texas, to Shreve- port, Louisiana, leave Dallas, you could reduce the population by 70%.
Me and pops used to go to the same country store every time. We’d get 35 cents worth of “hang down”, 10 cents worth of cheese, a Pepsi and a “hobo banquet.”
I finally deciphered the vernacular. “Hang-down” because summer sausage hung in 24- inch sticks from the ceiling of the butcher’s shop. The elders called a peanut patty a “hobo banquet” because it offered protein, carbs, sugar, and sodium. It’s a whole meal in one!
Unfortunately, our store “down home” gave way to a Wal-Mart.
I never despised Wal-Mart for creating a successful marketing plan; I hate that we lost so many small businesses and self-supporting entrepreneurs in the process.
Wal-Mart concerns many of us today because they are emblematic of what is wrong in and with America. We have lost our zeal to stand up to power. We can’t stand to see the slaughter, but we eat the meat anyway!
If it was ever true that the sun never set on the Roman or British Empires, then Wal- Mart owns the sunshine in America’s retail landscape. They have saturated us, urban and country alike. They muscled in on tax breaks, hijacked suppliers, and man- handled the union movement.
Organized labor finally got the merchandising giant in check. The United Food and Commercial Workers Union embarked upon a massive campaign to cut Wal-Mart down a bit.
After a while, the Walton family finally started to pay a semi-decent wage and offered baseline benefits. Wal-Mart succumbed to some pressures that allowed women and minorities to advance in their operations. MWBE suppliers and vendors became a small part of the team.
Wal-Mart started supporting BET and Telemundo. They feature lots of Negroes and Hispanics in their multi-million-dollar ad campaigns to get us to make them richer.
At some point, even their most fervent enemies, like me, gave in and started to shop them sporadically, but lately, they showed their true colors.
CBS News reported out in late November.
“Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, is rolling back its diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, joining a growing list of major corporations that have done the same after coming under attack by conservative activists.
Additionally, Walmart will no longer consider race and gender as a litmus test to improve diversity when it offers supplier contracts.
The company said it didn’t have quotas and won’t do so going forward. It won’t be gathering demographic data when determining financing eligibility for those grants.
Walmart also said it wouldn’t renew a racial equity center that was established through a five-year, $100 million philanthropic commitment from the company with a mandate to, according to its website, “ad- dress the root causes of gaps in outcomes experienced by Black and African American people in education, health, finance, and criminal justice systems.”
Several of those companies have subsequently announced that they are pulling back their initiatives, including Ford, Lowe’s, Tractor Supply, and Harley-Davidson.”
Wal-Mart and others will re- treat from the LGBTQIA com- munity and any other alpha- bets that don’t combine to spell RICH WHITE MALE!
We must be strategic and well-calculated in our efforts to punish these business entities. Because according to recent rulings from this jaded Supreme Court, the “poor have no rights for which the rich must respect.”
American businesses don’t have to acknowledge or make concessions for the 400 years of slavery, patriarchy, and economic injustice. The tradition of using immigrants as prosperous pawns that switch from valuable commodities to the scourge of our nation can continue for all Clarence Thomas et al care!
If PawPaw were still living, he would never walk into a WalMart, buy a Ford and he would tell Harley where they could stick that bike!
PawPaw always told me one thing. “You don’t have to whip every bully on the block son, just whip the sh!t out of the big- gest one!”
We need to go “Wal-Smart “on Wal-Mart! The rest will fall in line!
DEI or DIE!
A long-time Texas Metro News columnist, Dallas native Vincent L. Hall is an author, writer, award-winning writer, and a lifelong Drapetomaniac.
