Nineteen months after Minnesota organizers launched the National Target Boycott, the people sustaining it aren’t civil rights leaders standing at a podium. They’re shoppers who quietly rerouted their spending to Costco, farmers markets and family-owned businesses, and have no plans to go back.
“I believe that boycotting is a major way of speaking and being heard,” said Makeda Norris, who began avoiding Target before the boycott officially started.
The boycott’s staying power was tested again last week, when Target pulled a children’s Halloween costume that Black shoppers online said evoked racist blackface and minstrel-show imagery. For longtime boycotters, the episode wasn’t a surprise so much as confirmation of why they started boycotting in the first place.
Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights attorney and co-founder of the National Target Boycott, said the incident could not be dismissed as a single bad decision…