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Growing up in the suburbs of Atlanta, a city often dubbed America’s Black Mecca, one of my most vivid memories is revisiting a mall in a once white, thriving suburb. When I was a child, I had first met Santa at this mall. But when I returned years later, the mall was far more diverse and far less prosperous. As Chris Rock famously put it, this was now a mall “white people
Whereas the mall once boasted major anchor tenants like Neiman-Marcus or Rich’s (just before Macy’s acquired it), now the occupancy rate for the mall was below 60 percent and those stores that weren’t shuttered were practically unknown.