by Chief Lay and Comrade Mase

Baltimore, Maryland — Mom’s Organic Market (MOM’s) is, to be frank, just a wanna-be Trader Joe’s. This amerikkkan grocery store chain prides itself on being an environmentally-friendly and socially-conscious business. Still, it is nothing but a toxic and exploitative plantation to African and Indigenous colonized working-class people. 

An organic plantation is still a plantation, and today the Black Hammer Times has the plantation called MOM’s in our sights. 

MOM’s claims its core values are: 

• Find Your Gratitude
• We Rise by Lifting Others
• We Have the Courage to Grow
• Let Go of Ego
• Accept the Things You Cannot Change and Change the Things You Can
• Remember Your Purpose

These nice-sounding core “values” are nothing more than empty liberal phrases because what’s actually happening is shocking. 

In the words of one worker

The Black Hammer Times interviewed one employee, known as Sick Purple Cow (SPC), about the conditions in this organic, liberal, grocery store. Inside, workers aren’t happy, customers aren’t happy, and farmers aren’t happy.

While MOM’s writes that “Our Purpose is to protect and restore the environment,” workers there report, “no one knows where the food comes from. This doesn’t happen, it’s very closed off, and the quality of local food has gone way down.”

“I work outside, so I don’t see where stuff comes from, but I have been seeing a lot less stringent rules about cleaning,” SPC said, “one of the kitchen workers had COVID, but they didn’t tell any other workers about this. Four other workers got covid afterward. Even upper managers and kitchen bosses have been catching covid.”

After failing to protect their workers, eventually, MOM’s adopted a policy of giving masks before going into the kitchen.

This pattern of worker exploitation goes beyond handling the pandemic. “Not even the managers get treated well. People get wrecked by the bosses,” SPC explained and went on to say, “I’ve just been working there for 9 months, but in that short time, so many people have left because of overwork.”

Managers reportedly singled out African employees to be responsible for dealing with African customers, but at the same time would allow white customers to get in “verbal showdowns” about wearing face masks. “One day, with a lack of running water, workers were even forced to come in and use a bucket to flush toilets.”

In terms of the company’s growth, SPC recounted that “The CEO Scott Nash was there at my orientation. I asked if he was different than Jeff Bezos and his expansionary vision, and of course, he said he was different.” Still, MOM’s has been continually expanding and opening up new locations, with SPC saying, “The area I’ve been living in is being gentrified before my eyes. So much has been developed.”

The job is the plantation

SPC summed up the interview by saying, “Working with the people is very good. They got a lot of care for their community, and I can educate myself at the same time. The community that we serve is good. But the values MOM’s hold don’t translate into action.”

This is absolutely right. No matter the company, owner, boss, or how progressive a company’s core values may seem, businesses which work under this colonial white power system are the modern-day plantations for colonized and Indigenous people. Not only are we exploited as workers, but our cultures are mass marketed, and we are stolen from our homelands at the same time as the earth is being poisoned.

Green capitalism are two words that do not make any sense together. It is only through building dual contending power that we as colonized and indigenous people may free ourselves from the plantation’s shackles and the core contradiction we face, colonialism. 

This is why our current project at the Black Hammer Organization is to build Hammer City so that we may address and overturn the core contradiction of colonial oppression with a city ran for and by Indigenous and colonized people.

Remember, a plantation is a plantation no matter the name, capitalist, slaveowner, or which member of the white whipping-class is tryna beat our ass. Only when poor and working class colonized people have self determination and dictatorship over our lives, labor, land, and resources will we truly be free and be able to heal ourselves and our earth from colonialism.

Join Black Hammer today and help our people liberate themselves from the grips of white power plantations so that we may have dictatorship over our land, lives, labor, and resources.