Every year we are forced to endure a week long festival of capitalist peacocking, as the world’s largest multi-billion-dollar corporations invade our high streets and inboxes. Like a sex-worker gyrating her hips in the window of an Amsterdam brothel, these brazen online stores spare no shame in their attempts to woo me into their banner-bedecked bordellos with ‘tempting offers’ and ‘unmissable deals’. Not that I’m saying sex work is shameful, you understand, it’s an admirable and empowering trade for anyone who has the proficiency for it. But when it comes to spending my wad, the last thing I want is Amazon dot com twerking like a cheap whore in my inbox. If this indecent spectacle were not already degrading enough to everyone involved, they chose to label this hedonistic orgy of avarice: ‘Black Friday’. The racist connotations of the name simply cannot be ignored. A quick search into the etymology of the phrase on Wikipedia yielded the following information:‘…a popular explanation became that this day represented the point in the year when retailers begin to turn a profit, thus going from being “in the red” to being “in the black”.’
The accuracy of this interpretation is questionable to say the least. Whoever wrote the article confesses that nobody knows for sure when the phrase first came into common parlance, or indeed why the word ‘black’ is included. Well actually, to me it is rather obvious. You see, the dank lair in which capitalism dwells was built on slavery. I would wager that today’s retail moguls would bring back legalized slavery at the drop of a hat. As recently as the past two decades, companies such as Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Samsung have all gained a less than favorable reputation when it comes to treating their workers fairly, and the latter three have all at one time or another been heavily implicated in the employment of child labor when it comes to the sourcing of materials. It appears that taking advantage of cheap unskilled labor is a hard habit for the financial elite to break no matter how much gold lines their own pockets. 
Yes, the insatiable monster whose name is Capitalism owes its very soul to the African Americans who laboriously built its nest. In some ways making the term ‘Black Friday’ ironically fitting. But not even this open appreciation of America’s dark history is enough to satisfy the MAGA-voting redneck colonialists. On November 14th this year, the owner of a gun shop in Pembroke, Ontario displayed a sign in his window promoting a ‘White Friday’ sale. The sign attracted a certain amount of controversy, and when the store’s owner, Lance Perkins was accused of racism, he claimed he was concerned that ‘Black Friday’ would remind people of the blackface scandal of Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau which would have a negative effect on his store’s reputation.A gun store owner naming his sale ‘White Friday’ is of course, to anyone with half a brain, the action of a white supremacist. Although rednecks and Trump voters (the same thing) generally have less than half a brain so perhaps the entire situation was the product of many complex layers of ignorance. So, in conclusion, calling the event ‘Black Friday’ is racist. Calling it ‘White Friday’ is also racist. Either way I choose to boycott the whole charade because in all honestly, I feel that it demeans us all and if you can’t see that it is a racist promotion purely created to mock the most poverty-stricken communities within our society, then you don’t understand how capitalism works. And anyway, discounts on the 12.9” iPad Pro have been non-existent so far this year. Not so much as 10 percent off. Rubbish.
