America is giving dying mall vibes

On the dangers of social and political nostalgia.

It’s 7:20 am on the West Coast. I’ve been in Los Angeles for a better part of the week, where I was part of a keynote conversation for the National Education Leaders of Color Conference. (Thank you all for having me!)

I wish I could say the light was beautiful right now over downtown Los Angeles, but it is gray and gloomy. I am working on a few longer thoughts on this week’s Supreme Court ruling that gutted the Voting Rights Act. I hope to release it next week.

But today, let’s talk about the promise and peril of nostalgia.

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Gather round the digital campfire, my fellow Millennials. You, too, Gen X’ers, and a few of you Boomers. We all have tales of our favorite childhood malls.

In a capitalist society, malls might be the closest thing to a common sacred space Americans go to. My favorite malls growing up were Redbird Shopping Mall in South Dallas, Parks Mall in Arlington, and, for special occasions or back-to-school shopping, my late father would take us to Hillsboro Premium Outlets.

We could meet our friends at the movie theater, then get ICEEs, drinks, and popcorn. We’d go get my inflatable furniture and cargo pants from Limited Too. We would wander into dark-lit Abercrombie and Fitch, but never feel q(WHITE) welcome. There were stalls selling knock-off Dooney & Burke purses, along with covers for our Nokia phones. And the Dipping Dots in front of the Sears that I’d always remember being sad and empty— even before the chain’s virtual demise. (There are just five or six stores left in the whole country as of 2026).

I’ve said before, America is giving off decaying childhood strip-mall vibes.

At least in a digital sense, the online spaces like Twitter and Facebook that used to be a “global sphere”, feel like decaying strip malls. Once, places for delight and discovery of new friends, communities.

Now, on my part, going to X, or even Threads, feels like a strip mall turned into a flea market that is now overrun by drug dealers, bots, half-naked influencers, and the neighborhood skinheads. There are viral fights and gun battles breaking out in the parking lots of the strip mall all the time. And the old stores smell super funny because the roof leaks never got fixed—and the mold is taking on a life of its own. Maybe it could be fixed, but the slumlord owners don’t give a fuck. And maybe the city leaders could force the malls to be converted into affordable housing, community centers, or other useful spaces. But they, too, don’t give a fuck.

In a very real sense, yes, malls are dying in America. Walking in many of them is depressing and evokes a sense of grief over the loss of the feeling of infinite possibilities.

In a piece for the Dispatch, “The Decline of the American Mall”, Nic Rowan opens with Don DeLilio’s comic novel, “White Noise”. The protagonist is going through a midlife crisis and goes to a mall to try to solve it.

“I shopped with reckless abandon,” he says.

“I shopped for immediate needs and distant contingencies. I shopped for its own sake, looking and touching, inspecting merchandise I had no intention of buying, then buying it.”

The more he buys, the more he grows “in value and self-regard.” In the mall, he says, “I filled myself out, found new aspects of myself, located a person I’d forgotten existed.” He feels as if the building itself enhances his self-understanding.

Writing for the New York Times Magazine, writer Kelly Kalivaris called dying malls the “Roman Ruins of Our Civilization”, with religious odes to the almost divine nature of the emptying of mega-malls.

Macy’s. Best Buy. Barnes & Noble. It feels silly to be sentimental about these dwindling commercial spaces, but I have no choice — this is the beautiful, dark, twisted America I grew up in! These dying spaces are as much sublime purgatories as they are my Roman ruins. My formative years will always be associated with drifting through the atriums of big chain stores that pushed out small, beloved independent businesses. But now I watch in awe as these behemoths meet their own end.

Of course, there’s much to be said about how online shopping was the proverbial meteor to the dinosaurs that were mall chain stores. And indeed, those same dinosaurs were the ones that preyed on and ate the smaller, more defenseless mom-and-pop stores in the neighborhood. Nature Capitalism is scary. Why are we nostalgic about predatory mall-chain dinosaurs that killed the smaller community spaces that came before? Do we really want to go back in time and resurrect these mall dinosaurs— Jurassic-Park style?

Yeah—— I don't know about that. I’m reminded of the famous Jurassic Park Line—

No, malls aren’t coming back.

Our childhoods aren’t coming back.

Looking at the state of the economy, our ability to “shop with reckless abandon”— well, for many of us, we never quite had that anyway. But the promises that malls had— American monoculture in which we can all partake in consumption— that anything we could see or touch could be ours with just a swipe of a card, or a layaway plan.

I’d argue that the dominant cultural and political force in our country right now is nostalgia. Nostalgia is extremely powerful, and in many ways, it is easy money. We have powerful desires to indulge in the belief that our childhood was better, carefree, and full of possibilities. In a time where the very foundations of the American dream are unstable, and the future of work, family, and America’s place in the world looks bleak, Nostalgia Core tells us that the best time is behind us.

And I believe it is leading us into dark places. This piece from Mini Philosophy has had me thinking.

The danger of nostalgia

Nostalgia— real or manufactured— can also lead to political repression, and in the worst cases, identity-based atrocities.

“..the promise to rebuild the ideal home lies at the core of many powerful ideologies today, tempting us to relinquish critical thinking for emotional bonding…In extreme cases, it can create a phantom homeland, for the sake of which one is ready to die or kill. Unreflective nostalgia can breed monsters.”

We see millennial cultural nostalgia everywhere, in the superhero blockbuster remakes, and in extremely popular Instagram accounts solely dedicated to 90s pop culture.

In some ways, the retrospective lookbacks can be good—after all, I do think it is wise to revisit how horribly the culture treated, say, Britney Spears during her pop prime in the late 90s/early 00s. The questions about her body, her virginity, and the sheer fascination and revulsion she inspired are worth re-examining.

Many times, we have to fight nostalgia in order to pursue justice.

It’s worth overcoming our wistful memories of bopping to Diddy in the 90s so that we can hold him accountable for terrorizing the women in his life.

We are already seeing White Political Nostalgia play out in our politics. The roll-back of affirmative action, the purging of Black voices from education and journalism, and now the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act are all fueled by white nostalgia for an America where Black people were kept from power and authority. It is nostalgia for a time when the only socially permissible roles for Black people in America were under the foot of White people. While billionaires outsource jobs overseas, or to AI, white people are being sold the idea that they can return to power, to a carefree time with more opportunities, as long as they get rid of the Blacks and immigrants first.

And this is the thing— maybe we are all collectively hurtling into decaying mall nostalgia because it feels like we are in an era where America is destroying itself. We Black people know about the swimming pool politics. In the South, white people would pour acid in pools instead of sharing the space with Black people. We remember what happened with Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the Greenwood. That this country would rather destroy itself than share power with Black people, women, poor people, or immigrants.

Alas. The future looks bleak. But the glorious past we think we remember never existed. So we are yearning for a time where it seemed like, for a moment, we all shared space, and some Dippin’ Dots.

Might as well enjoy what we can while we can. Can anyone send me an Orange Julius?