There are too many liquor stores in Black neighborhoods. Few observations about U.S. cities hold universally across region, time, and economic conditions, but this is one of them.

The corner liquor store’s disproportionate density has been brought into high relief by activists, scholars, legislators, and artists. Black folk have long contested the ubiquity of liquor stores and unabashedly aggressive marketing of alcoholic beverages—particularly those that offer an inexpensive and powerful high (e.g., malt liquor, fortified wine). Public Enemy put it this way on Apocalypse ’91 The Enemy Strikes Back: “They don’t sell that shit in the White neighborhood”. This book explores the corner liquor store, interrogating the multiple and conflicting meanings, uses, reactions to, and consequences of these quotidian retail spaces. As sites of consumption, liquor stores offer sensory pleasures, social interaction, and often, services that have been abdicated by the state; but they are also contentious sites, repositories of historical conflicts, and generators of crime and social disorder. Stubbornly woven into the urban landscape, yet transient and transformed into relic in equal measure, they signpost the divestment of capital and public regard from the communities they call home.