![]() Importantly, these political meanings cannot be severed from the violence that looting entails. Looting, then, has taken on a variety of political meanings: a challenge to the violence of racial capitalism, an alternative and accelerated path to justice, and a way to call attention to the reality of racial violence that is often ignored by the media, to name a few. Louis, looting has captured the attention of mainstream media and redirected it to the murders of Black people and the broader injustices of racial oppression. In New York City, it was the looting of a bodega and a Rite Aid store after a vigil that brought attention to the murder of Kimani Gray. The looting and burning of a QuikTrip in Ferguson became a focal point after the murder of Michael Brown the gas station lot was quickly transformed into the staging ground for protests. In our own political moment, looting has drawn critical attention to racial justice movements that otherwise might have gone unnoticed by the media. Looting, then, played a key role in accelerating the rate of change. Kennedy to deliver his Civil Rights Address and move towards civil rights legislation. The riots prompted Attorney General Robert Kennedy to convince John F. In the summer of 1963, for example, protesters rioted in Birmingham, provoking immediate action on the part of the president. However, threats of looting helped force the hand of politicians. Of course, nonviolent civil disobedience was also vital to the civil rights movement, and its legacy of peaceful protests continues to inspire activists across the world. More recently, looting played an important role in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. In that historical continuum, looting constitutes an important repertoire of actions in the struggle.” According to this definition, Terry added, surely anti-racist revolutionaries like John Brown or Nat Turner would be considered looters. “You are literally stealing your own person and transforming yourself from property into a fuller sense of personhood. “One of the earliest forms of American looting is runaway slaves,” Terry told the HPR. Terry, abolition under this conceptualization of property could be considered its own form of looting. According to Harvard professor of African and African American studies Brandon M. Black slaves were considered property because they were Black. As slavery replaced indentured servitude as the primary system of labor in America by the late 17th century, racial categories emerged as a way to differentiate between those who could be enslaved and those who could not. In the American context, property has always been racialized. In addition to embodying the anger and frustration of centuries of oppression, looting is a radical challenge to capitalism and its conceits. It has been continually reimagined, recast, and reinvented by Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities in their struggle for equality. While both liberal and conservative critics have denounced looting as ineffective and unnecessarily antagonistic, looting has long remained an act of resistance in movements for racial justice in America, from the abolition of slavery to the civil rights movement to our contemporary political moment. ![]() Even those sympathetic to anti-racist mobilization have criticized looting, some going so far as to brand it as “domestic terrorism.” However, this sentiment is not limited to right-wing leaders. In doing so, he laid bare his ideological commitments: Private property matters more than Black lives. Headley, Trump asserted that the theft and destruction of private property was punishable by violence. On May 29, in response to escalating protests in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, President Trump tweeted, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Invoking the rhetoric of White supremacists and segregationists from George Wallace to Walter E. ![]()
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