LET'S TALK LOOTING
Over the past 60 years, whenever there has been an uprising in the Black community that involved destruction of property, a reaction against "looting" has been part and parcel of the response by the White power structure and the white community at large. "Why are they destroying their own neighborhood?" "Don't they know it dilutes their message?" "That isn't the right/best way to make yourself heard."
At best, these responses are ignorant or disingenuous. At worst they are cynical attempts to cut off discussion about the actual causes of the uprising and the issues at stake.
As a person born just after WWII into a Jewish family, I have always felt my designation as "White" to have a tenuous and impermanent reality. Jews in Germany, after all, thought they were German. In this country, it was not that long ago there were signs that read "no dogs or Jews", just as there were signs that said "No Irish need apply". The definition of who is white, who belongs to the dominant group, is in the hands of that group. Others may gain entry, but one is always in danger of bring thrown out.
With that said, let me talk about how we talk about looting.
In the first place there is the implicit equivalency of damage to human beings and property. "We won't talk to you about violence to people while there is property being damaged". Mike Pence received a good amount of push-back to his statement about protecting "property and people"--but it shouldn't be any surprise. White society has a long history of owning black people--as slaves, share-croppers, servants and prisoners--so it should not be surprising when that equivalency is articulated in these statements.
In the early days of the Civil Rights Movement white communities blamed "outside agitators" for the protests. "Their Negroes" would never have done such a thing. James Baldwin's eloquent cry that "I am not your Negro" was a challenge to that smug and patronizing assumption. This lies behind the second issue around looting discussion--the assumption that the white community gets to set the terms of the debate. "We won't talk to you until you stop your bad behavior". You need to speak in our language and under our rules of debate.
The final and, for me, most galling part of this response to looting is the failure to recognize that White Western Hegemony has been built upon systematic looting of the people of the world and, indeed, of the planet itself. Empires loot the produce of their colonies and suck the wealth out of them--just as large corporations suck the wealth from local communities until there is nothing left to loot. Finance Capitalism is a system where the financiers create nothing but money, end up with everything. The rest of us can beg (the most desperate), borrow (the rest of us) or steal (those who emulate their betters and often end up in jail for their imitation). The loot still flows to the top.
In the United States over 100,000 Japanese American citizens were placed in Internment camps at the beginning of WWII. Their homes, farms and businesses were seized with little or no compensation. Looting? Black musicians and artists have been consistently cheated out of their creations and compensation by white agents, recording companies and other entities in their Industries. Looting?
The list goes on and on. As Woody Guthrie put it "As through this world you travel you'll see lots of funny men, some will rob you with a 6-gun, some with a fountain pen." Who is the bigger thief.? According to Woody, "As through this world you wander, as through this world you roam, you'll never see an outlaw drive a family from their home."
My suggestion is that those outraged by some windows broken at a Target store by young people who have been consistently ignored, and when not ignored often brutalized, start paying more attention to the pervasive and demoralizing looting that defines the economic system in which we live, and which has always treated the bodies, souls and spirits of non-whites as part of a landscape which is, at the end of the day, theirs for the looting.
