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. Headley, Trump asserted that the theft and destruction of private property was punishable by violence. In doing so, he laid bare his ideological commitments: Private property matters more than Black lives. However, this sentiment is not limited to right-wing leaders. Even those sympathetic to anti-racist mobilization have criticized looting, some going so far as to brand it as “domestic terrorism.”
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. It has been continually reimagined, recast, and reinvented by Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities in their struggle for equality. In addition to embodying the anger and frustration of centuries of oppression, looting is a radical challenge to capitalism and its conceits.
History from Below
In the American context, property has always been racialized. 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. Black slaves were considered property because they were Black. According to Harvard professor of African and African American studies Brandon M. Terry, abolition under this conceptualization of property could be considered its own form of looting.
“One of the earliest forms of American looting is runaway slaves,” Terry told the HPR. “You are literally stealing your own person and transforming yourself from property into a fuller sense of personhood. 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.
More recently, looting played an important role in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. 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. However, threats of looting helped force the hand of politicians. In the summer of 1963, for example, protesters rioted in Birmingham, provoking immediate action on the part of the president. The riots prompted Attorney General Robert Kennedy to convince John F. Kennedy to deliver his Civil Rights Address and move towards civil rights legislation. Looting, then, played a key role in accelerating the rate of change.
In our own political moment, looting has drawn critical attention to racial justice movements that otherwise might have gone unnoticed by the media. 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 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. From Minneapolis to Los Angeles to St. 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.
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. Importantly, these political meanings cannot be severed from the violence that looting entails. Terry spoke of the importance of redefining what we see as violence in the context of revolutionary movements: “Even if the participants are making their claims explicitly, there are underlying justice claims within their actions.” In other words, the explicitly violent act of looting is inextricably tied up with political aspirations for justice.
Whose Windows?
Because so much of the discourse around looting is determined by the media, it is important to think critically about the aims and consequences of looting. Who is doing the looting? Whose property is being damaged? What communities are being hurt? In the most recent wave of protests, looters have targeted chains like Whole Foods and Target which have been criticized for intensifying existing problems of inequality in low-income and majority-Black neighborhoods, suggesting that poor communities of color loot as a way to redistribute the wealth in gentrified neighborhoods. The conspicuous lack of Black business ownership in these communities, which has been exacerbated by COVID-19, poses the question: How can a community loot or destroy a neighborhood that it does not own?
This question becomes even more complicated when we account for the successes of recent immigrant entrepreneurs who benefit from significant advantages compared to their generational African American and Native American counterparts. According to Terry, systemic racism has made it extremely difficult for Generational African American entrepreneurs to thrive: Loan discrimination, lack of access to capital, insurance premium discrimination, competition at scale and social stigma are only some of the challenges to Generational African American business ownership. Immigrant business owners from various countries face fewer of these barriers, he said, and the challenges they do face are less extreme.
As a result, Terry said “the competition between GenerationalAfrican American and immigrant business owners can be narrated in a way that provokes a lot of resentment.” This resentment is often drawn out and made explicit through instances of looting. From the tensions that emerged between Jewish entrepreneurs and protesters in the Crown Heights riot to the underlying anti-Asian sentiment in the Rodney King riots, Terry said looting has escalated racial and ethnic conflict.
However, some immigrant small business owners have stood in solidarity with anti-racist struggle, even at significant sacrifice. After Gandhi Mahal, a Bangladeshi-owned restaurant in Minneapolis, was burned down by looters, its owner Ruhel Islam told the HPR he was supportive of the protests.
“We don’t walk with their shoes, so we don’t know,” Islam said. “But we’re learning every day about the hundreds of years of problems and discrimination that Black people have faced. The problems are very deep and people are angry. Sometimes in the revolution, freedom comes through protests, through rioting.”
Islam also pointed to his upbringing in Bangladesh as one reason he has been supportive of the movement. The Bangladeshi liberation movement of the 1990s had a strong impact on him. “I saw how a government regime can change and fall when people protest,” he said. “Parliamentary and democratic government came to Bangladesh because people fought for it. Here I see people of all races participating in the movement. I participate in the movement because it is my right.”
Discourses of Criminality
Although police chiefs and political commentators have argued that the protests have given criminals a cover for looting, this discourse of criminality can only be rationalized by capitalism. The foundational organizing principles of the United States rest on the right to private property, a right which is constitutive of liberty itself, according to the Bill of Rights. Under capitalism, the right to private property is transformed into a property regime in which private property is the basis of power for the ruling class. The elite ruling class, which is mostly White and wealthy, ensures the maintenance of private property through violence. The property regime, in other words, values profits over people. In the context of American White supremacy, this means that Black lives are collectively found less valuable than property. The logic of a capitalist and White supremacist state dictates that the punishment for stealing bread is far more severe than the punishment for murdering a Black person.
The discourse of criminality also creates a division between “good” and “bad” protesters. “Good” protesters, who are peaceful, do not explicitly challenge the property regime through their actions, while bad protesters engage in criminal behavior and confront the violence of capitalism through looting. The dichotomy between “good” and “bad” protesters, and by extension peaceful protests and riots, is abused by the police. Throughout the protests, the police have justified their disproportionate use of force against protesters by claiming they were responding to violence on the part of protesters even if those claims are inaccurate.
Selective police violence indicates another consequence of the distinction between “good” and “bad” protesters: the reproduction of racist stereotypes of Black people as aggressive or violent. Once the media shifts its attention to looting as a violent counterpart to peaceful protest, crime itself becomes the story and looting becomes a racialized act. This interplay was made clear in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when White subjects were described as “finding” supplies while Black subjects were described as “looting.”
Abbie Zamcheck, an organizer involved with the Occupy City Hall movement in New York City, thinks that this dichotomy distracts from the broader goals of anti-racist struggle. “The whole effort to divide ‘good’ and ‘bad’ protesters comes from the perspective of the state,” he told the HPR, “which claims that the only correct and proper way to fix the system is through peaceful protest. When communities in the United States do not have power, the better question to ask is, ‘What tactics and strategies can we use to win power for ourselves?’” Looting offers one powerful response to his question.
Image source: Jake Schumacher / Unsplash