And also it provides people with an imaginative sense of freedom and pleasure and helps them imagine a world that could be. It gets to the very root of the way those three things are interconnected. Looting strikes at the heart of property, of whiteness and of the police. is derived through whiteness and through Black oppression, through the history of slavery and settler domination of the country. Importantly, I think especially when it’s in the context of a Black uprising like the one we’re living through now, it also attacks the history of whiteness and white supremacy. And without “state oppression”, how are you going to have the kind of communism Osterweil apparently wants.īut wait! There’s more! Looting is also a form of liberation. How are you going to have televisions and clothing unless somebody makes them and you have to pay for them? What kind of society is she envisioning? Clearly one without police, which would be a disaster, but she’s even more Communist than the Soviet Communists. And really, “working for a boss”? In fact, many of the small stores that were looted in the spate of recent riots were mom and pop stores, in which the owners worked not for a boss but for themselves.įurther, if looting attacks the idea of “property”, does that mean that the looters don’t consider what they take as their property?įinally, no, you can’t have things for free under any society. For without some form of capitalism, you’re not going to get fancy televisions, sneakers, and and booze for free. So you get to the heart of that property relation, and demonstrate that without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free. And the reason that the world is organized that way, obviously, is for the profit of the people who own the stores and the factories. It points to the way in which that’s unjust. It attacks the idea of property, and it attacks the idea that in order for someone to have a roof over their head or have a meal ticket, they have to work for a boss, in order to buy things that people just like them somewhere else in the world had to make under the same conditions. It also attacks the very way in which food and things are distributed. That’s looting’s most basic tactical power as a political mode of action. It gets people what they need for free immediately, which means that they are capable of living and reproducing their lives without having to rely on jobs or a wage-which, during COVID times, is widely unreliable or, particularly in these communities is often not available, or it comes at great risk. I am not making this up.Ĭan you talk about rioting as a tactic? What are the reasons people deploy it as a strategy? Osterweil’s defense of looting is that it is an effective tactic to equalize the distribution of wealth, free the looters from having to work for “bosses” to get stuff (I guess she’s a hard socialist or Marxist), and to demonstrate that the concept of “property” is bogus. If “looting” is highly racialized, so is “pajamas.” But what is the point of that? Nobody even knows that, but somehow she has to work the idea of race into her interview as early as possible. She begins her blather by saying that “looting is a highly racialized word” (it comes from a Hindi word that means “goods or spoils”). To her, “looting” is something that accompanies protests and riots, and is the (“non forcible”?) taking of stuff from stores, whether they be big department stores or mom-and-pop stores. Code Switch is NPR’s “ blog on race, ethnicity, and culture.”įirst, we should clarify what the author means by “looting”, which she defines as “the mass expropriation of property, mass shoplifting during a moment of upheaval or riot.” She emphasizes that she’s not defending any expropriation of property by force (I guess she means robbery) or in home invasions. ![]() You’d never see that on NPR.Īnyway, read and weep, or, as in my case, get angry, for I see Osterweil’s argument as both weak and indefensible. ![]() ![]() Yes, the piece may foster discussion (in my view, the main benefit of publishing it is to “out” both Osterweil and her minions who think looting is justifiable), but imagine if a right-winger were to publish a book on, say, why it’s good to destroy abortion clinics. Now NPR is about as woke as the New York Times, but I’m still surprised that it would publish something like this. Note the title of the NPR sub-site as well as its its motto. The NPR interview with Osterweil is below click on screenshot.
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