One of the things we all have to acknowledge
is that we’re not here by accident.
You know, this is not a spontaneous response
to the pandemic, and suddenly white people
are waking up and saying, “Oh, wait a second,
Black lives matter.”
No, this is a product of enormous work, going
back well before Trayvon Martin.
But you think about all the organizing work,
the Movement for Black Lives, Black Lives
Matter, the women who organized Black Lives
Matter, initiated — Opal Tometi, Alicia
Garza, Patrisse Cullors — people like Melina
Abdullah, Charlene Carruthers of Black Youth
Project 100, all the scholar activists who
have been working on this question — Barbara
Ransby, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Angela Davis,
Ruth Wilson Gilmore — and then, before that,
the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Copwatch,
Dignity and Power, Critical Resistance,
the African American Policy Forum.
These were initiatives on the ground who did
all this political education, all this organizing
work — We Charge Genocide, Dream Defenders,
the Rising Majority, Black Organizing for
Leadership and Dignity, and also groups like
SURJ, you know, [Showing] Up for Racial Justice,
which deals with white racism.
So you have an infrastructure in place that
has been doing this work for a decade or more
— more than a decade.
And that’s why people are out here.
That’s why people can come out into the
streets and simply roll off their tongues
words like “defund the police."
What’s interesting is the way that the media
really has grabbed onto looting as the problem.
It displaces some of the major issues that
are being raised, especially the violence
of the police against protesters.
And so, what’s interesting about looting,
you know, if you look at the long history,
there is not a civil disturbance, civil unrest
of any significance, or even a natural disaster,
in which some sort of flash looting or appropriation
of goods didn’t take place.
So, that’s not uncommon.
Also, there’s a tendency to treat looting
as a way to dismiss legitimate organizing
work, when, in fact, many people who are sort
of seizing the moment — in this case, during
an economic crisis with 40 million people
applying for unemployment — as if somehow
those kinds of attacks on property or appropriating
property are themselves part of a movement
or part of a wing of a movement.
And we know that’s not the case at all.
What the question of looting does bring to
fore are two things.
One, what — it goes back to Mr. Floyd’s
question: What is a Black man’s life worth?
What is a Black person’s life worth?
Is the destruction of property or taking things
or taking sneakers or computers somehow more
important than watching someone die on film,
you know, watching the 5,000-some-odd people
killed by the police over the last few years?
I mean, what’s more important?
And so, what’s the value of someone?
The second part of looting is it displaces
the looting that is the history of the United
States.
We know that human bodies, that Black bodies,
were looted — that’s how we got here — that
Indigenous land was looting, seizing that
land.
We know that for years the housing market
has been a kind of form of looting, in which
the value of Black-owned homes have been suppressed,
Black wages suppressed.
The transfer of wealth is a kind of form of
looting.
But also, if you look at the history of race
riots in America, most so-called race riots
were basically pogroms, going back to Cincinnati
in 1839, 1841, going back to a whole range
of so-called race riots in Philadelphia.
You mentioned Tulsa in the opening of the
show, Tulsa, Oklahoma, which was a kind of
looting — not a kind of looting, but you’re
talking about destroying 35 blocks of Black-owned
property and businesses worth millions of
dollars, people going into people’s — white
people going into homes, with the support
of the police, taking Black people’s stuff,
destroying and taking stuff.
Tulsa, Oklahoma, East St. Louis in 1917 — we
could talk about Rosewood in 1923.
You know, there’s so many examples — Springfield,
Illinois, in 1908.
And some of that looting is also about taking
political power.
And so, one last example I want to give is
the most absurd.
And that is, if you noticed, during George
Floyd’s funeral, the New York Stock Exchange
decided that it would go silent and not trade
for eight minutes and 46 seconds.
Now, what’s interesting about that is that
— talk about looting —
Wall Street has profited from police misconduct.
