The protests might have seemed, to some, like a release valve. Others, meanwhile, see looting as a form of empowerment—a way to reclaim dignity after decades of abuse at the hands of police and other authorities. And then they started protesting; nobody listened. But as soon as the CVS burned in Baltimore, the whole world watched. Instead, they seize the moment to cause chaos and destruction. In its recklessness, looting can seem inevitable.
But the police, the media, and even protesters can sometimes inadvertently encourage looting. Read: The police can still choose nonviolence. The actions of police and protesters tend to mirror each other. When police use rubber bullets, flash bombs, and pepper spray on peaceful protesters, protesters are then also spurred to aggression—including, in some cases, inciting fellow protesters to looting.
The protestors are destroying property, and again, the plight of these people and their struggle for basic rights should outweigh any care about property. In short, disruptive movements are the only ones which cause change. People in power care about money, and when big corporations are looted, it sends a signal which leads to the people with money paying attention. As John F. Anvee Bhutani is the former Managing Director of The Oxford Blue, having also held a variety of roles on the editorial and business teams.
She is a penultimate year student at Magdalen College reading More by Anvee Bhutani. Anvee Bhutani. Previous Letters from the porters. I think that the question is sort of backwards, because there is no movement without these moments of rioting and looting and property destruction.
They reappear, and they fight side by side with people, and there have been studies from the nineteen-sixties that showed that folks who participated in rioting and looting were in fact people who are very politically active and connected to their community.
Many political movements have used methods that are not always democratic at times, from Nelson Mandela on. Are you over-interpreting these actions as having some political character? To people in a movement getting what they want for free.
Rich people get it from the exploitation of people working for them and through their generation of rents and profits, through labor and through ownership of factories and stores. I think that when people loot during a riot, they are solving a lot of the immediate problems that make their lives very, very hard, and they may also take the opportunity to make their lives more pleasurable. And being able to have that stuff for free allows you to have more communal pleasure, pleasures that are totally normal.
A lot of the people who are rioting or looting in a neighborhood have worked for those small businesses. They have shopped in those small businesses. They have been followed around by security in those small businesses. No amount of lost business is worth a lost life. Is that wrong? That definitely happens, but I actually think riots are incredibly femme.
Riots are really emotive, an emotional way of expressing yourself. It is about pleasure and social reproduction. You care for one another by getting rid of the thing that makes that impossible, which is the police and property.
You attack the thing that makes caring impossible in order to have things for free, to share pleasure on the street. I think there are tremendous limits to that mode. I think, in this instance, one of the ways that people tend to think about militant action is being very macho and male chauvinist. And I think that that slander is dangerous, because it is very necessary that our movements not be male chauvinist and be anti-patriarchal and feminist at their core.
But I think that we have a tendency to immediately equate those things with masculinity. This seems to be a type of connection that people on the left often want to make, no? Like I said, in Minneapolis, there was a community bookstore, for example, that was amid the row of all the corporations that we saw get hit in that neighborhood. And that bookstore went untouched.
I feel anger at the way in which capitalism in America has often organized its society such that you have immigrant groups who end up working as store owners and small-business people in largely Black communities. You saw that in , where there were so many Korean immigrants, and in Watts in , there were a lot of Jewish immigrants and Jews who were store owners there.
As the word became more and more widely used, it brought with it negative connotations. Throughout U. Louis and Maryville University. This is likewise the case for the way Americans have tended to discuss colonial treatment of Native American land and property, he adds. The history-shaping actions of white people are rarely remembered as looting, even when they have involved seizing goods by force, whereas the word is freely applied when those doing the seizing lack power. Because of the racial history of the United States, that dynamic has meant that the term often has racial implications too.
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