Attacking
Liberal Delusions

areader on

BLACKS
ANARCHIS}
LOOTING;

ON THE MYTH OF
BLACK LEADERSHIP
AND OTHER WHITE MYTHS

from a Black affinity group,

posted to It's Going Down

What they call, “the black leaders|

what they are talking about is nothing more than a figment of the white
liberal imagination. That is,if these so-called black leaders even exist
atall, then they can only be found shucking and jiving a "woke" white
person’s head.

Isn't it interesting how progressive whites seem to have a direct line of
communication with black leaders, while everyone else in the street fails
to suffer from the same delusional schizophrenia? What's all the more
oddis that the voices that they hear from these magical negroes always
manage say the same things: *Everyone should peacefully protest on the
sidewalk, because unmediated black rage makes others uncomfortable
"Don't strike back at that cop even if he wants to kill you and everyone
youlove." "I know the manager follows black kids from aisle to aisle, but
still, his store shouldn't be looted” In other words, the message relayed
from the sounds on repeat in a white liberal's head is to end the black
revolt and conduct civil disobedience in a manner that is appropriate for
Karen and Ethan, not Jamal and Keisha.

Itis worthwhile to note that black people, ourselves, never refer to any
mythical black leadership. This is because we know, full and well, that

all of our leaders, since Martin and Malcolm, have been killed. Even

our potential leaders, like Trayvon and Tamir, are gunned down before
they can share with us their vision. What's more, if they are not brutally.
murdered, then they are locked away forever with Sundiata, Mutulu, and
Mumia. That is, we know that if you speak with truth and move against
‘oppression, then the only way to avoid the pig’s bullet or penitentiary, the
modern-day cracker's whip or plantation, is to go on the run like Assata
Olugbala Shakur! In fact, any black person that says otherwise should be
exposed for what he or she is: a poverty-pimp!

After half a century without a figurehead in the front, the black youth has
shown the whole country that they are more than capable of setting their
own path and directing their own initiatives. They have demonstrated

to us a dynamism that can never be reduced to a homogeneous mass
following of anyone one authoritative voice. Paradoxically, it is the entire
spectrum of the black revolt in the streets that can be identified as
leaderless "leaders;" since they have shown everyone else what it means
tofree yourself.

To paraphrase James Baldwin's still apt observation, we black people
are more aware of the inner workings of our pale-face antagonists than
they are of themselves. Consequently, the diagnosis of woke whitey's
psychological condition is quite simple: this James Earl Jones, Carl
Winslow, o Rafiki from the Lion King voice, which bellows off the walls
of their skull is a defense mechanism against their inability to completely
repress their own white superiority complex. What's also abundantly clear
is that the only way to fully work through this hang up is to gain even a
small percent of the courage of a black adolescent and overcome their
white guilt with a fist, a stone, and a Molotov cocktail

- The We Still Outside Collective

PS. Fuck 12!
THE ANARCHISM OF
BLACKNESS

by Zoé Samudzi & William C. Anderson

This essay isreprinted from ROAR Magazine #5, and s the precursor for the book *As Black
s Resistance” by the same authors,

Present incamations of an unfazed and empowered far right increasingly
demand the presence of a real, radical left. In the coming months and
years, the left and left-leaning constituencies of the United States will
need to make clear distinctions between potentially counterproductive
symbolic progress, and actual material progress. Liberalism and party
politics have failed a public attempting to bring about real change — but
there are solutions.

‘The Black liberation struggle, in particular, has long provided a blueprint
for transformative social change within the boundaries of this empire,
and it has done so due to its positioning as an inherently radical social
formation — a product of the virulent and foundational nature of anti-
Blackness in American society. Understanding the significance of this
struggle, we can proceed through examinations of the past, present and
future to build new movements, a strong and radical left, and political
power that generates and inspires rather than disappoints.

The Failings of American Liberalism

‘The United States’ self-ascribed democratic traits have long been filtered
through oppressive forms that the state insists are necessary. Life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness are measured by the success of a capitalist
system that only truly benefits a few. Meanwhile, everyone else s told

to believe that our supposedly meritocratic chance at being one of those
few beneficiaries is what makes us “free” True, unfiltered freedom and
deep democracy are far too revolutionary for this state, so radical and
revolutionary critiques of systemic limitations are often dismissed as
overly idealistic or a utopian fantasy. But itis in the midst of the real-life
nightmare that is the Trump administration that we should now — more
than ever — be dreaming and striving to achieve something better.

For many years now, American liberalism has been a bitter disappointment

to many of those who somehow maintained faith in the democratic
integrity of the two-party system. The Democratic Party has seemingly
been the only choice for those who consider themselves progressives
‘working for a better society, but the notion that social inequities will

be solved through the electoral process was always naive at best. The
entrails of this system are lined with the far-right fascism that is currently
rising and has been bubbling under the facade of liberal democracy at
the expense of non-whites in a white supremacist society. A system
predicated on the over-emphasis of "order” and “security” is primed for
authoritarianism.

Genocide, enslavement and other forms of violence the empire inflicts
have grown more tepid in their bluntness since this nation's birth. Over
time, the violence has been displaced and restructured by more insidious
and invisible modalities of community destruction. The reservation, the
prison system and austerity policies are just some of the negotiable forms
of violence that liberalism has facilitated over time.

Over the past few decades, the United States has seen a shift in liberal
politics leaving the Democratic Party in a completely compromised
position. The emergence of the Tea Party, a populist surge in the
Republican Party, alienated the more "moderate” establishment
Republicans in favor of a more explicitly articulated bigoted takeover. The
lack of a real response to this moment further enabled the rightward shift
s a shaken liberal establishment only sought and attempted bipartisan
negotiations with the more extreme elements commandeering the party.
Instead of moving left, the Democratic Party pandered to the alienated
"moderate” right as it had been for years, and facilitated this conservative
shift with nearly every waking opportunity.

Bipartisan Delusions

Liberal support for the Iraq War, post-9/11 domestic policy and the
foreign policy extensions of the War on Terror made clear the position of
the Democratic Party. For “millennials” in particular, our generation has
come of political age watching perpetual disappointments to this end.
‘There has been no true left in the United States because the positioning
of the Democratic Party is not ane of stark opposition to the right. The
messaging that suggests we should meet conservatives halfway and work
on "both sides of the aisle” has comfortably consolidated a giant right-
wing apparatus,

It seems fitting that at the end of the Obama era we would see a white
supremacist Trump presidency, and that immediately following a Black
president whose cabinet was outspoken about diversity and inclusion we
6

would see a spike in right-wing hate group enrollment. And through the
transition of administrations and the first wave of antagonistic legislation,
there was neither sustained nor sustainable protection being planned by
the party purporting to defend progress. That quiet has now manifested
itself in a Trump administration filled to the brim with the worst of the
worst: the absence of a real left has left so many vulnerable populations
exposed and at the mercy of a plutocratic tyrant hell-bent on destruction.

After a spate of extrajudicial police killngs, hate crimes and domestic
terror incidents, the country is reeling. Black America has been reminded
again and again that we are seen as a monalithic group of feeble-minded
children to be chastised by the state for our own disenfranchisement and
community disadvantage. Ifthere is nothing to be offered that addresses
the reparations Black America is owed on several fronts, then we should

seek to secure these things ourselves through action.

Liberalism and Democratic Party politics are simply not working for Black
people. The agenda of the iberal establishment s frequently not one that
is in line with the everyday material needs of Black America. Despite the
optics of change and the promises of a new day and the moral victories
of "going high” an old sun is ising on a white horizon. At this point

Black people and all people of color across the United States will have

to decide between securing real change and bargaining with bigotry for
compromise.

Blackness and the Zone of Non-Citizenship

Societal fascism describes the process and political logics of state
formation wherein entire populations are either excluded or ejected from
the social contract. They are excluded pre-contractually because they
have never been a part of a given social contract and never will be; or they
are ejected from a contract they were previously a part of and are only
able to enjoy a conditional inclusion at best.

Black Americans are the former: they are residents in a settler colony
predicated upon the genocide of indigenous people and the enslavement
of the Africans from whom they are descendants. Residents in the

United States, as opposed to citizens of. Despite a Constitution laden
with European Enlightenment values, and a document of independence
declaring egalitarianism and inalienable rights as the law of the land, Black
existence was that of private property. The Black American condition is
perpetual relegation to the afterlife of slavery, and as long as the United
States continues to exist as an ongoing settler project, in this afterlife
Black people will remain
As Hortense Spillers makes clear in her seminal work, "Mama's Baby,
Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Story Blackness was indelibly
marked and transformed through the Transatlantic chattel trade. European
colonialism and the subsequent process of African enslavement — both as
a profit-maximizing economic institution and an un-humaning institution
— can be regarded as *high crimes against the flesh, as the person of
African females and males registered the woundin

Crimes against the flesh are not simply crimes against the corporeal self:
the wounded flesh, rather, was the personhood and social positionality of
the African. The wounding is the process of blackening and necessarily of
subjugation, a wound from which Black people and "Blackness" writ large
have yet to recover. Black exclusion from the social contract is existence
within a heavily surveilled and heavily regulated state of subjection. We
are carriers of the coveted blue passport still trapped in the zone of citizen
non-being. We are simultaneously subjugated and teased with promises
of liberation via individualized neoliberal self-betterment and swallowing
of along-soured American Dream whilst choking back dissonances and
forcibly reconciling irreconcilable double consciousnesses.

‘Whiteness has long sought to grapple with the existential threat posed
by Black freedom. Black repatriation to Africa, or "colonization has long
been floated as one potential solution. Founded in 1816 and driven

by a variety of ultimately complementary motivations, the American
Colonization Society helped to found the colony of Liberia in 1822. The
abolitionist contingents within the society believed that because of the
insurmountable discriminations free-born Black people and freedmen and
their families experienced, Black people would fare far better organizing
themselves in their African "homelands.”

Slaveholders within American society were concerned that the

presence of free Blacks would inspire enslaved Blacks to revolt and thus
compromise the stability (both economic stability and the stability of the
anti-Black racial order) of the southern slaveocracy, and other openly
racist members outright refused Black people the opportunity to integrate
into American society. Others still were concerned that Black families
‘would burden state welfare systems and that interracial labor competition
‘would ultimately compromise wages for white workers.

Alesser known proponent of colonization was the “Great Emancipator
himself, Abraham Lincoln, who entertained a far lesser known and
quickly abandoned plan for Black colonization in Panama — one decried
by Frederick Douglass as “ridiculous” — which would also play a role

in the expansion of American trade influence in the Caribbean. The

"Back to Africa’ project was subsequently taken up by Black thinkers
s
like Marcus Garvey in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries
following the failures of Reconstruction in the South, the first attempt to
meaningfully extend citizenship to newly emancipated Blacks, to protect
them from white supremacist violence and also the social and political
disillusionment of Blacks who had migrated to northern states. It is no
coincidence that interest in repatriation peaked during the period.

‘The major problem with both historical and contemporary repatriation-
colonization programs is the means by which they fail to both provide
reparation for historic violence and answer the perennial question of
Black citizenship in the United States. Many or most Black people,
including many descendants of enslaved Africans trafficked from the
continent centuries ago, have no desire to return to an Africa that has
never been their home in any material sense. Given plans to remain, Black
people have organized in myriad ways to affect change and actualize
varying conceptions of liberation in the United States. But as history has
demonstrated, some vehicles for change and political advancement are
more fickle than others.

The Anarchism of Blackness

Make no mistake: progress has been secured by Black people's
mobilization as opposed to a single political party. We are the ones who
have achieved much of the progress that changed the nation for the
better for everyone. Those gains were not a product of any llusion of
American exceptionalism or melting pots, but rather through blood, sweat
and community self-defense. Our organization can be as effective now
asit has been in the past, serving every locality and community based

on their needs and determinations. This much can be achieved through
disassociating ourselves from party politics that fai to serve us as Black
freedoms cannot truly be secured in any given election. Our political
energy is valuable and should not al be drained by political cycles that
feed into one another as well as our own detriment.

‘While bound to the laws of the land, Black America can be understood
s an extra-state entity because of Black exclusion from the liberal social
contract. Due to this extra-state location, Blackness i, in so many ways,
anarchistic. African-Americans, as an ethno-social identity comprised of
descendants from enslaved Africans, have innovated new cultures and
social organizations much like anarchism would require us to do outside
of state structures. Black radical formations are themselves fundamentally
anti-fascist despite functioning outside of *conventional” Antifa spaces,
and Black people have engaged in anarchistic resistances since our very
arival in the Americas
From slave ship and plantation rebellions during enslavement to post-
Emancipation labor and prison camps, to Harriet Tubman's removal of
enslaved peoples from the custody of their owners, to the creation of
maroon societies in the American South, to combatting the historic (and
present) collusion between state law enforcement and the Ku Klux Klan —
assertions of Black personhood, humanity and liberation have necessarily
called into question both the foundations and legitimacy of the American
state,

S0 given this history, why do we understand Black political formations
as squarely entrenched within liberalism or s almost synonymous with
supporting for the Democratic Party? The reality of the afteriife of slavery.
shows that the updated terms of Black citizenship are still inextricably
linked to the original sins levied against us from the moment of this
nation's inception. We are not able to escape a cage that has never been
fully removed, though liberal fantasy would have you think we wil have a
dream or dignifiedly protest out of harm's way.

‘The simple and increasingly realized reality is that mass protests, petitions
and the over-exhausted respectable methods liberals tout as sole
solutions have a purpose, but do not stop bullets — that is why Dr. King.
and many of their favorite sanitized "non-violent” protesters of yesteryear
carried weapons to defend themselves.

Responding to this Neo-Fascist Moment

Liberalism cannot defeat fascism, it can only engage it through symbolic
political rigmarole. The triteness of electoral politics that has been
superimposed onto Black lfe in the United States positions Black people
as an indelible mule for much of this nation's social progression. Our
hyper-visible struggle i a fight for all people’s freedom and we die only
torealize that everything gained can be reversed with the quick flick of a
pen. While liberalism takes up the burden of protecting *free speech” and
the rights of those who would annihilate all non-whites, Black people and
other people of color assume all of the risks and harms.

‘The symbolic battles the Democratic Party and its liberal constituents
engage in pose direct existential threats to Black people because they
protect esteemed ideals of a constitution that has never guaranteed Black
people safety or security. The idealistic gestures with which liberalism
defines itself are made at the expense of Black people who are not
protected by such ideals in the ways institutional whiteness and even
articulations of white supremacy are protected.

Constitutional amendments are contorted based on the state’s historical
disregard for sustaining an active antagonism towards Black life. The

First Amendment has been repeatedly trampled by militarized police
trotting through Black neighborhoods. The Second Amendment has
been shot down by countless state enforcers who have extrarjudicially
murdered Black people based merely on the suspicion they might have
aweapon. The Thirteenth Amendment legitimized enslavement through
mass incarceration and extended the practice into a new form of white
supremacist rationalization and an old capitalist labor politic that still
tortures us to this day. This fascist moment is neither ideologically new
nor temporally surprising. It is an inevitability.

Anti-fascist organizing must be bold. The mechanisms working against us
do not entertain our humanity: they are hyper-violent. They deal death
and destruction in countless numbers across the non-Western world
while turning domestic Black and Brown neighborhoods into proxies
for how to treat sub-citizen “others.” The militarization of police, border
regimes, stop-and-frisk and ICE are clear examples of how the state
regards the communities it targets and brutalizes, At the very least, a
conversation on self-defense that does not mistreat our survival as a
form of violence is deeply needed. And it would be even better if such

a conversation normalized anti-fascist organizing that prepared people
for the possibility of a fight, instead of simply hoping that that day never
comes and respectably clutching proverbial pearls at those currently
fighting in the streets.

Everyone has a stake in the fight against fascism. It cannot be defeated
with bargaining, petitioning, pleading, *civilized dialogue, or any other
mode of response we were taught was best. Fascists have no respect for
“othered" humanities. Regardless of age, gender, race, sexuaty, religion,
physical ability or nationality, there i a place for a of us in this struggle.
We are always fighting against the odds because there is no respite in a
perpetually abusive state. It can only function through this abuse, so we
can only prevail through organizing grounded in radical love and solidarity.

Our solidarity must prioritize accountability, and it must be authentic.
Strategic organizing of this sort, organizing where we understand the
inextricable linkedness of our respective struggles, is our means of
bolstering the makings of a cohesive left in the United States. The time
‘wasted on dogma and sectarianism, prejudice and incoherence among
leftists is over.

‘The sooner Black America in particular begins to understand our position
s an inherently anarchistic element of the United States, the more.
realistically we will be able to organize. Moving beyond the misnomer
of chaos, the elements that make us such are the very tools we should
utilize to achieve our liberation. This burning house cannot be reformed
to appropriately include us, nor should we want to share a painful death
perishing in the flames. A better society has to be written through our

inalienable self-determinations, and that will only happen when we realize
we are holding the pen.
STEALING AWAY IN
AMERICA

a conversation with
Z0é Samudzi & Vicky Osterweil

This comersation i from e 10, 2020 in Jewish Currents.

Since the mucer of George Foge by a Minneapolspofice ofcer on May 25th,the country
s been seizd by protests against poloe brutalty. I odltion o peaceful morches and
demonsiaos, rre v o ben ot soneso g and property domage

e burming of Minneapols’s Thic Frecinct, preceded by looting
fshops n hesurourdingneghhood iluding o Tge e soenes—ond siior
enesinclies ocros th raion—one prompied e et o fomlor rgumerds about
looting that heve perodicallyarsen for years—inclucing, inrecent memory,during the
aftermath of Huricane Katrina in 2005 and the 1992 LA rots th folowed the polce
assaulof Rodhey king

Thisdebote was o reactivated s yeors ago at he beginning o the Ferguson uprisings,
lferthe murce of Michoe! rcun, when many pur riatorsproisec

e pecceful protests against polce brutalty whie forcefuly condemming loting as
misguided or even counterproductive, In response, Vicky Osterwe published the
I Defense of Locting” in The New nquiny Inthe essay, Ostenvei refuses the moralstc:
distincton between “non-vikent protesters” and “ooters,” wriing tht looting actuolly
4y hon; i  space without cops,property eltions can be destoyed and

o common obections to hese toctics,

o defeating betiavir: She quotes a il
e Ferguson ifer says, "People nant o say wee desiroying our own
neightorhoods. We doriton nothing out here” Ostervet wries, Th .. could be said
of mast mojorty bock neighborboocs n America, whi conceptrations
of choinstores and fost food restaurants than non-b Hrw coud
e average Ferguson resident eally sa it our QuikTip?” She goss on fo rgue th
lieral i ofloting e often hypocriicol The same it berols who inveigh against
corporations for destoying local communites are aghastwhen rioters toke the citque to
it actuol moteriol condlusion, she writes.

e, Osterweil s expanded e essoy o a book, n Defense of Looting: A Riotous History
of Unci Action,out his August. n the boo, Ostenteil has developed the crigina
into o searching examination of thecrigins and evoluton of polcing, e, and property
vights. Utimately, Ostnweil demancds we not only overcome the respectablty polcs
animating our desiefor “pecceful potests”but that we work to abolishthe rociol coprtalist
5

Z0é Samudzi: Can you describe the etymology of the word "looting and
how that informs its present racialized usage?

Vicky Osterweil: The word 'loot" was taken from Hindi by [British]
colonial officers. It first appears in English in an 1845 colonial officer's
handbook. From the very beginning it's this really racializing word that
contains the idea that black and brown people were obsessed with
plunder—that they had a deviant relationship to property, as opposed
to the proper ownership embodied by the colonizers. This connotation
persists today, which is why people are so reactive and defensive against
the word. It really is a classic dog whistle. When Trump says, "When the
looting starts the shooting starts” we know he’s not talking about the
‘white protesters who might be helping and participating. He's talking
about murdering black people.

25:In your book, you explain the relationship between property rights and
the evolution of white supremacy and racial structures. You write, "Many.
historians have shown that strong, explicit racist ideology does not appear
in the historical record in America until the revolutionary period, when
the rights of man (and itis indeed man) became the defining philosophy of
US politics. If the rights to liberty and property are inalienable, then what
to do about al these people who are very clearly not in possession of
liberty, or the capacity of property ownership?” To solve this conundrum,
the colonists enforced the structure and hierarchy of race in America

by designating white people as owners and black people as things to

be owned, therefore joining racial identity and citizenship to property
relations. How can we think about looting in the context of what you are
describing as the racial roots of property?

VO: [The Jamaican writer and cultural theorist] Sylvia Wynter talks about
this in her essay "No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues
about the way LA police were referring to a black criminal underclass
using the phrase "No Humans Involved; or *NHI” She uses that as a
jumping-off point for her project about the construction of the human:
how the idea of humanity itself s built on the denial of [human status

to black people. This project of rights and legal bourgeos subjecthood

is being built on a definition of humanity that necessarily has an outside:

u
‘That outside is always African and Indigenous populations.

‘The enslaved—who were not only excluded from property ownership,

but were themselves defined as property—understood innately that the
concept of property made o sense. They would call just having a meeting
“stealing” the meeting, and they would call escaping "stealing away” Once
You have been made into property by a society, then you recognize that
any freedom you're going to have has to be stolen.

Z5: You write, “This specter of slaves frecing themselves is American
istory’s first image of black looters. | really love the way you play with
time, retroactively applying the word “looters" and connecting it to
contemporary usage. It really allows us to connect the sheer magnitude
of the state's theft, trafficking, and enslavement of African people to its
present fear of the black looter destroying and stealing in return.

VO: For centuries, black thinkers have been arguing that slavery didn't
actually end [after abolition and emancipationl. Frederick Douglass was
making that claim in the 1880s. Black studies scholar Christina Sharpe
talks about how we have to understand the entire capitalist world as
in the wake of the techniques and modes of living that were produced in
colonization and the slave trade. | think understanding that is really vital
to breaking out of the progressive narrative that things have been getting
better. In 1892, fewer people were getting lynched than are being killed
every year by the police in America, which means there are more police
Iynchings now than there ever were at the height of lynching as a white
fascist movement. None of these problems have gone away. There have
been moments of uprising and resistance when they have been pushed
back: Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement, even LA in 1992 But
the fundamental structures never shift.

25:1 often find that the real objection to property damage is about the
fact that there's always a caveat for the preservation and maintenance
of black life, a set of specific conditions under which most white people
feel comfortable about allowing black people to exist. You write that
the "specter of slaves freeing themselves! the fear of black looting, is
really the white fear of and objection to black people choosing terms

of existence beyond white law and order. It's a kind of deep-seated
existential objection—one that we just don't see, for instance, in
responses, even condemnatory ones, to white people rioting and setting
things on fire after a big sports victory.

VO: | think there is a desire on white people’s behalf to deny the existence
of the anti-Black, white supremacist state that we live in. They don't want.
to believe in it They live their ives organized around not believing in it
even as they benefit from it.

Legal scholar Cheryl L. Harris, in her very important text “Whiteness as
Property,” argues that the ultimate property in society is whiteness. And
for many white folks, especially in this country in 2020, [whiteness] may
be the only property they own. Part of why so many have come out to
the street this time is because they realize that the wages of whiteness
have gotten really low. It's important to understand that whiteness and
property are inextricable from each other: Without one there cannot be
the other. We tend to think of property as tangible things or commoities,
but it also includes rights, protections, and customs of possession passed
‘down and ratified through law. Whiteness emerges as the race of people
‘who are neither Indigenous nor enslavable—national identities are
increasingly collapsed around the distinctions of slave/free and black/
white.

S0 when black folks rise up and attack property, they re also attacking
‘whiteness. That is an understanding that goes back to the plantation:
When you attack your status as property, you attack whiteness as
domination over you.

25 Its so interesting to think about the slogan we often see: Being pro-
Black isn't anti-white. But f you're supporting black people in the street
protesting the police, if you're supporting white people protesting against
the violence of the police, you are necessarily opposing whiteness.

VO: Yes. Whiteness only exists as the condition under which you can
‘oppress black and Indigenous people. That's the identity of whiteness.
There is nothing [else] there. The peace of whiteness is a peace of the
grave. It needs to be abolished~and if we're talking about abolishing
whiteness, we're also talking about abolishing the police. Police evolved
from slave patrols, slave catchers, colonial overseers (in the Caribbean

s well as Ireland), and as anti-riot forces designed to control new urban
non-white populations. The earliest modern police force in the world was
in Charleston, South Carolina: the City Guard. It existed mostly to control
and terrorize the quarters where *hired out” enslaved people lived at
some remove from their plantations and enslavers, and thus represented
some small amount of autonomy, and the possibilty of rebellion or
organization—which was a threat to the white establishment. Further, one
of the main [original] tasks of the NYPD, the earliest police force in the
North, included enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act-kidnapping free
black peaple and sending them back into slavery—and putting down the
anti-slave catcher riots that were a major part of the abolition movement
in antebellum New York.

©
In other words, from the very beginning, police exist to prevent black
people from unsettling their status as property and threatening property
itself, a5 well as to repress other unruly proles who might riot, refuse
work, and otherwise attack property and its systems.

25:In discussions about looting, people sometimes categorize survival
theft—for example, stealing food or baby formula when you need it—
differently from what's seen as opportunistic, joyriding theft. Do do you
think that particular distinction really matters?

VO: No. I don't think so. Many people would, in moments of peace,
encourage opportunism: They would tell you that you're just not working
hard enough, you just need to get a better job, you need to better
yourself. But when people who have been denied those legal “proper”
routes toward wealth take an opportunistic moment to act, then suddenly
‘opportunism becomes a crime. Then opportunism reveals a sort of
villainous or lazy disposition. This distinction ignores the law of value. If
you were really broke and you go into a department store and you grab as
much food as you can carry, that’s going to last you a lot less long in terms
of survival than grabbing a handful of jewelry. You can carry a lot more
value out of a store in more valuable things.

“This understanding also erases something essential about the act of
looting, which s that its actually really scary and tense and difficult. Its
not just an easy solution to the problems you have. It also undermines
the capitalist system by pointing to a way of relating to things and to each
other that doesn't involve property. Its a way of immediately transforming
your relation to the world around you. I think that's also part of what
makes it 50 scary for onlookers, and why they want to divide between
people stealing a bag of rice and people stealing a flat screen TV.

Z5: What about the distinction between looting from or damaging small
businesses as opposed to chain stores or corporations?

VO: “Small business” has come to mean a “moral” business, a “good” thing.
As anyone who has worked for small businesses can attest,

small businesses often subject workers to just as much wage theft and
workplace harm as large ones. Small businesses may occasionally uplift,
but more often they prey on the poor as much as big businesses, just a
little less profitably.

In the case of riots, as looting is usually done by people who live in the
neighborhoods where it occurs, distinctions are often made between
businesses that gentrify or oppress, and those that don't. Liquor stores,
pawn shops, pharmacies, and gentro-cafes tend to be hit much more
readily than the quaint *small business” the phrase is designed to evoke.
I believe we should trust those who loot and riot to understand their
targets and their actions: to have analyzed the social world they live in,
and therefore to trust them when they select the targets of their rage and
resistance—especially when that rage is applied to property. No amount of
lost business is worth more than a single lost lie.

Z5: You quote the black feminist scholar Saidiya Hartman—whom |
consider the queen of pleasure and anarchy—describing black people
taking small moments of pleasure as *stealing away’—which, as you noted,
is a phrase enslaved people sed to talk about escaping. I’s so interesting
that the language used to talk about pleasure overlaps with the language
of theft, the criminal and also self-emancipatory act of freeing oneself
from bondage. This also makes me think about how the revolutionary.
Frantz Fanon talks about violence as an act of self-making. What you
think is the function o role of pleasure in looting? | don't think that part is
negligible or apolitical.

VO: One of the things that scares police and politicians the most when
they enter a riot zone—and there are quotes from across the 20th century
of police and politicians saying this—is that it was happy: Everyone was
happy. In the book, | quote a piece by the playwright Charles Fuller,

who happened to be a young man starting out his career during the
Philadelphia riots of 1964. He talks about the incredible sense of safety
and joy and carnival that happens in the streets.

1 think riots and militant violent action i general get slandered as being
macho and bro-y, and lots of our male comrades like to project that sort
of image. That definitely happens, but | actually think riots are incredibly
femme. Riots are really emotive, an emotional way of expressing yourself.
Itis 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. Obviously, riots
are not the revolution in and of themselves. But they gesture toward the
world to come, where the streets are spaces where we are free to be
happy, and be with each other, and care for each other.

IN DEFENSE OF
LOOTING

by Vick weil

This essay is reprinted from The New Inquiry from August 21, 201,

For most of America’s history, one of the most righteous anti-
‘white supremacist tactics available was looting.

As protests in Ferguson continued unabated one week after the
police killing of Michael Brown, Jr., zones of Twitter and the left media
predominantly sympathetic to the protesters began angrily criticizing
looters. Some claimed that white protesters were the ones doing al of
the looting and property destruction, while others worried about the
stereotypical and damaging media representation that would emerge. It
also seems that there were as many protesters (if not more) in the streets
of Ferguson working to prevent looting as there were people going about
it. While | disagree with this tactic, | understand that they acted out

o care for the struggle, and | want to honor all the brave and inspiring
actions they've taken over the last weeks.

Some politicians on the ground in Ferguson, like alderman Antonio French
and members of the New Black Panther Party, block looting specifically in
order to maintain leadership for themselves and dampen resistance, but
there are many more who do so out of a commitment to advancing the
ethical and politically advantageous position. It i in solidarity with these
latter protesters-along with those who loot-and against politicians and
de-escalators everywhere that | offer this critique, as a way of invigorating
discussion amongst those engaged in anti- oppression struggle, in
Ferguson and anywhere else the police violently perpetuate white
supremacy and settler colonialism. In other words, anywhere in America.

‘The dominant media s itself a tool of white supremacy: it repeats what
the police deliver nearly verbatim and uncritically, even when the police
story changes upwards of nine times, as it has thus far in the Brown
Killing. The media use phrases like “officer-involved shooting” and will
switch to passive voice when a black man is shot by a white vigilante or a
police officer ("shots were fired"). Journalists claim that "you have to
hear both sides” in order to privilege the obfuscating reports of the state

9
over the clear voices and testimony of an entire community, members of
‘which witnessed the police murder a teenager in cold blood. The media
are more respectful to white serial killers and mass murderers than to
unarmed black victims of murder.

And yet, many of the peaple who perform this critique day-in, day-out
can get jammed up by media perceptions of protesters. They want to
correct the media’s assertion that protesters were alllooters for good
reason: the idea of black people looting a store is one of the most racially
charged images in the white imaginary. When protesters proclaim that
"not all protesters were looters, in fact, most of the looters weren't part of
the protest!”or words to that effect, they are trying to fight a horrfically
racist history of black people depicted in American culture as robbers and
thieves: Precisely the image that the Ferguson police tried to evoke to
assassinate Michael Brown's character and justify his killing post facto. It
is a completely righteous and understandable position.

However,in trying to correct this media image—in making a strong
division between Good Protesters and Bad Rioters, or between ethical
non-violence practitioners and supposedly violent looters—the narrative
of the criminalization of black youth is reproduced. This time it delineates
certain kinds of black youth~those who loot versus those who protest.
The effect of this discourse is hardening a permanent category of
criminality on black subjects who produce a supposed crime within

the context of a protest. It reproduces racist and white supremacist
ideologies (including the tactic of divide-and-conquer), deeming some
unworthy of our solidarity and protection, marking them, subtly, s
legitimate targets of police violence. These days, the police, whose public-
facing racism is much more manicured, if no less virulent, argue that
“outside agitators’ engage in rioting and looting. Meanwhile, police will
consistently praise *non-violent” demonstrators, and claim that they want
to keep those demonstrators safe.

Inworking to correct the white-supremacist media narrative we can

end up reproducing police tactics of isolating the individuals who attack
property at protests. Despite the fact that if it were not for those
individuals the media might pay no attention at all. If protesters hadn't
looted and burnt down that QuikTrip on the second day of protests,
would Ferguson be a point of worldwide attention? It's impossible to
know, but all the non-violent protests against police killings across the
country that go unreported seem to indicate the answer is no. It was the
looting of a Duane Reade after a vigil that brought widespread attention
to the murder of Kimani Gray in New York City. The media's own warped
procedure instructs that riots and looting are more effective at attracting
attention to a cause.

But of course, the goal s not merely the attention of dominant media. Nor
is the goal a certain kind of media attention: no matter how peaceful and
well-behaved a protest is, the dominant media will always push

the police talking points and the white-supremacist agenda. The goal is
justice. Here, we have to briefly grapple with the legacy of social justice
being won in America: namely that of non-violence and the civilrights
movement. And that means correcting a more pervasive and totalizing
media and historical narrative about the civil ights movement: that it was.
non-violent, that it claimed significant wins because it was non- violent,
and that it overcame racial injustice altogether.

In the 400 years of barbaric, white supremacist, colonial and genocidal
history known as the United States, the civilrights movement stands out
as a bright, beautiful,all-too-brief moment of hope and struggle. We still
live in the shadow of the leaders, theory, and images that emerged from
those years, and any struggle in America that overlooks the work (both
philosophical and organizational) produced in those decades does so at
its own peril. However, why is it drilled into our heads, from grade school
onward, in every single venue, by presidents, professors and police chiefs
alike, that the civil ights movement was victorious because it was non-
violent? Surely we should be suspicious of any narrative that the entire
white establishment agrees is of the utmost importance.

‘The civi rights movement was not purely non-violent. Some of its bravest,
most inspiring activists worked within the framework of disciplined non-
violence. Many of its bravest, most
months of largely non-violent campaigning in Birmingham, Alabama to
force JFK to give his speech calling for a civilrights act. But in the month
before he did so, the campaign in Birmingham had become decidedly not-
non-violent':

protesters had started fighting back against the police and Eugene
"Bull’ Conner, throwing rocks, and breaking windows. Robert
Kennedy, afraid that the increasingly riotous atmosphere in
Birmingham would spread across Alabama and the South, convinced

John to deliver the famous speech and begin moving towards civil
rights legislation.

‘This would have been impossible without the previous months of
courageous and tireless non-violent activism. But it s also the emergent
threat of rioting that forced JFK's hand. Both Malcolm X and MLK had
armed bodyguards. Throughout the civil rights era, massive non-violent
civil disobedience campaigns were matched with massive riots. The most
famous of these was the Watts rebellion of 1965 but they occurred in
dozens of cities across the country. To argue that the movement achieved
what it did in spite of rather than as a result of the mixture of not-non-
violent and non-violent action is spurious at best. And, lest we forget,
Martin Luther King Jr, the man who embodied the respectable non-
violent voice that the white power structure claims they would listen to
today, was murdered by that same white power structure anyway.

‘Though the Civil Rights movement won many battles, itlost the war. Mass
incarceration, the fact that black wealth and black-white inequality are at
the same place they were at the start of the civil rights movement, that
many US cities are more segregated now than they were in the sixties;

no matter what “colorblind" liberals would say, racial justice has ot been
‘won, white supremacy has not been overturned, racism is not over. In
fact, anti-black racism remains the foundational organizing principle of
this country. That s because this country is built on the right to property,
and there is no property, no wealth in the USA without the exploitation,
appropriation, murder, and enslavement of black people.

As Raven Rakia puts it, “In America, property is racia. It always has been."
Indeed, the idea of blackness was invented simultaneously

with American conceptions of property: via slavery. In the early days

of colonial America, chattel slavery was much less common than
indentured servitude—though the difference between the two was not
always significant—and there were Irish, French, German and English
immigrants among these populations. But while there had always

been and continued to be some black freedmen, over the course of the
17th century light-skinned European people stopped being indentured
servants and slaves. This is partially because production exploded in

the colonies much faster than a working population could form to do the
‘work-either from reproduction or voluntary immigration-and so the cost
of hired labor went through the roof. Even a very poor and desperate
European became much more expensive than an African bought from the
increasingly rationalized transatlantic slave trade.

‘The distinction between white and black was thus eventually forged
asaway of distinguishing between who could be enslaved and who could
not. The earliest working definition of blackness may well have been
"those who could be property”. Someone who organized a mob
toviolently free slaves, then, would surely be considered a looter (had
the word come into common usage by then, John Brown and Nat Turner
would have been slandered with it). This is not to draw some absurd
ethical equivalence between freeing a slave and grabbing a flat screen in
ariot. The point, rather, is that for most of America’s history, one of the
most righteous anti-white supremacist tactics available was looting. The
specter of slaves freeing themselves could be seen as American history's
first image of black looters.

On Twitter, a tongue-in-cheek political hashtag sprang up,
#suspectediooters, which was filled with images of colonial Europeans,
slave owners, cowboys and white cultural appropriators. Similarly, many
have pointed out that, had Africa not been looted, there wouldn't even be.
any black people in America. These are powerful correctives to arguments
around looting, and the rhetorical point-that when people of color loot
astore, they are taking back a miniscule proportion of what has been
historically stolen from them, from their ancestral history and language

to the basic safety of their children on the street today—is absolutely
essential. But purely for the purposes of this argument— because | agree
‘wholeheartedly with the political project of these campaigns—I want to
claim that what white settlers and slave traders did wasn't mere looting.

It was genocide, theft, and barbarism of the lowest order. But part of how
slavery and colonialism functioned was to introduce new territories and
categories to the purview of ownership, of property. Not only did they
steal the land from native peoples, but they also produced a system under
‘which the land itself could be stolen, owned by legal fiat through force

of arms. Not only did they take away Africans'lives, history, culture, and
freedom, but they also transformed people into property and labor-power
into a saleable commodity. Chattel slavery is the most barbaric and violent
form of work coercion—but as the last 150 years has shown, you can
dominate an entire people through law, violence, and wages pretty well,

Recently an Instagram video circulated of a Ferguson protester discussing
the looting and burning of the QuikTrip convenience store.

He retorts the all too common accusation thrown at rioters: "People
‘wanna say we destroying our own neighborhoods. We don't own

nothing out here!” This is the crux of the matter, and could be said of
most majority black neighborhoods in America, which have much higher
concentrations of chain stores and fast food restaurants than non-black
neighborhoods. The average per capita income in Ferguson, MO is less
than $21,000, and that number almost certainly gets lower if you remove
the 35% white population of Ferguson from the equation. How could
the average Ferguson resident really say it's "our Qu
although you might hang out i it, how can a chain convenience store

or corporate restaurant earnestly be part of anyone's neighborhood?
‘The same white liberals who inveigh against corporations for destroying
local communities are aghast when rioters take their critique to its actual
material conclusion.

‘The mystifying ideological claim that looting is violent and non-political is
one that has been carefully produced by the ruling class because it

is precisely the violent maintenance of property which is both the basis
and end of their power. Looting is extremely dangerous to the rich (and
most white people) because it reveals, with an immediacy that has to be
moralized away, that the idea of private property is just that: an idea,

a tenuous and contingent structure of consent, backed up by the lethal
force of the state. When rioters take territory and loot, they are revealing
precisely how, in a space without cops, property relations can be
destroyed and things can be had for free.

On aless abstract level there is a practical and tactical benefit to looting.
Whenever people worry about looting, there is an implicit sense that
the looter must necessarily be acting selfishly, “opportunistically” and in
‘excess. But why is it bad to grab an opportunity to improve well-being, to
make life better, easier, or more comfortable? Or, as Hannah Black

put it on Twitter: “Cops exist so people can't loot ie have nice things

for free so idk why its so confusing that people loot when they protest
against cops” [sicl. Only if you believe that having nice things for free

is amoral, i you believe, in short, that the current (white-supremacist,
settler-colonialist) regime of property is just, can you believe that looting
is amoral in itself.

‘White people deploy the idea of looting in a way that implies people of
color are greedy and lazy, but it is just the opposite: looting is a hard- won
and dangerous act with potentially terrible consequences, and looters
are only stealing from the rich owners' profit margins. Those owners,
meanwhile, especially if they own a chain like QuikTrip, steal forty hours
every week from thousands of employees who in retur get the privilege
of not dying for another seven days.

And the further assumption that the looter isn't sharing her loot s just as
racist and ideological. We know that poor communities and communities
of color practice more mutual aid and support than do wealthy white
‘communities—partially because they have to. The person looting
be someone who has to hustle everyday to get by, someone who, by
grabbing something of value, can afford to spend the rest of the week
"non-violently” protesting. They might be feeding their family, or older
pry

ht

people in their community who barely survive on Social Security and
can't work (or loot) themselves. They might just be expropriating what
they would otherwise buy—liquor, for example—but t still epresents a
material way that riots and protests help the community: by providing a
way for people to solve some of the immediate problems of poverty and
by creating a space for people to freely reproduce their lives rather than
doing so through wage labor.

Modern American police forces evolved out of fugitive slave patrols,
working to literally keep property from escaping its owners. The history
of the police in America is the history of black people being violently
prevented from threatening white people’s property rights. When, in the
midst of an anti-police protest movement, people loot, they aren't acting
non-politicall, they aren't distracting from the issue of police violence
and domination, nor are they fanning the flames of an always-already
racist media discourse. Instead, they are getting straight to the heart of
the problem of the police, property, and white supremacy.

Solidarity with all Ferguson rebels! Justice for Mike Brown!

BLACK LIBERAL, YOUR
TIME IS UP

by Yannick Giovanni Marshall

As you ready yourself to attempt to hijack the work of radicals, to go
undercover dressed in our clothes and slp into the crowd pretending
that you were always there and that you are us, know that we see you.
Even now, as you are preparing your watered-down Black Lives Matter
syllabi and your “Hope and the Black Spring in the Time of Corona” book
manuscripts, which are by now ready for press, filled as they are with the
same dimly lit, unimaginative pablum about "improving race relation:
feel-good "anti-racism’, and "ways to move forward". We see you. We
know why you have come.

You are here to translate an uprising. You are here to show your black
skin so that you can claim the mantle of authority on anti-Blackness

that white liberals have bestowed upon you. You are here to sit at their
pundit tables, before their cameras. Your face beaming across the world
asit provides the safest possible interpretation of a revolution in order to
police its possibilties and pave over the threat of abolition with as mild
and ineffective a reform s possible.

Although uprisings are spearheaded by radicals, we are shut out of the
public discussion. Neither the Black radical, nor Black radical thought is
given air time. Instead, we are forced to endure being talked about and
having the revolution we fought for be defused and repackaged to be
palatable to awhite liberal audience.

We see you gearing up for your mission. You will not be able to blend into.
the crowd this time.

No interpretation of a revolution is needed. Its commentators should not
be the people who yesterday were only too happy to sit at the table with
‘white nationalists and who took smiling pictures with the “good police”.

It cannot be narrated by the same people who - alongside their white
liberal colleagues - jump Black radicals, beating us down with tired Martin
Luther King Jr quotes in an attempt to discipline our anger and fix the
boundaries of our action. Not by the same peaple who spew King at every
‘opportunity, wielding him as a cudgel against those whom they have

0
trained in the belief that King is king and his word is law.

Itis a cult of King sustained, on the one hand, by the power of white
liberal media, schools and corporate offices that have bled him of what
little anti-colonialism he had in order to parade him for their purposes, and
on the other hand, by the effective silencing of his contemporaries and his
‘contemporary critics.

We have had to endure the silencing of people like Kwame Ture, who

said, “In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent has to have a
conscience. The United States has no conscience.” We have endured the
silencing of people like Assata Shakur, who said, "Nobody in the world,
nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral
sense of the people who were oppressing them.”

You have not only been complicitin the silencing of the radicals, but
by hogging the mic and having the prerogative on how Black struggle
is spoken of and its history remembered, you have engineered it. Even
as our people are permanently incarcerated or are made refugees and
hunted, they die a second death in your willful amne:

Black radical critics have proven to be right although you would not know
it by how little their names are known and how little room you have given
them. Get off the mic and give it to the people. Get off the platform and
out of the newsroom. Your time is up.

For far too long, Black liberal, you have been allowed to domesticate
Black radicalism. Because our oppressors prefer you to us and at any sign
of trouble, rush out to find you to speak on behalf of all Black people, you
have eagerly taken the chance to hog all of the mics and silence us. You
‘weaken our revolt with your narration.

We know that even now you are preparing to invade us with your linked
arms performing that played out *we shall overcome” nonsense in order
to reframe destruction in the colony and of the civil order as a quest for
policy changes.

You have come to firehose the fire in our uprising while pretending to be
angrier and more rebellious than the rebels. As if it were not just yesterday
that you were standing shoulder to shoulder with police and politicians
begging for calm and agreeing that this s sad.

We know that by the immensity of your power and the relative strength
of your megaphones you will have some successes in the coming fraud.
But no matter how well you carve and gut this revolution and lay its skin

on your face as your mask, we will still see you.

We know that when we say abolish prisons and police you will intercede
on behalf of the state and white power with your deliberate mistranslation
saying we asked for “less harsh sentences and more trust between the.
police and Black community.”

When we say we want this thing over with, you will say we want “change’.
‘When we say this white supremacist settler-colony has anti-Blackness

inits DNA and is incapable of providing any adequate liberation you say,
*America is failing Black people”.

We say we want to get out of here. You ask *how do we move forward?"
Asif we do not hear in your tone the hope that all this “unrest” can be
quelled and we can move quietly onto the next killing.

You nsist on mistranslating us.

Black liberal, your time is up. You have held the mic for too long. Give:
the mic to any random protester on the street. Any one of them will have
something more insightful and analytically sound to say than you do.
‘When you dress up in clothes with our slogans and go on TV all you do is
cry. What are you crying about? | cannot remermber the last time | have
smiled so much.

You have been smiling too long with our oppressors. There is no reason to
cry when the resistance comes out. We would have thought you would be
ecstatic, all you who have professed to be interested in change.

You who would speak lovingly of the English peasants of 1381 who, torch
in hand, emerged from the ruins of the Black Death to burn the property
of the ruling classes in the hope of emancipating themselves. But now,
‘when Black people who are forced to witness themselves publicly hunted
and tortured to death on a weekly basis rise up, you attempt to coax them
away from their cigarette lighters.

When the Target starts burning down, the Black liberal will fight harder
to put it out than its owners. But as Malcolm X said: "You had another
Negro out in the field. The house Negro was in the minority. The masses
- the field Negroes were the masses. They were in the majority. When
the master got sick, they prayed that he'd die. If his house caught on fire,
theyd pray for awind to come along and fan the breeze”

‘They gave you the platform, but there are more of us than there are of

you. The greatest trick you ever pulled off was to make it seem that it

‘was you who represented the majority of Black people and it were those
radically against colonial policing who were few and far between. Now.
You see us in our thousands. Stop crying.

X: “That Uncle Tom wore a handkerchief around his head. This Uncle Tom
wears a top hat. He's sharp. He dresses just like you do. He speaks the
same phraseology, the same language. He tries to speak it better than you
do. He speaks with the same accents, same diction. And when you say,
"your army_ he says, ‘our army! He hasn't got anybody to defend him, but
anytime you say we' he says ‘'we! ‘Our president, ‘our government; ‘our
Senate; ‘our congressmen; ‘our this and our that” And he hasn't even got
aseatin that 'our’ even at the end of the line. So this is the twentieth-
century Negro”

Black liberal, as we brace for the second wave of repression from your
government, remember that we still see you. When your police, your
National Guard, your dogs are sicced on s, when your P W Botha/Bull
Connor of a president who agitated for a Sharpeville 1960 against the
migrants, prepares to commit atrocities, despite our masked shouts,
stones and placards, we still see you. We know why you have come. But
you are too late.

For the first time in a long while we have also been seen and know that
we are not alone. Before we might have stepped out sheepishly, politely
asking to consider more radical solutions, thinking that we were moving,
Vulnerably, naked and alone, into an open field of attack dogs.

But now that we have stridden bravely forth, without shields, into the
centres of white supremacy, we have discovered that we are covered

by a multitude of good people. Look at the world. We are not alone. As
you jump the bandwagon and attempt to wrestle the reins away from us,
know that this is a Black radicals’ moment. See us.

Black radicals are here to stay. Come up off that mic and get out before
you get "looted. And take those Barack and Michelle posters with you.
They never belonged to us.

‘The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards Malcolm.
)