Dispossession
By Michelle Molitor, with Nicole Young
The History of Looting
The conversations about reparations in the United States is almost always a political non-starter, in part because the conversation about what has been stolen from Black people is inevitably incomplete.
This is the reason why the incredible Ta-nehisi Coates wrote his award-winning 2014 essay, “The Case for Reparations,” in which he discusses a very recent, very modern coordinated theft of Black money, property, and possibility. In writing it, Coates moved the discussion about reparations away from chattel slavery to redlining in our most recent century. And while the economic system that was founded on the brutal enslavement of millions, lasted hundreds of years, and secured the wealth of the white landholding class into perpetuity is a strong enough example on its own, Americans are removed enough from their true history that they believe slavery’s incalculable debt has already been paid. In focusing on redlining, Coates paused a conversation about what is owed to Black people because of enslavement and highlighted instead this country's ongoing tradition of looting the livelihoods of its Black citizens.
Looting is a word we’ve heard often in 2020. Our press reminds us of the threat of looting every time Black activists take to the street to demand their right to live. Looting is the threat white supremacists and the politicians supporting them trot out to scare white Americans into believing the phrase “Black Lives Matter” is dangerous, instead of a simple truth they should be working to support. But looting is not their word — at least not in the way they think it is — and understanding its roots helps us understand how to unbraid and reframe what’s next in the Movement for Black Lives.
Looting is derived from a Hindi word, lut, first introduced to the English language when the British colonized India in the late 1770s. The term was used to describe what the British Empire was doing to the native people of India; snatching, robbing, and taking property and lives. Thus the language that is repeatedly leveraged against Black protestors, citizens, and even survivors of cataclysmic natural disasters is deeply rooted in a colonial legacy of dispossession. We must understand that the English language would not have this word were it not for Western theft of the Indian subcontinent alongside the robbery of so many other lands, languages, and people. It is itself a linguistic proof — a record — of wrongful dispossession.
But the current language used around looting is designed to further disenfranchise marginalized groups and make the claim that Black and brown people have no legitimate claims within their own country. The threat is clear: “Real” Americans cannot let these people who have the nerve to demand rights in a country that doesn’t really belong to them steal white land or damage property on white streets. But this language is not new. Just as it is rooted in oppression on a subcontinent thousands of miles away, it is echoed in the delegitimization and dehumanization Black people have encountered since the inception of slavery. We cannot move forward without understanding the depth of Black dispossession in this country. In order to repair and restore all that was looted by racism and whiteness, we must interrogate what is truly owed to Black people in America.
Reframing Looting in America
At the heart of the modern concept of looting is the idea that nothing actually belongs to Black people. You can only delegitimize Black Americans' claims to rights, justice, and a compassionate government when you believe that nothing in this country is truly theirs. The sentiments that the Trump administration attempts to dog whistle to its base may seem novel — that of Black entitlement, laziness, and inhumanity — but they have been foundational tenets of our national mythology since slavery and are at the heart of Black dispossession.
Slavery was an evil institution — the kind of evil that is inconsistent with almost every moral and religious tenet across the world. The kind of evil that tears apart, that shreds the soul when faced directly. Author Richard Rohr describes evil as “a social agreement.” And in order to make slavery of Black people and the genocide of Indigenous peoples palatable, it was necessary to completely dehumanize the people whose land and lives were being looted. In order to loot, words like “savage” and “negro” and “slave” had to be erected as barriers between the evil perpetuated by those manmade systems and the white people who benefitted from them. In order to make the pillage of slavery successful, even more had to be taken: the languages and cultures of the enslaved Africans were purposefully stripped away when they were forced to abandon their native tongues and punished for not speaking English. Their given names were destroyed and replaced with those of their masters and their history was erased — not just upon their arrival in this country, but repeatedly throughout the lives of their descendants.
But the looting we most often ignore is the creation of race itself, a mythology that was perpetuated by white people across the world in order justify slavery, cruelty, and colonization.
The pseudosciences and mythologies that promoted the concept of genetically determined race and the inferiority of Black people still linger today, codified into our laws, our health care, and every aspect of our lives. We see this clearly in the disproportionate rates of COVID-19 deaths in Black communities and the stories of Black people with COVID being turned away because their symptoms were not believed. The Association of American Medical Colleges and numerous university studies have shone a light on the erroneous belief in the medical community that Black people are somehow less susceptible to pain — an idea dating right back to the days of the Enlightenment and the creation of a Black “race.” But it is safe to say that if even healthcare professionals — who have sworn an oath to heal and serve — believe that Black people are impervious to pain, that idea has rooted itself deeply into every facet of our society.
Immediately after slavery, as newly emancipated Black people began to acquire resources and property, they were met with violence by white mobs who believed them subhuman and completely undeserving. As time progressed, new laws and statutes codified that white anger into either unpunishable or completely lawful racial theft. At the heart of that dispossession, was the belief — reinforced by the myth of race — that Black people did not have a right to good, prosperous lives. How else could you understand the more than 4,000 lynchings in 12 southern states that happened between 1877 and 1950? How else can you fathom the brutality of the Red Summer or the Tulsa Massacre? How then could you explain the land theft of millions of acres from Black farmers through robbery and predatory policy? How else could you justify the assassination of civil rights leaders throughout the 1950s and 1960s or the MOVE bombings in Philadelphia? Such calculated, precise hatred could only be levied against those believed to be less than people, not worthy of protection, not worthy of safety, and certainly not deserving of rights.
Over the past many years — as the violence of Black death has once again been cast into the mainstream by social media — we’ve collectively witnessed a movement to declare the worth of Black life. Across the world, we’ve witnessed uprisings over a range of human injustices; in the United States, we have struggled to reconcile the legacy of race and racism in our own country. This summer’s uprisings are in in line with that reckoning. At the heart of this awakening is a deeper understanding about how the language we use and the history we teach either upholds or helps to undo the injustices in our society. A fight over what the words riots and looting actually mean isn’t just linguistic; rather, it is a conversation about the right-sizing of the history — both well-known and harder to uncover — that influences our current moment. Once we allow ourselves to examine the factors that distance us from the oppression and pain of the people around us — once we shed the barriers those words erect — we are freer. Language drives our behaviors, and it is an indication of what we value — both individually and collectively.
When we maintain the kind of brutal status quo to which we are accustomed, we are missing out on the relationships that are necessary for love to be present. And because language has been used to drive the disinvestment of millions, both in our country and across the world, if we can’t take it upon ourselves to challenge our own language and the history that drives it, we will not achieve the kind of change we are striving for. If language and history have been used as a tool of disenfranchisement and dispossession, it stands to reason that, if used properly, they could also be tools that grant us access to the full humanity in each person.
When we first acknowledge the losses suffered by Black people in our country and globally, when we reframe what precisely has been looted, then we can clearly support demands for the return and reparation of what’s been stolen.