![]() “You are literally stealing your own person and transforming yourself from property into a fuller sense of personhood. “One of the earliest forms of American looting is runaway slaves,” Terry told the HPR. Terry, abolition under this conceptualization of property could be considered its own form of looting. According to Harvard professor of African and African American studies Brandon M. ![]() Black slaves were considered property because they were Black. As slavery replaced indentured servitude as the primary system of labor in America by the late 17th century, racial categories emerged as a way to differentiate between those who could be enslaved and those who could not. In the American context, property has always been racialized. In addition to embodying the anger and frustration of centuries of oppression, looting is a radical challenge to capitalism and its conceits. It has been continually reimagined, recast, and reinvented by Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities in their struggle for equality. While both liberal and conservative critics have denounced looting as ineffective and unnecessarily antagonistic, looting has long remained an act of resistance in movements for racial justice in America, from the abolition of slavery to the civil rights movement to our contemporary political moment. Even those sympathetic to anti-racist mobilization have criticized looting, some going so far as to brand it as “domestic terrorism.” However, this sentiment is not limited to right-wing leaders. In doing so, he laid bare his ideological commitments: Private property matters more than Black lives. Headley, Trump asserted that the theft and destruction of private property was punishable by violence. ![]() On May 29, in response to escalating protests in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, President Trump tweeted, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Invoking the rhetoric of White supremacists and segregationists from George Wallace to Walter E.
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