Skip to content

In Defense of Looting

Metadata

Highlights

Torture is celebrated a thousand times a day on television in police procedurals and action flicks, and most people accept imprisonment—years of unrelenting psychic torture—as a necessary fact of social life. — location: 63 ^ref-43370

local politicians, middle-class “leaders,” political groups, and reactionary organizations—block looting in order to gain power for themselves. These peacekeepers and de-escalators cooperate with the police to derail and destroy uprisings to show the white power structure that they are responsible parties, that, because they can control and contain the unruly masses, they are the “natural leaders,” the people who should be negotiated with. — location: 79 ^ref-42736

Looting rejects the legitimacy of ownership rights and property, the moral injunction to work for a living, and the “justice” of law and order. — location: 86 ^ref-37172

the talismanic gathering-word Loot (plunder) a sufficient bond of union in any part of India.” — location: 94 ^ref-11524

The racialized idea of an “Indian” identity did not yet exist outside the minds of the colonizers, but a natural racial tendency, one overcoming tribal, religious, and cultural differences, could be “revealed” by the offer of plunder. — location: 94 ^ref-47738

Looting is a word taken from a colonized people and used to denigrate and racialize riotous subalterns resisting English empire. It would from the very beginning refer to a nonwhite and lawless relationship to property. — location: 99 ^ref-19764

it is precisely the fact that looting exists at the nexus of race and class that gives it its tactical power. — location: 106 ^ref-43770

Looting represents 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. Looting is an act of communal cohesion. — location: 110 ^ref-4992

Looting involves not only taking wealth directly but also immediately sharing that wealth, which points to the collapse of the system by which the looted things produce value. — location: 116 ^ref-24263

nonwhite, noncommodified communal approach to property was seen as a dangerous threat to capitalism and “civilization.” — location: 125 ^ref-40573

racist assumptions at the base of this argument—happy dumb slaves duped into believing they are human beings by scheming Northerners—still forms the logic behind the “outside agitator,” a phrase that emerged in force during the civil rights movement. — location: 137 ^ref-40005

The concept is structured around the implicit racial logic of borders and citizenship through which an individual’s status inside/outside is the main consideration that determines political legitimacy. Outside of what? — location: 145 ^ref-17483

Though the buildings destroyed may be located in a predominantly Black or proletarian neighborhood, the losses go to the white, bourgeois building and business owners, rarely the people who live near them. — location: 150 ^ref-63319

the emancipation of impoverished communities is not measured in corner-store revenue. It’s not measured in minimum-wage jobs.” — location: 164 ^ref-26578

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. — location: 169 ^ref-63982

It reproduces racist and white supremacist ideologies, deeming some unworthy of our solidarity and protection, marking them, subtly, as legitimate targets of police violence.8 — location: 182 ^ref-64215

those who participate in rioting and looting tend to be the most politically informed and socially engaged in the neighborhood, while the most apathetic, disconnected, and alienated people riot at the lowest rates. — location: 186 ^ref-43134

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. Although it can sometimes be leveraged strategically, the mass media is the enemy of liberation, and when we shape our actions to conform to its opinions or perspectives, we will always lose. If we riot, they will slander us. If we behave politely, peacefully, legally, they will simply return to ignoring us. — location: 216 ^ref-52417

How is it that we can go to the streets to protest that violence still believing that our behavior dictates police response rather than recognizing that the police will brutalize whoever they want, whenever they want to, unless we can stop them? — location: 223 ^ref-4441

“the poor are not supposed to understand the fundamentals of exchange-value? That they should have been loading shopping carts with flour and beans, rather than with computers which could, in theory, be sold for a much larger quantity of flour and beans?” — location: 231 ^ref-42598

IF RIOTS ARE SEEN AS INCHOATE, SENSELESS OUTPOURINGS OF ANGER and resentment, it is also a commonplace that famous historical riots “give birth” to movements. — location: 262 ^ref-46140

in humans, birth is violent and dangerous, life-threatening to both gestator and fetus. — location: 268 ^ref-62259

looting makes day-to-day life easier by changing the price of goods to zero, relieves pressure by spreading wealth within the community, and reinforces bonds of solidarity and kinship through mutual struggle and action. — location: 275 ^ref-41688

one of the main aftereffects of riots is a sense of unity, togetherness, and joy not normally experienced in the urban neighborhood, a unity that leads to the blossoming of dozens of political, social, and economic projects. — location: 282 ^ref-19301

crucial moments in the course of revolution and as fundamentally transformative experiences for everyone involved. — location: 293 ^ref-20730

we don’t often question that a store or factory owner should be allowed to steal the profits we create when we work or that we should have to spend money to have things people like us created. — location: 302 ^ref-40000

We accept that the police and the state, through laws, courts, and violent armed action, guarantee that the owners of stores, companies, and apartment buildings can take our money and time on their terms, and that the boss can fire us and the police can evict us, arrest us, or even kill us if we try to live otherwise. — location: 305 ^ref-62270

the great wealth of the European empires was built on slave-produced commodities: the silver mined from Peru and Mexico, the sugar and tobacco raised in the Caribbean, the cotton grown in the American South. African people were enslaved to produce commodities on lands stolen through the genocide of the Indigenous people of the Americas. — location: 309 ^ref-4867

as the concepts of the commodity and private property were established, the primal, ideal commodity was the enslaved African—she existed exclusively for the further production of commodities and profits—and the purest property was stolen Indigenous land—it could be exploited, profited from, and expanded without concern for its historical and social role. — location: 312 ^ref-57885

during riots, police shoot looters on sight. The police exist to prevent Black people and poor people from threatening rich white people’s property rights: abolishing property is a direct attack on their power. — location: 326 ^ref-29532

the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all we do.” — location: 335 ^ref-43170

history must rely on stories passed down through generations, accounts and interviews with participants, and the work of radical archivists, historians, and academics. — location: 358 ^ref-3344

Although US history is predominantly the story of the continuation of this violence, it is also full of moments, movements, and images of a life lived otherwise, of resistance, liberation, and transformation. — location: 378 ^ref-21319

mineral wealth was the material basis and political focus of European mercantilism, the system that would give rise to the bourgeoisie and lay the groundwork for industrial capitalism. — location: 388 ^ref-25923

Indigenous peoples were swapped between New England and the Carolinas or sold from the continental colonies to the West Indies, and vice versa. — location: 395 ^ref-57409

A settler colony relies on the promise of “open land” or “virgin territory” as the material and ideological basis of its existence. The problem is that this “open land” is always already occupied. — location: 401 ^ref-16957

to capture the land, the settler colony must eliminate the Indigenous population through genocide, first by outright murder, later, by cultural destruction and assimilation. Yet, at the same time, laborers are required to transform that “virgin territory” into value for the colonizers, — location: 403 ^ref-9378

many Africans in the early United States were not enslaved for life, but only under indenture contracts, and eventually went on to receive freedom dues, own land, even own white servants. — location: 433 ^ref-28980

“African slaves during the years between 1619 and 1661 enjoyed rights that, in the nineteenth century, not even free black people could claim.” — location: 434 ^ref-15177

Bacon’s Rebellion, the largest rebellion in the pre-Revolutionary colonies, taking place in 1676–1677, saw armed and aggrieved free Englishmen, joined by slaves and servants, loot and burn the capital of Virginia and briefly take over the colony. — location: 448 ^ref-37724

“the law did not formally recognize the condition of perpetual slavery or systematically mark out servants of African descent for special treatment until 1661.” — location: 454 ^ref-1033

Wall Street—were largely built through providing capital for the slave trade. — location: 466 ^ref-19952

there is no American economy, North or South, without slavery. — location: 468 ^ref-30241

a surplus of 50 percent or more on investments made by British capital—were the cash basis of the growth of industrial production occurring in England and the European continent through the period, and, thus, a key factor in the growth of European capitalism. — location: 470 ^ref-21294

goods produced in the colonies helped form an incentive to drive peasants into cash markets and capitalist labor relations. — location: 474 ^ref-42282

capitalism is a system ideologically committed to free labor—though the freedom in “free labor” is the freedom to starve. The maximum development of profit for the bourgeoisie relies on a free labor market, on the reproduction of a proletariat with nothing to sell but their labor power. — location: 479 ^ref-31884

they were required to turn over most of their income every week—as many proletarians in America today turn over all their wages to debtors and landlords. — location: 486 ^ref-58590

it is precisely these urban communities of relatively independent Black people that would lead to the earliest development of police departments, as gangs of slave catchers evolved into formalized slave patrols designed to keep these “slave quarters” under surveillance and control. — location: 489 ^ref-52429

the main way capitalists increase profits is to drive down the cost of production, of which the largest part is usually the price of labor. — location: 492 ^ref-39251

maintaining a large body of unemployed proletarians, thus making workers replaceable and allowing employers to fire insubordinate, disabled, sick, or pregnant workers, while using the threat of unemployment to coerce the rest into working more hours for less pay. — location: 493 ^ref-19099

With no threat of losing their wage nor any real promise of advancement, and with no unemployed people liable to take a slave’s position—slavery is a system of 100 percent employment, after all—the enslaved tend to work the bare minimum required to avoid punishment and are less reliably coerced by speedups and expanded managerial demands. — location: 495 ^ref-1431

The earliest examples of employee surveillance, individual performance assessment, traceable units of production, detailed record keeping, and employee incentivization—all key concepts in modern management theory—occurred on slave plantations. — location: 499 ^ref-3896

a definition of capitalism that considers the wage the most important defining feature of capitalism, a definition that underestimates the importance, for example, of the totally necessary unwaged reproductive labor that predominantly falls to women under capitalism: housework, emotional care, and the literal reproduction of the working class. In these models, unwaged labor becomes not a central component of capitalism but a supporting side effect, an arbitrary management tactic. — location: 503 ^ref-23381

When Brazil abolished slavery in 1888—the last country in the Americas to do so—King Leopold II of Belgium’s genocidal domination of the Congo was but three years old. From 1885 to 1908, almost all the people of the Congo Basin, along with thousands kidnapped from other parts of Africa, were forced into slavery. — location: 510 ^ref-14459

slavery and settler colonialism were necessary components of the formation and maintenance of capitalism. And slavery and settler colonialism couldn’t be carried out, day by day, instinctively and across centuries, by millions of Euro-Americans, both rich and poor, without the formal, legal, psychological, and ideological frameworks of racism, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness. — location: 524 ^ref-37612

racialized hierarchies were crucial to medieval European notions of nobility and the formation of serf and slave populations—for example, in Russia, serfs were imagined to have black bones, as opposed to the white ones of nobles. — location: 536 ^ref-36521

Bacon’s Rebellion. In the infamous 1676 Virginia uprising, enslaved and servant, Black and white fought side by side, and some historians therefore celebrate this rebellion as a proto-democratic and revolutionary uprising. — location: 543 ^ref-44229

the first three acts of Bacon’s Assembly all focused on pursuing total war against Indigenous Americans and confiscating Indigenous lands theoretically protected by British treaty. — location: 561 ^ref-33565

This contradiction, between legal and social structures of racial oppression and democratic liberty, is the central epistemological framework of the modern European worldview. — location: 565 ^ref-43904

the key transition from feudal thought to enlightened reason centers around the replacement of God versus Man as the structuring dichotomy of society with that of reason versus lack of reason. — location: 567 ^ref-19796

attribute of human nature is therefore completely premised on the creation of hierarchies of reasonable and unreasonable people. — location: 576 ^ref-44413

domination, colonialism, and the expansion of capitalism become justice, the end of poverty, and the spread of culture, science, and truth. — location: 582 ^ref-23761

John Locke quotation that did not mention happiness: it was “life, liberty, and the pursuit of estate.” — location: 590 ^ref-52013

to be able to own property is to be human, so those who cannot own property—be they enslaved, Indigenous, or even the children and wives of settlers—need not be recognized as fully human by the state. — location: 592 ^ref-24211

Africans came to stand for lack of reason itself. Because people lacking reason were not human, they were only capable of being property, not owning it. — location: 597 ^ref-17052

American power and property developed along two racial axes: the genocidal dispossession of the indigene and the kidnap and enslavement of the African. — location: 600 ^ref-15173

private property accrued from the admixture of labor and land. As this formula was color-coded on the colonial ground, Blacks provided the former and Indians the latter.” — location: 603 ^ref-54130

Just as Blackness marks a person as (potential) property, whiteness also cannot be understood outside of property relations: the characteristic of “whiteness” is the thing white people have that makes them legal subjects, owners, and human beings. — location: 611 ^ref-16990

Property, in other words, also includes rights, protections, and customs of possession passed down and ratified through law. — location: 614 ^ref-39566

Property law emerges to codify, formalize, and affirm white enslavement of Africans and conquest of the Americas, to protect, project, and strengthen whiteness. — location: 619 ^ref-5521

“Only particular forms of possession—those that were characteristic of white settlement—would be recognized and legitimated. — location: 621 ^ref-9402

whiteness became the meta-property from which all other private property flows and is derived. — location: 625 ^ref-11137

capitalist development completely reliant on racialized forms of power, but bourgeois legality itself, enshrining at its center the right to own property, fundamentally relies on racial structures of human nature to justify this right. — location: 626 ^ref-26658

As Blackness became a way to signify and describe those who can be and had become property, the radical consummation of that refusal would mean at minimum the abolition of the entire system under which things can be commodified. Revolution. — location: 634 ^ref-15480

though this revolution would only destroy legal slavery and not everything it meant, defended, and reproduced, it is evidence of the revolutionary potential of abolishing property, of joining together and expropriating the owners. The revolutionary potential of looting. — location: 638 ^ref-45123

it was despite the intentions and desires of Lincoln and the North, not because of them, that the enslaved achieved emancipation, dragging Lincoln and the Union Army kicking and screaming behind them. The enslaved freed themselves. — location: 668 ^ref-5410

five hundred thousand enslaved persons escaping in the span of four years is treated like some individualistic, apolitical phenomenon called “opportunism”—a crime rioters and looters are always accused of. — location: 679 ^ref-37721

enslaved populations across the centuries have always recognized political crises among their enslavers as the best moments to organize and get free. — location: 680 ^ref-29563

after defeating the colonial government, the Spanish, the British, and Napoleon Bonaparte, the independent Black nation of Haiti had been established. — location: 687 ^ref-41061

the tiny country of Haiti, the result of the first victorious anticolonial and antislavery struggle in the Americas, has been punished by economic sanction, debt, invasion, war, boycott, and neocolonialism ever since. — location: 689 ^ref-55444

as many as a hundred thousand people, near 20 percent of the colonial slave population, escaped slavery during the course of the American Revolution—including some slaves of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, fugitives who no doubt had a more expansive idea of freedom than their enslaving Founding Fathers—making it the largest slave revolt in United States history until the Civil War. — location: 695 ^ref-17251

The fugitive escaping slavery is as old as the colonies. Her history is necessary to understanding the course of and possibilities for revolution in the United States. — location: 702 ^ref-55985

The white industrialist North, labor and management alike, had gone into the war not to abolish but to contain slavery (and thus Black people) in the agrarian South, and it would continue afterward to attempt to restrict Black movement and resist Black migration north and westward. — location: 708 ^ref-4167

Frederick Douglass, in 1888, only eleven years after the end of Reconstruction, would denounce emancipation as a “stupendous fraud.” — location: 712 ^ref-4030

the legal and ideological transformation of Black people from slaves into criminals, the formal transition of slave patrols into police, and the increasing organization of Black people in America as a political, social, and revolutionary force. — location: 719 ^ref-17107

This specter of slaves freeing themselves is American history’s first image of Black looters. — location: 724 ^ref-29124

Individual instances of rioting and looting can similarly have a medium-term positive effect for the regime of racial capitalism if they are not soon repeated or taken further, instead functioning as “safety valves,” diffusing anger and releasing tension. — location: 747 ^ref-22903

Fugitive slaves increased the number of abolitionists by thousands and spelled the doom of slavery.” — location: 752 ^ref-42609

From 1861 to 1865, five hundred thousand slaves escaped the plantations, throwing down tools and often crossing Union lines to emancipation. — location: 754 ^ref-9199

As many as two hundred thousand of them served in the Union Army. — location: 755 ^ref-1746

by 1860, before the general strike began, the number of escapes had reached perhaps fifty thousand annually — location: 758 ^ref-40100

Fugitive Slave Act into the Compromise of 1850: this law was a central component of the political crisis that led to the outbreak of the Civil War. — location: 764 ^ref-43285

it convinced many Northern white politicians, intellectuals, and capitalists of the fearful rise of the great “Slave Power,” an anxiety not about slavery itself but about a lack of Northern political sovereignty within the federal government. — location: 769 ^ref-37681

oversleeping, and other ways of rejecting the enslaver’s labor regime and lowering his profits were practiced wherever Africans were enslaved. — location: 782 ^ref-20800

The very first known enslaved Africans in what would become the United States, kidnapped and brought to a small Spanish colony in the area of the Carolinas around 1526, revolted, escaped their bondage, and lived out their lives among Indigenous tribes. — location: 784 ^ref-19745

A government terrified by Indigenous and Black solidarity waged the Seminole Wars, and these conflicts represent an important moment in the long tradition of armed self-defense in both insurgent communities. — location: 807 ^ref-5868

Black and Indigenous captives of the Dutch built the first European settlements on the island of Manhattan; — location: 818 ^ref-3103

The North did not abolish slavery out of some liberality of spirit. Instead, it saw slavery mostly materially destroyed by fugitives in the years of the American Revolution. Early in the war, the British promised emancipation to any slaves who joined their cause. Eventually, seeing the incredible effectiveness of this promise, so did colonial forces. — location: 825 ^ref-57873

the enslaved favored the British, joining with them over the colonials at a rate of more than ten to one. — location: 829 ^ref-9258

Perhaps one hundred thousand, or 20 percent of the entire colonial enslaved population, escaped during the conflict. — location: 834 ^ref-39397

There were still hundreds of legal slaves in Pennsylvania and New Jersey in the 1840s. — location: 840 ^ref-21019

as African slavery began to disappear from Northern states, white people installed laws and practices discouraging free Black people from settling there that, to the modern eye, look an awful lot like Jim Crow. — location: 841 ^ref-16308

But in the years leading up to the Civil War, it was a movement equally focused on militant direct action, whether through opposition to the fugitive slave laws or by the Underground Railroad. — location: 856 ^ref-15681

The Underground Railroad was extensive in the North, but it also led into Mexico, a western branch aided and organized in large part by Indigenous tribes and displaced Seminole maroons. — location: 860 ^ref-18311

The Underground Railroad is believed to have helped as many as one hundred thousand fugitives to freedom in the North, with thousands more escaping to Mexico. — location: 865 ^ref-20428

“a slaveholder need merely swear that a particular black person was his slave, and appointed commissioners and federal marshals would seize the purported fugitive” — location: 886 ^ref-17613

one of her major strategic insights was to continue moving south some distance with the newly fugitive before heading north, because enslavers never suspected groups would head deeper into slave territory. — location: 911 ^ref-28813

Had she been present when Brown carried out their plan on October 16, 1859, some have argued, she would have prevented Brown from making the tactical blunders—most notably, allowing a mail train to leave Harpers Ferry and thus bring news of the raid to the federal government—that led to his becoming a martyr and symbol rather than a victorious freedom fighter. — location: 914 ^ref-25447

Such an act, within the context of war, was celebrated by white supporters of the Union Army. But had it been carried out under “peaceful” circumstances, would it have been celebrated or seen as an act of violent looting, rioting, arson, and rebellion? The reaction to John Brown’s failed raid, only four years earlier, gives us our answer: the US Senate set up a committee to prosecute anyone who had aided Brown, Abraham Lincoln called him “insane,” and many liberal white abolitionists reacted with shock and outrage against his violent methods. — location: 930 ^ref-34268

The mainstream political battles over slavery in the 1850s were rather between the plantation class, who wanted slavery to expand into the territories of the West, and those who wanted the western territories to join the Union as “Free Soil.” — location: 947 ^ref-62416

the expansion of slave plantations across the territory would leave no space for them to homestead.IX — location: 961 ^ref-33851

Neither side saw any problem with the fact that these territories were to be added to the United States by the violent conquest of their Indigenous residents, many of them already multiply displaced by America’s genocidal expansion. — location: 964 ^ref-58202

political conflict around slavery that precipitated the Civil War was, in other words, between two different white supremacist, pro-slavery, settler-colonialist visions of America’s future. — location: 966 ^ref-29001

the Supreme Court in 1857 issued the Dred Scott decision, which ruled that Black people had never been allowed to be nor ever could be American citizens, that Congress was constitutionally unable to ban slavery in the territories, and that the federal government had no legal ground to free slaves whatsoever. — location: 973 ^ref-36521

combined with the constantly growing movement of fugitives—reaching fifty thousand maroons per annum by 1860—and the always increasing “disorder” among urban communities of enslaved Black workers, insurgency seemed a much more immediate threat to slavery’s existence than Abraham Lincoln. — location: 978 ^ref-34738

Arrogant in the face of their legislative successes, the planters overestimated their power and their popular support. And so the enslavers made their great historical gambit, counterrevolution by secession, and sealed their fate as a doomed class. — location: 985 ^ref-28077

the Union did not intend to free the slaves and that emancipation was against the Union’s economic, political, and social interests. — location: 998 ^ref-30333

Nor did Free Soil, the political argument unifying the Republican Party, make any sense in justifying a war with the South, where there was, after all, no new “Free Soil” to settle. — location: 1004 ^ref-20264

The same day that Lincoln finished drafting the Emancipation Proclamation, December 31, 1862, he also signed a contract funding the relocation of five thousand Black men, women, and children to Haiti as an experimental test case for total colonization. — location: 1012 ^ref-20873

Just as through their self-emancipation the enslaved gave the Civil War its meaning, so it was their belief that Lincoln would be the Great Emancipator that would make him appear so to history. Lincoln’s transformation was, ironically, aided by the most rabid Southern ideologues. — location: 1016 ^ref-25497

The political campaign Southern nationalists waged to confer legitimacy on peaceful secession, held in the big houses of the plantations and the central squares of Southern cities, was based on the (false) claim that Lincoln’s election would mean abolition, and the campaign couldn’t be waged without revealing this logic to the enslaved. So when secession instead came with war and chaos, not an orderly and peaceful legal split, the enslaved did not see some grim tale of “brother fighting brother” but rather Jubilee, the Bible-ordained day of emancipation, and they fled the plantation in their hundreds of thousands. — location: 1021 ^ref-4959

the Union Army at first would only accept emancipation on terms that continued to regard fugitives as property—contraband or not—reveals just how little this war began as one of emancipation. — location: 1037 ^ref-50503

poor, largely immigrant populations that represented the majority of Union conscripts resented serving in a bloody and seemingly intractable war fought on behalf of industrialists. But this class resentment merged with a resurgent Northern anti-Blackness, and Black people, rather than the slavocracy, were blamed for the conflict. — location: 1050 ^ref-64882

tiny cohort of planters had voting power equivalent to perhaps two million citizens in the North. — location: 1063 ^ref-48578

as imprisoned people are stripped of their right to vote, even though the census counts them as residents of the (overwhelmingly rural, white) counties where they are caged rather than the (mostly Black, urban) communities from which they are captured. — location: 1064 ^ref-3622

after an early burst of excitement in 1861, the yeomen of the South began to see the Confederate struggle for what it was: “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” — location: 1082 ^ref-38946

a war fought to preserve slavery produced the conditions under which the enslaved could escape and destroy it. In attempting to stop this social upheaval and preserve the slave system, Confederate policy exacerbated class tensions, guaranteeing the Confederacy couldn’t win the military struggle, either.XIII — location: 1090 ^ref-2237

The Emancipation Proclamation did nothing to free the enslaved. It only declared slavery ended in the Confederacy, where the federal government had no actual power to enforce it, in effect only freeing those who had already freed themselves. — location: 1100 ^ref-37398

Slavery was maintained in the border states of the Union, the states where Lincoln actually had the power to enforce emancipation. — location: 1101 ^ref-11124

To get free, the enslaved had to steal themselves and, in so doing, abolish themselves as property. — location: 1117 ^ref-34575

They had to loot themselves, entering a lawless relation to property and the state. The relationship between liberation and the stealing and destruction of property was never so obvious nor so clear cut as it was during the period. — location: 1118 ^ref-3852

In the 1660s, they would have been able to make a claim for freedom dues for their servitude, but in 1865, as in 2020, they and their descendants were scorned for demanding reparations. Yet still they tried to build a better world on the salted grounds of slavery. — location: 1132 ^ref-39759

The railroad men and the mine owners, the bankers, speculators, and merchants, the senators, governors, and judges watched the planters drown and vowed not to let it happen to themselves. They ensured that their property could not be so easily looted; neither would they ever allow its destruction to gain the moral righteousness and historical clarity of the struggle for emancipation. — location: 1135 ^ref-27313

The ad hoc combination of these forces—police, white terrorists, Southern Democrats, and Northern liberals—ultimately defeated the enslaved people, who had struck off their bonds, created a social revolution in the South, and won a war against their former masters. — location: 1196 ^ref-27360

As the United States followed its Manifest Destiny to the West Coast, it furthered its genocidal displacement, internment, and war on Indigenous Americans. — location: 1200 ^ref-32252

the police, alongside white collective punishments, played an increasingly central role in society and became a crucial factor in all of the transformations occurring throughout the country. Urbanization, industrialization, western expansion, Black internal migration, labor struggles, American imperialism, political machines, and “gilded age” financial and corporate concentration of wealth all relied on or responded to police and vigilante violence in their daily enactments. — location: 1206 ^ref-35449

Race riots and lynchings were a way of “stabilizing” white supremacist settler-colonial capitalist hegemony—by terrorizing and disorganizing the American proletariat, by transferring wealth and power to white capitalists—while the police served as a new tool for legitimizing and regulating this violence. — location: 1210 ^ref-35977

in the United States, the forces doing that everyday work of repression, deferral, and destruction have tended to wear a blue cap or a white hood. — location: 1215 ^ref-33836

modern police departments are a relatively recent phenomenon, with even the oldest forces being just over two hundred years old. — location: 1222 ^ref-6410

drank, caroused, gambled, and behaved in all sorts of “immoral” ways—the same leisure and economic activities practiced by the English aristocracy, of course, but suddenly immoral when practiced in public by former peasants. — location: 1253 ^ref-63441

people merely hadn’t internalized or didn’t respect the new economic and social relations developing in the period and had to be forced to recognize the “rational,” “natural” ways of the new system of property, commodity, labor, and contract. — location: 1256 ^ref-49750

transforming people into criminals is one of the core methods of social control under capitalism. — location: 1260 ^ref-5268

The government found itself facing new, massive crowds with only one tool for suppression: the army. — location: 1264 ^ref-8840

How could it regulate repressive violence so that it maintained order without producing conditions of outright civil war? — location: 1268 ^ref-65072

English policing methods were developed to maintain imperial domination in the colonies, then were applied to the newly developed striking, riotous poor and working classes back in the metropole. — location: 1275 ^ref-4936

The English police represent the internalization of the empire’s colonial relations. The methods that best work to stamp out colonial resistance also work to repress class conflict, allowing us to see that class relations and colonialism are not always easily distinguishable: class power is in many ways fundamentally colonial. — location: 1277 ^ref-39258

poor and immigrant communities began to be regarded as officially alien groups with fundamentally different ethics and values. The drunkenness and “vagrancy” of these “dangerous classes” were not recognized as a product of their material conditions; instead, such behaviors were regarded as somehow biologically inherent to their being (the Irish reputation for being drunks has never gone away, but you might be harder pressed to find people who think all Catholics are a degenerate force of laziness and moral decay these days). — location: 1285 ^ref-46965

The NYPD as it exists today thus emerged to enforce the racial and class hierarchies essential to urban capitalist development. — location: 1304 ^ref-7070

The police are an apparatus designed to reinforce the white supremacist, bourgeois order. And that order finds many of its origins in the practices and techniques developed in the early days of settler colonialism. — location: 1306 ^ref-32423

Police nowadays rely on the legal tool of civil asset forfeiture—and the pretense that they’re investigating drug crimes—to take whatever cash and valuables they find in a car or a home they search. — location: 1328 ^ref-26969

While plantation owners benefited from the repression of revolt and rebellion, stealing possessions served as a main incentive for overseers and volunteers, who made up the bulk of the patrol, a significant supplement to their wages. — location: 1332 ^ref-38474

So Southern cities developed “city guards,” militarized forces of young white men whose large numbers and modern weaponry allowed them to patrol and control those quarters. — location: 1350 ^ref-54344

the urban guards of the South were adapted directly from rural slave patrols and put into place directly to replace the watch. — location: 1352 ^ref-65222

Charleston, South Carolina, City Guard and Watch, incorporated in 1783. — location: 1354 ^ref-62308

the Guard and Watch developed the essential police tactics of selective enforcement and random terror, which, alongside keeping Black people from certain places (e.g., bars and public parks), became the everyday job of the guard. — location: 1364 ^ref-62039

In all instances, the police developed as a formal governmental organization when the enslaver, colonizer, and/or capitalist could no longer sufficiently protect their property or control on their own the crowds of laborers they required. — location: 1371 ^ref-24204

the police did not evolve exclusively or simply in response to the chattel slavery relation. However, police evolved and modernized earlier in cities with slavery and appeared sooner in settler colonies than in their metropoles. — location: 1374 ^ref-62168

America currently has more police per capita than any nation in Europe, and the highest rates of imprisonment in the world, yet it continues to have higher rates of crime. So, what do the police do? The police exist to enforce the rule of the powerful few over the weak and many. — location: 1382 ^ref-42081

“What do you do with an institution whose core function is the control and elimination of black people specifically, and people of color and the poor more broadly? You abolish it.” — location: 1384 ^ref-40881

THIS TRANSITION FROM SLAVE PATROL TO OFFICIAL POLICE FORCE IS mirrored by the similar transition of the object of police violence from slave to criminal. — location: 1387 ^ref-12610

the former rulers of the slavocracy understood that, although the legal category of slave had been abolished, they could use the category of criminal, and the enforcement mechanisms of the state, to return Black people to a state of bondage. — location: 1398 ^ref-57727

“The law’s selective recognition of slave humanity nullified the captive’s ability to give consent or act as agent and, at the same time, acknowledged the intentionality and agency of the slave but only as it assumed the form of criminality. The recognition and/or stipulation of agency as criminality served to identify personhood with punishment.” — location: 1403 ^ref-60107

the courts did not recognize slaves as legal subjects—humans—unless they were accused of a crime. — location: 1406 ^ref-31397

Criminal law was thus a crucial part of producing and maintaining slavery, and it has always been a key way of producing race in America. — location: 1407 ^ref-60134

The police of Charleston and other Southern cities thus served a relatively continuous function across the event called emancipation. — location: 1408 ^ref-26026

the Slave Codes’ smooth transition into vagrancy laws and Black Codes is a perfect example of the notion that crime is not some transcendental fact of life against which the police nobly battle but is rather the thing identified by the state and the police as a post facto explanation for the repression they already carry out on behalf of society’s rulers. — location: 1411 ^ref-6725

in many important respects, convict leasing was far worse than slavery.… Slave owners may have been concerned for the survival of individual slaves, who, after all, represented significant investments. Convicts, on the other hand, were leased not as individuals, but as a group, and they could be worked literally to death without affecting the profitability of a convict crew.” — location: 1421 ^ref-49433

the police and their prisons, then, as the most direct continued embodiments of the legacies of colonialism and slavery in our society. — location: 1425 ^ref-41979

“The entire history of police, the entire history of prisons is a history of reform.” Reforms merely make these institutions more palatable, more acceptable in their task of caging, torturing, murdering, and disappearing people. Anything less than the total abolition of the police and prisons means keeping the colonialist and enslaving violence, ideology, and control intact: that violence is what they are. — location: 1429 ^ref-37925

In most of the South, civil war continued at a lower level of violence for another decade, often taking on the form of open combat, and even expanding into statewide civil war in Mississippi and Arkansas. — location: 1449 ^ref-63392

the power of liberal elements of the bourgeoisie to pacify liberation movements and repress revolutionary social change in favor of their own interests. — location: 1468 ^ref-51089

The Reconstruction legislatures enacted a series of laws that brought the South the most extensive, and in some cases the only, social reform it has ever known. Child labor laws, free public education, women’s property rights, credit structures to enable the poor to obtain land—these and other measures flowed out of the law-making bodies that the men of property, north and south, denounced as “parliaments of gorillas.” And behind these legislatures stood the Black masses. — location: 1477 ^ref-14311

The sharecropping, convict leasing, and segregation that so resembled re-enslavement were carried out on behalf of Northerners as much as for Southern white supremacists. — location: 1489 ^ref-63990

Those who argue that reform is “more practical” or “more realistic” than revolution forget how easily reforms are rolled back to leave the white supremacist, heteropatriarchal capitalist state in place. The gains made in the midst of a civil war that led to 750,000 deaths, won by the largest uprising in American history—the general strike of the enslaved—and consolidated in a decade of local and autonomous governance were traded away by politicians and leaders for the four-year presidential term of Rutherford B. Hayes, and the freedom movement was set back for decades to come. — location: 1503 ^ref-64194

Jim Crow, which emerged in the South in the 1870s and 1880s to be struck down only in the 1960s, was a reign of terror and violence, protected by law but enforced by upstanding white citizens whose three-piece suits hung cozily in their closets beside white robes. — location: 1546 ^ref-26452

the continued genocidal dispossession of Indigenous peoples and all-out war on the Plains Indians were mythologized as the romantic settling of the frontier. — location: 1550 ^ref-31844

many communists, anarchists, and radical labor organizers were disappeared by the KKK or similar vigilantes. — location: 1554 ^ref-51606

if we want to understand looting and rioting as essential tactics in fighting racial capitalism, is it vital that we see the role that riots played in enforcing the white supremacist order? For one, it is important to understand that rioting is a common political tool and, as such, can be used for many different political aims: rioting is powerful. — location: 1557 ^ref-22997

differences between liberatory rioting and its opposite and see the ways in which property, violence, and race are organized differently in these separate riots. — location: 1559 ^ref-2637

In one of the contradictions of action produced by white supremacy, racist vigilantes and police forces would ride out to try to stop trains from leaving for the North, to try to keep the Black people they hated in their towns and counties. — location: 1593 ^ref-31396

lynchings were instead prepared for days, even weeks in advance, called for and explained by community leaders, hyped and built up in local newspapers. — location: 1609 ^ref-61097

Such a varied list belies the claim that lynching was in response to crime: the reproduction of white supremacy was its reason and its cause, plain and simple. — location: 1619 ^ref-24699

“White men used their ownership of the body of the white female as a terrain on which to lynch the Black male. White women felt that their caste was their protection and that their interests lay with the power that ultimately confined them.” — location: 1624 ^ref-1308

Lynching solidified a politics that used the Black male sexual threat to defend white violence—a thread that still runs through many carceral white feminist projects that appeal to the state and its police and prisons for protection. — location: 1626 ^ref-21986

lynchings could be a major form of social gathering and togetherness in rural white communities. — location: 1631 ^ref-9487

Does war play a similar role today? Iraq war, for example

lynchings the same way we are taught to think of criminal trials today: as an integral part of American democracy and society, as a crucial mode of criminal justice. — location: 1632 ^ref-32852

had Africa not been looted, there wouldn’t even be any Black people in America. — location: 1641 ^ref-28453

when people of color loot a store, they are taking back a miniscule portion 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— — location: 1642 ^ref-36436

what white settlers and enslavers did wasn’t mere looting. It was genocide, theft, and cruelty of the lowest order. — location: 1645 ^ref-30970

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. — location: 1648 ^ref-28375

White rioters aim to keep people of color from developing autonomous economic, political, or social power as much as possible, or to crush it where it has appeared. To do this, they produce submission, fear, and economic ruin in the people they attack. White supremacist race riots thus tend to feature significantly more personal violence than they do attacks on property, more property destruction than looting, and, when looting occurs, these white rioters tend to target people’s homes and persons much more than these items are targeted during antipolice/anticapitalist uprisings, which tend to focus on stores and workplaces.III — location: 1650 ^ref-12010

while general strikes by white labor unions were shutting down whole cities in the North without facing mass murder, merely organizing a union and demanding the most basic economic rights proved to be deadly for Black sharecroppers.V — location: 1664 ^ref-62542

Black people were the only ones arrested or prosecuted for the events in Elaine. — location: 1680 ^ref-27315

white people of Elaine rioted to prevent Black people from successfully organizing, to keep them indebted to white landlords and trapped in the system of neo-slavery known as sharecropping. — location: 1687 ^ref-48102

White people taking Black people’s things is what happens under the conditions of order, not the conditions of riot. The most common relation to property in white riots is the simple destruction of Black people’s personal property rather than any organized looting of private businesses or commercial goods. — location: 1690 ^ref-64977

when looting appears in an antipolice uprising, it is a radical and powerful tactic for getting to the roots of the system the movement fights against. — location: 1730 ^ref-62970

THE DOMINANT MEDIA IS A TOOL OF WHITE SUPREMACY AND STEADFAST ally of the police. It repeats the lines the police deliver nearly verbatim and uncritically, even when the police story changes upward of nine times, as it did in the murders of Mike Brown, Tyrone West, and Sandra Bland. — location: 1748 ^ref-52297

The media is more respectful of white serial killers and mass murderers than of unarmed Black victims of murder. — location: 1753 ^ref-31900

The infamous Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, discussed more below, was instigated by front-page headlines that read TO LYNCH NEGRO TONIGHT. — location: 1761 ^ref-57831

the Wilmington coup as a key moment in consolidating post-Reconstruction white supremacy, because it saw a white mob overturn a legitimate election result, drive Black officials out of office, disenfranchise all Black voters, and establish an officially white supremacist local government. The coup was reported nationally, and the fact that the federal government witnessed these events and did nothing to stop or overturn them demonstrated to the entire country that white violence and supremacy—not law or elections—formed the real basis of American governance. — location: 1772 ^ref-52225

Creating white victimization and grievance via willful misinterpretation of reality is one of the oldest tricks in the settler-colonial book. — location: 1783 ^ref-50820

the widespread sharing of images of white supremacist violence and Black death was an essential part of lynch law. — location: 1795 ^ref-25145

more often than not, the media’s deployment of lynching images served to normalize white supremacist violence, narrativizing it into a digestible and socially acceptable form. — location: 1799 ^ref-2421

The police didn’t intercept rioters or try to calm down white crowds in Atlanta in 1906, Philadelphia in 1918, Chicago in 1919, or Tulsa in 1921: they merely arrested or disarmed the Black people. — location: 1815 ^ref-42693

The media is a necessary part of the state apparatus in a liberal democracy, and though it might very occasionally “speak truth to power,” it usually just speaks power’s truth. — location: 1825 ^ref-34850

she urged Black people in the South to migrate north, boycott white businesses, and arm themselves and get organized on the basis of self-defense. — location: 1838 ^ref-5310

incidence of domestic violence increases appreciably after sports matches and increase much more dramatically among the fans whose team has won the game. — location: 1878 ^ref-11069

All accounts suggest that some significant number—a third to half of those killed, in the case of the lower total estimates—were white rioters. Although the numbers and proportions will never be accurately known, many in Tulsa believed the true casualty numbers were covered up because they would have become a source of shame for the white community. — location: 1945 ^ref-38914

movements foreground purity and noncriminality as the traits that signify people are worth defending from violence. This may make a powerful argument for a particular victim, but it reproduces the division between subjects deserving of empathy and “Black criminals” who, as Sylvia Wynter shows us, are not seen as human at all. This is precisely the structure of racialized criminalization that produces and protects police lynching in the first place, making it legible and possible. — location: 1985 ^ref-49469

This refusal of solidarity and alliance constantly enfeebled the labor movement and saw labor “radicals” betray Black people and their struggles again and — location: 2165 ^ref-39946

the energetic and hard work of Communist militants on the ground often conflicted with the demands of the Party and the Communist International. — location: 2403 ^ref-46087

It is precisely this sort of mass liberal co-option and diversion of energy that organizers, as politicized “strategists,” are meant to be best positioned to resist. — location: 2431 ^ref-11475

“color-blind” lens of “racial tensions,” which implies that white people having racist feelings and Black people experiencing the effects of racism are equivalent. — location: 3782 ^ref-25696

liberal explanations of riots as caused by “poverty” are just as lacking and ahistorical as neoliberal evocations of “despair.” — location: 3786 ^ref-300

Forming a “buffer class” of ethnic entrepreneurs with easy access to small business loans and support, these small shop owners perform the daily exploitation of capital and as such perpetuate and absorb much of the violence of the system in exchange for generational entry into the middle class and whiteness. — location: 3817 ^ref-26020

immigrant participation in American citizenship is predicated on the expropriation of Black communities and the reproduction of anti-Blackness. — location: 3819 ^ref-48028

gangs’ existence in the ghetto is not only tolerated but also approved by the state, as they turn economic and social violence largely inward while giving the state an unlimited excuse for intervention and repression. — location: 3887 ^ref-9688