The language of looting is a way to try to
distract and diffuse from the kind of bureaucratic
violence that has rained down on Black communities,
bureaucratic violence in terms of militarizing
the police, bureaucratic violence in terms
of underfunding public schools, bureaucratic
violence in terms of environmental toxins
being poured into poor and Black communities.
That kind of bureaucratic violence just gets
elided over.
And so, one of the things when I wrote White
Rage, I talked about how we focus so much
on the flames that we miss the kindling.
And the kindling is that bureaucratic violence
that systematically destroys Black communities,
that systematically erodes their citizenship.
That is what we need to be paying attention
to, or we’re always going to see the flames.
And so, that looting tries to make that equivalence.
It’s a false equivalence, that language
of looting, that language of, “Well, you’re
distracting from the peaceful protest.”
But when African Americans peacefully protested,
like Colin Kaepernick, he was just vilified
for somehow disrespecting the flag?
When the real disrespect of the flag is the
systematic destruction of Black people.
AMY GOODMAN: In your Guardian piece, Professor
Anderson, you write, “[O]ur current attorney
general, Bill Barr, does not appear to see
injustice.
Instead, he sounds much like his ancient predecessor,
A Mitchell Palmer.”
Explain.
CAROL ANDERSON: So, A. Mitchell Palmer was
the attorney general during 1919, the Red
Summer of 1919.
And there you had an eruption of anti-Black
violence as Black veterans are coming back
from World War I.
Their work in the military as soldiers so
disrupted what was the hierarchy of power,
because it was like, “Wait a minute, they
think they’re citizens now?”
So, you saw this violence erupt, where Black
people were hunted down and killed.
One of the most horrific cases was in Elaine,
Arkansas.
And that is where Blacks were mobilizing to
unionize because their wages were being stolen.
You had this massive group of sheriffs and
vigilantes and the U.S. Army coming in and
just massacring Black people.
A. Mitchell Palmer didn’t see that.
What he saw instead of people fighting for
their constitutional rights, he said, “These
are these left-wing radicals.
These are communists.”
And it launches what would become known as
the Red Scare, this hunt for communists in
every kind of movement for equality.
What you see with Bill Barr, by raising up
this fictive antifa organization that is out
to destroy all that is good and right in America,
where they can’t even identify what the
antifa organization is — and “antifa”
stands for anti-fascist, fighting the fascists.
But what we do have is the violence of the
right wing, the violence where you have armed
men storming into the Michigan state Capitol
and threatening to kill the governor and yelling
at law enforcement.
But somehow that’s not the kind of violence
that Bill Barr is concerned with.
So you get this mobilizing of federal forces
to knock out progressive forces that are fighting
for equality, by using the threat of some
outside agitator, some terrorist group — for
A. Mitchell Palmer, communists; for Bill Barr,
antifa.
Whatever.
