By Rich Lowry
Friday, June 05, 2020
Breaking things and burning buildings is enjoying a vogue
it hasn’t had since the late 1960s or early 1970s.
Arson and looting are a perennial feature of urban
unrest, but they have been pretty universally condemned for decades now — until
the past week or so.
Forced to choose between criticizing the George Floyd
protests when they get out of hand and defending the indefensible, activists
and writers on the left have been tempted into the latter.
Their inventive, if completely absurd, contention is that
the destruction of property doesn’t qualify as violence, and, at the end of the
day, isn’t such a bad thing, maybe even a salutary thing.
The Pulitzer Prize–winning architect of the New York
Times’ 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, argued in an interview: “Violence
is when an agent of the state kneels on a man’s neck until all of the life is
leached out of his body. Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not
violence. To use the same language to describe those two things is not moral.”
The editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick,
favorably quoted a co-founder of Black Lives Matter Global Network, who
explained: “We don’t have time to finger-wag at protesters about property. That
can be rebuilt. Target will reopen.”
An article in Current Affairs asserted that
applying the word “violence” to the destruction of property risks “making the
term conceptually incoherent and — much more important — conflating acts that
do very serious physical harm to people with acts that have not physically
harmed anyone.”
Now, it’s obviously true that what happened to George
Floyd is sickening, and that harming a person is much worse than damaging
property. But that doesn’t mean that both aren’t acts of violence, and both
aren’t wrong.
Property is not an abstraction. It gives people shelter
and a sense of protection and stability. If the property is a business, it
often represents years of sweat, tears, and dreams.
For someone to come and destroy it in a spasm of rage or
gleeful looting is felt as a profound violation, and understandably so.
In Minneapolis, rioters ransacked the bar of an
African-American former firefighter named Korboi Balla. He had invested his
life savings in the place, which he had planned to open any day. “I don’t know
what we’re going to do,” Balla said. “We’ve been working so hard for this
place. It’s not just for me; it’s for my family.”
But hey, it was just property.
Those who minimize looting often explain that businesses
have insurance, so what’s the big deal? But Balla wasn’t insured, and neither
are many small businesses.
How about chain stores such as Target? They have more
resources. But there’s still a cost. They may decide it’s too risky to open
back up in a neighborhood where a store has been looted. And these businesses
employ black people and have black customers.
It is ahistorical to assume that urban areas easily
bounce back from the large-scale destruction of property. Cities such as
Newark, Detroit, and Washington arguably never recovered or took decades to
fully recover from the riots of the 1960s.
Finally, there isn’t such a clear distinction between
harming property and people. Some shop owners will try to defend their
livelihoods or hire security guards to do it. We’ve seen business owners beaten
and a security guard at a St. Louis pawnshop shot and killed by people who,
presumably, started out “only” wanting to destroy and steal property.
It’s easy to be cavalier about someone else’s property.
The former ESPN NBA reporter Chris Martin Palmer celebrated an image of a
building burning in Minneapolis, tweeting, “Burn that s*** down. Burn it all
down.”
Then, when rioters got close to where he lived, Palmer
lashed out at them as “animals.”
He subsequently explained that he doesn’t endorse the destruction of property and supports peaceful protest. That’s the right position, although one that is now, incredibly enough, controversial.
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