And The Looting Continues

You wanna talk about Looting after Cold-Blooded Murder.
So let’s talk.

The neighborhood was Looted
Long before the windows broke
Long before the tear gas was thrown
Long before fire grenades flashed through the night
There was Looting
There has always been Looting
Since land, liberty, and life was Looted from the first people to live in this neighborhood,
The Looting has Continued

Let’s talk about who lit the neighborhood on fire
Let’s talk about
Who ransacks
Who plunders
Who pillages
Who rapes
Who steals
And who is despoiled of
Dignity. Humanity. LIFE

Looting is the indiscriminate taking of goods by force
And what counts as goods?
A TV?
A bag of rice?
Safety?
Agency?
Respect?
A voice?
A human life?
And what counts as force?
How about Murder without Consequence?

When American museums are filled with artifacts from Countries Who Did Not Give Consent,
The Looting Continues.
When the loan sharks and predatory lenders move into poor neighborhoods,
The Looting Continues.
When healthy food and access to healthcare is unavailable within miles,
The Looting Continues.
When the rich children get laptops and the rest get to share a twenty-year-old textbook missing pages,
The Looting Continues.
When BIPOC people are jailed while their white counterparts get a slap on the wrist for the same crimes,
The Looting Continues.
When a black toddler is put in handcuffs for behaving like any other toddler,
The Looting Continues.
When the best jobs, social capital, and political power go to the Ones with Connections who are a Good Fit,
The Looting Continues.
When we have to mute who we are so you will throw us scraps and be grateful for it,
The Looting Continues.
When our languages become extinct,
The Looting Continues.
When trans and nonbinary people are killed and misgendered even in death,
The Looting Continues.
When the rich get tax cuts and the minimum wage always stays the same,
The Looting Continues.
When packing plant workers die by the hundreds in a Pandemic so the rich can get their steaks,
The Looting Continues.
When children are sick and in cages, alone,
The Looting Continues.
When Indigenous burial grounds are dug up for pipelines,
The Looting Continues.
When black and brown dead bodies are on display for the public to see,
The Looting Continues.

When a black man with a white knee on his neck begs for his life and dies anyway,
The Looting Continues.
And when his murderers get away with it,
The Looting Continues.

You want to talk about what kind of Looting is okay?
The kind that has for centuries
Looted:
Life
Liberty
and
The Pursuit of Happiness

Don’t confuse the Symptoms for the Problem
The Maintainers of the Status Quo
Get away with Looting.
So understand.
When your knees are on our necks
Day In. Day Out.
And when pleading politely for our lives fails.
Again. And again. And again. And again.
You can bet
The Looting Will Continue.

By Ferial Pearson

Being open-minded means listening to something you don’t want to hear. This poem is most certainly one of these moments, when I wish I would not have read what I read.

You can’t make it unread or unheard!

The brain starts digesting the information, the heart gets involved.

Two voices struggling inside me.

It’s not right! (But I understand, even though I don’t want to.)

Make the mind stop thinking!

Make me stop feeling!

“We won,” the black kid said and the reporter looked at him in disbelieve.

“How can you say that? Everything around here is broken or distroyed.”

“We won,” the kid insisted.

“Why do you think you won.”

“Because you would have never come to us without it. Now the TV stations are here, even the mayor. They all came to the hood. Now we are seen. Now we will be heard.”

Most of the experts I spoke with agreed that looting is a side effect of protests, which are a side effect of the conditions causing the protests. In this case, the root cause is yet another killing of a black man by a white police officer. To fully eliminate looting, you’d have to eliminate the conditions that make people upset enough to protest. Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/06/why-people-loot/612577/