DeRay McKesson has been conducting a 2 day workshop, this is the second day, defending looting as a political act.

Some other tweets from his buddy, Johnetta Elzie, describing the comments in the class:

This was the ‘reading’ the class was assigned, ‘In Defense of Looting’. Apparently burning and looting black and minority businesses in Ferguson equals fighting ‘white supremacy’. Some fun excerpts:

In fact, anti-black racism remains the foundational organizing principle of this country. That is because this country is built on the right to property, and there is no property, no wealth in the USA without the exploitation, appropriation, murder, and enslavement of black people[…]

When rioters take territory and loot, they are revealing precisely how, in a space without cops, property relations can be destroyed and things can be had for free[…]

But why is it bad to grab an opportunity to improve well-being, to make life better, easier, or more comfortable? Or, as Hannah Black put it on Twitter: “Cops exist so people can’t loot ie have nice things for free so idk why it’s so confusing that people loot when they protest against cops” [sic]. Only if you believe that having nice things for free is amoral, if you believe, in short, that the current (white-supremacist, settler-colonialist) regime of property is just, can you believe that looting is amoral in itself.

White people deploy the idea of looting in a way that implies people of color are greedy and lazy, but it is just the opposite: looting is a hard-won and dangerous act with potentially terrible consequences, and looters are only stealing from the rich owners’ profit margins.