The answer, it seems to me, is that looting is a way of exerting control over a situation — securing direct material gains for yourself or your community in an environment that presents a constant risk to your life, your livelihood, or your sanity. It’s opportunistic and sometimes violent, to be sure, but in the context of that environment it makes sense. There’s a reason comfortable Americans don’t lose their shyt every time Rick Grimes filches a can of beans on
The Walking Dead; what they don’t realize is that for many groups of people the structure of America is just as dangerous as the hordes of zombies that plague Rick and his friends.
Target, AutoZone, DollarTree, Cub Foods — all of these businesses are emblematic of and supported by this system of white supremacy, which passes pain and violence down to poorer or browner communities through institutions constructed to ensure that the people America was designed for can live their lives unfettered by inconvenience or fear. These businesses are also not people, as Ashley Reese
pointed out earlier today in a fantastic piece for Jezebel:
Property is inanimate. It doesn’t breathe, it doesn’t have hopes, dreams, or mouths to feed. There are properties we cherish—our homes, our places of worship, buildings of historical and cultural significance. A Target is not one of these places, and neither is an Arby’s, a Wendy’s, an Aldi, an Autozone, or an empty construction site. It’s safe to say that the aforementioned establishments are better insured than many Americans.
She continues later:
For far too many Americans, it is easier to mourn the destruction of a series of chain stores, owned and operated by millionaires, than the death of a Black American. A stolen lamp is worthy of a kind of empathy that a black person could only dream of.