Democracy Now!
Historian Robin D.G. Kelley: Media Focuses On “Looting” To Dismiss Legitimate Concerns
“The momentum carrying worldwide protests against systemic racism and calls in some cities to defund police can be attributed to decades of organizing by Black women and Black-led collectives, says historian and UCLA professor Robin D.G. Kelley. Still, despite the “enormous work” of movements to underscore the core issues shaping their demands, Kelley says the media is wrongly framing looting as the major problem. He notes that the hyperfocus on looting, which is a common occurrence across history during natural disasters or times of civil disturbance and thus not a new phenomenon in the current protests, is part of a “tendency to treat looting as a way to dismiss legitimate organizing work.” The media’s coverage of looting also “displaces the history of the United States” and highlights the societal value of wealth and property over Black and Indigenous people’s lives. “Is the destruction of property or taking things, taking sneakers or computers, somehow more important than watching someone die on film? Watching 5,000 some-odd people killed by the police over the last few years?” Kelley tells Democracy Now! “We know … that Black bodies were looted. That is how we got here.”
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