Abstract
The #BlackLivesMatter movement’s most controversial moments have centered on the destruction of property. Beginning with a theoretical reading of the role of property in American life, this chapter reads the act of property destruction as a decolonial act—a kind of iconoclasm against colonial structures of power. It uses the events surrounding Freddie Gray’s death in Baltimore as its centerpiece. In the movement for Black lives, property destruction forces us to choose which we value more: human life or property. Far from being nihilistic, property destruction is an affirmation of life. Riots are thus theological and property destruction is a deeply theological act.
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Notes
- 1.
Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender, and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2000), 1.
- 2.
Althaus-Reid, 2.
- 3.
Althaus-Reid, 5.
- 4.
David Graeber, “Turning Modes of Production Inside Out: Or, Why Capitalism is a Transformation of Slavery,” pp. 61–85 in Critique of Anthropology (March 2006, vol. 26, no. 1.), 61.
- 5.
Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 5. See also Malcolm X as quoted in On the Side of My People: A Religious Life of Malcolm X, by Louis A. DeCaro, Jr. (New York: NYU Press, 1997), 121: “The United States government did not need to look to ‘foreign instigation’ to see why America is hated abroad, but should look right here in America where the Gestapo tactics of the white police who patrol Negro neighborhoods are similar to those used by ‘occupation forces’ when the conquering armies take over and enter into ‘occupied territories.’”
- 6.
Originally Anatole France, Le Lys Rouge (1894), but quoted by Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 296.
- 7.
Ture and Hamilton, 5.
- 8.
Ture and Hamilton, 16.
- 9.
Amaryah Armstrong writes, “…given that those who are descendants of people who were property, those dispossessed who through policing are made out to be property for the state, it would seem in the looting and property destruction is a critique of private property as the invention that produces public property, which is black flesh” “On Ferguson and Property,” Women in Theology blog, November 24, 2014. https://womenintheology.org/2014/11/26/on-ferguson-and-property/.
- 10.
Armstrong.
- 11.
Locke writes, “Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men: for this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.” John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1980), 19.
- 12.
Raven Rakia, “Black Riot,” in The New Inquiry, issue 45, November 14, 2013. http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/blackriot/.
- 13.
Rakia.
- 14.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2005), 1.
- 15.
Fanon, Wretched, 2.
- 16.
Fanon, Wretched, 2.
- 17.
Fanon, Black Skin, 107.
- 18.
Ezekiel 37:5–6, NRSV.
- 19.
“Spirit,” in the Greek of the New Testament, is pneuma which would typically connote moving air or breath. The Hebrew Spirit that moved across the face of the deep was ruach. The linguistic connections between life, spirit, breath, and air and strong.
- 20.
Thomas J. J. Altizer, “Radical Theology and Political Revolution,” pp. 5–10 in Criterion 7 (Spring 1968), 7.
- 21.
James Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997), 55.
- 22.
Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Other America,” speech at Grosse Pointe High School, March 14, 1968. http://www.gphistorical.org/mlk/mlkspeech/.
- 23.
Joshua Clover, “Propaganda, Deed,” in The Nation, December 9, 2014. http://www.thenation.com/article/propaganda-deed/.
- 24.
Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement,” in Journal of Social Issues (Vol. 24, No. 1, 1968). There were 159 riots in American cities during the summer and fall of 1967. King did not advocate for rioting, but neither did he denounce it. Instead, he recognized property destruction for what it is. It’s worth quoting him here at length.
This bloodlust interpretation ignores one of the most striking features of the city riots. Violent they certainly were. But the violence, to a startling degree, was focused against property rather than against people. There were very few cases of injury to persons, and the vast majority of the rioters were not involved at all in attacking people. The much publicized “death toll” that marked the riots, and the many injuries, were overwhelmingly inflicted on the rioters by the military. It is clear that the riots were exacerbated by police action that was designed to injure or even to kill people. As for the snipers, no account of the riots claims that more than one or two dozen people were involved in sniping. From the facts, and unmistakable pattern emerges: a handful of Negroes used gunfire substantially to intimidate, not to kill; and all of the other participants had a different target—property.
I am aware that there are many who wince at a distinction between property and persons—who hold both sacrosanct. My views are not so rigid. A life is sacred. Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on; it is not man.
The focus on property in the 1967 riots is not accidental. It has a message; it is saying something.
If hostility to whites were ever going to dominate a Negro’s attitude and reach murderous proportions, surely it would be during a riot. But this rare opportunity for bloodletting was sublimated into arson, or turned into a kind of stormy carnival of free-merchandise distribution. Why did the rioters avoid personal attacks? The explanation cannot be fear of retribution, because the physical risks incurred in the attacks on property were no less than for personal assaults. The military forces were treating acts of petty larceny as equal to murder. Far more rioters took chances with their own lives, in their attacks on property, than threatened the life of anyone else. Why were they so violent with property then? Because property represents the white power structure, which they were attacking and trying to destroy. A curious proof of the symbolic aspect of the looting for some who took part in it is the fact that, after the riots, police received hundreds of calls from Negroes trying to return merchandise they had taken. Those people wanted the experience of taking, of redressing the power imbalance that property represents. Possession, afterward, was secondary.
A deeper level of hostility came out in arson, which was far more dangerous than the looting. But it, too, was a demonstration and a warning. It was designed to express the depth of anger in the community.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. ed. James Washington (New York: HarperCollins, 1986), 648–650.
- 25.
Anjali Kamat, “The Baltimore Uprising,” in Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter, eds. Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton (London and New York, Verso, 2016).
- 26.
Paul Solman, “Why the Freddie Gray Riots Began at a Shopping Mall,” PBS’s website. May 29, 2015 http://www.pbs.org/newshour/makingsense/answersbaltimoreseconomicrecoverystartshoppingmall/.
- 27.
David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 154.
- 28.
Graeber, 85.
- 29.
Philippians 2:7.
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Miller, J.E. (2019). #BlackLivesMatter. In: Resisting Theology, Furious Hope. Radical Theologies and Philosophies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17391-3_7
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