Rather than denounce the shameful
lawlessness demonstrated by many “protesters” demanding “justice” in the wake
of the grand jury decision about Officer Darren Wilson, progressives are
doubling down by posting rationalizations for the rioting.
Marc Lamont Hill, for example, author of a book on “hip hop pedagogy” who
hilariously describes himself as “one of the leading
intellectual voices in the country,” tweeted, “The story of ferguson tonight is way bigger than looting or violence.
People are angry. People are hurting. They're killing us with impunity.” This
is nonsense. People don’t loot and burn down neighborhood businesses because
they are angry and hurting; they do so because trumped-up racial controversies
give a criminal element the cover to commit crimes against business owners who
had nothing to do with the controversy. Rioters steal big-screen TVs and Nike
sneakers because they’re hurting? Ridiculous. They steal them because they are
opportunistic thieves.
The hugely popular Gawker site, in an article claiming that “riots are good,” actually argues that “rioting is
economically efficient”: “Since state authorities are always and everywhere
most concerned about capital and business interests, threatening to impose
costs on them via rioting should have a similar impact on police incentives” –
by which it means that destructive rioting now supposedly discourages the
police from shooting innocent black males later. What it really dissuades
economically is businesses starting up or rebuilding in a neighborhood
devastated by looters. The costs it imposes are not on the police, but on the
victimized local business owners and their employees. But then, celebrity
gossip is Gawker’s strong suit, not economics or common sense.
Perhaps the most unintentionally comical defense of rioting is from Mask
Magazine, “an online style
+ living magazine for antagonist youth.” With a title that could have come
straight out of the satiric site The
Onion, “Hey, Step Back with the Riot Shaming” explains irrationally that
“[People of color] are criminals because we are seen as criminals.”
[emphasis in original] So, simply being viewed with suspicion causes people to
commit crimes? The writer argues (actually, he doesn’t “argue” anything; he
just spews a lot of whiny victimhood) that blacks don’t “own” neighborhoods; there
are black-owned businesses, he
concedes, but in the next breath he claims that “we don’t have shit,” and so apparently
it’s all right to loot and burn the black-owned neighborhood businesses that he
says blacks don’t have.
Even before the grand jury decision, as early as August right after
the shooting of Michael Brown, a site
called the New Inquiry put up a piece with the straightforward title, “In Defense of Looting.” It was Marxist, racist agit-prop written by
a guy whose bio identifies him as “a member of the punk band Vulture Shit.”
Here’s a sample: “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.” Here’s another: “Looters are only stealing from the rich
owners’ profit margins. Those owners, meanwhile, especially if they own a chain
like QuikTrip, steal forty hours every week from thousands of employees who in
return get the privilege of not dying for another seven days.” This sounds like
easily dismissed, Occupy lunacy, but unfortunately it is representative of the
“thinking” of a depressing percentage of young people.
Also in August, the radical
Salon.com posted a piece
“in defense of black rage,” in which the writer states about rioting, “I refuse
to condemn the folks engaged in these acts, because I respect black rage… How
dare people preach and condescend to these people and tell them not to loot,
not to riot? Yes, those are destructive forms of anger, but frankly I would
rather these people take their anger out on property and products rather than
on other people.”
But what Salon and other riot
apologists refuse to acknowledge is that those products and property don’t
exist in a vacuum; they belong to people who had nothing to do with the
controversy and yet whose livelihoods are seriously damaged, and in some cases
ruined, by the looting and burning of that property.
In addition to these intellectually insupportable attempts to justify rioting,
other progressive voices took the opportunity to simply fuel the fire. In
apparent response to tweets that the rioters should “go back to Africa,” The Atlantic’s popular Ta-Nahisi Coates,
perhaps best-known for his recent article supporting slave reparations, tweeted, “Not how this works. We are here to run you out, not the other way
around.” If he’s saying that blacks are here to run whites out of the country,
then that’s a rather militantly racist admission.
Another militant, UPenn’s willfully illiterate Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Africana Studies Anthea
Butler – whose unhinged response to the George Zimmerman verdict I have
previously written about – posted an equally unhinged response this time, an inflammatory article
asserting that Michael Brown was a “sacrifice to the god of white
supremacy.”
In all fairness, not all the progressive voices attempted to whitewash
the rioting or fan the flames. Charles M. Blow of The New York Times, for example, kept a relatively even keel in his Wednesday op-ed:
No one of good character and conscience
condones rioting or looting or any destruction of property. Those enterprises
aren’t only criminal, they’re fruitless and counterproductive and rob one’s own
neighborhood of needed services and facilities and unfairly punish the people
who saw fit to follow a dream and an entrepreneurial spirit, and invest in
themselves and those communities in the first place.
“But people absolutely have a right
to their feelings,” Blow continues, “including anger and frustration.” Of
course. But what the riot apologists won’t acknowledge is that violent rage is
not justice or justification.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 12/1/14)
