The head of the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project described the looting that has taken place during violent protests over the past week as a “symbolic taking.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones quoted Martin Luther King Jr. during an interview Monday with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in which they talked about the demonstrations around the nation that began after George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, died after a white Minneapolis police officer pressed a knee into his neck for nearly nine minutes. In some cases, property damage, looting, and even shootings have taken place during demonstrations calling attention to racial injustice and police brutality.
“‘Often the negro does not even want what he takes,’” Hannah-Jones said, quoting King. “‘He wants the experience of taking. Negroes have committed crimes, but they are the derivative crimes, and they are borne of the greater crimes of the white society. So when we ask negroes to abide by the law, let us also demand that the white man abide by the law and the ghettos as well.’”
“So I think we have to have some perspective on what exactly we are seeing when we call that violence and looting,” she said.
“And so when we think about someone taking an act to take something from some big-box-name store, it is symbolic,” she said. “That one pair of shoes that you’ve stolen from Foot Locker is not going to change your life. But it is a symbolic taking.”
Hannah-Jones’s project won a Pulitzer Prize this year for essays that argue the founding of the United States is defined by slavery, starting in 1619. She also argued that white colonists revolted against England in order to preserve slavery in the U.S.
A clarification was added months later to note “some” but not all colonists fought to preserve slavery.
Yesterday we made an important clarification to my #1619Project essay abt the colonists’ motivations during the American Revolution. In attempting to summarize and streamline, journalists can sometimes lose important context and nuance. I did that here. https://t.co/y1ycIiL4MN
— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) March 12, 2020
