In Defense of Looting Quotes

“In the center of all these transformations is the fugitive slave. Winning her emancipation singly, in groups and en masse, stealing through dark swamps and across busy roads, dodging the slave catchers and outwitting police patrols, she moves unseen on the edges of history, changing it inexorably with her flight. To find herself, she must steal and abolish white property, must abolish herself-as-property. She strikes fear into the heart of white society because she reveals just how flimsy their regimes of property, power, and domination can be in the face of her jailbreak for freedom. This specter of slaves freeing themselves is American history’s first image of Black looters.”
― Vicky Osterweil, In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action

“The emergence of reason and the subsequent reification of reason as the fundamental attribute of human nature is therefore completely premised on the creation of hierarchies of reasonable and unreasonable peo-ple. The enlightened, reasoned man can only exist in distinction to the (African, Indigenous, nonmale) person who lacks reason; the idea of universal humanity is premised on human difference from and opposition to the less- or nonhuman person, a racialized and racializing difference.”
― Vicky Osterweil, In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action

“The United States of America is built on African slavery and Indigenous genocide. This simple fact is the premise from which any honest study of American history must begin.”
― Vicky Osterweil, In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action

“But research increasingly reveals that, rather than merely delay profit growth, this “dilemma” of enslaved labor saw overseers develop some of capitalism’s most powerful (and erroneously considered modern) management techniques. The earliest examples of employee surveillance, individual performance assessment, traceable units of production, detailed record keeping, and employee incentivization—all key concepts in modern management theory—occurred on slave plantations.”
― Vicky Osterweil, In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action

“Looting rejects the legitimacy of ownership rights and property, the moral injunction to work for a living, and the “justice” of law and order. Looting reveals all these for what they are: not natural facts, but social constructs benefiting a few at the expense of the many, upheld by ideology, economy, and state violence.”
― Vicky Osterweil, In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action

“Frederick Douglass spent some of his bondage working as a ship caulker in Baltimore and, like many others, deceived his enslaver about how much he was actually making, thus secreting funds for his escape. Many of these workers lived miles distant from their enslavers- indeed, it is precisely these urban communities of relatively independent Black people that would lead to the earliest development of police departments, as gangs of slave catchers evolved into formalized slave patrols designed to keep these "slave quarters" under surveillance and control.”
― Vicky Osterweil, In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action