The founder of the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, said during two interviews that looting from “big box main store” is “symbolic,” and that “destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence.”
“Destroying property which can be replaced is not violence. And to put those things — to use the exact same language to describe those two things, I think really is not moral to do that. So, yes, I think any reasonable person would say we shouldn’t be destroying other people’s property. But these are not reasonable times. These are people who have testified against police violence again and again and again, year after year, and still, we can have videos of law enforcement and witnesses nonchalantly taking the life of — of man for the alleged crime of passing a fake $20 bill. So when we have people who say that people should respect the law, they’re not respecting the law because the law is not respecting them. You can’t say that…”
“I mean this is the thing, you are asking people whose communities have been looted for decades, who don’t have proper schools, who don’t have proper amenities, who have been — you know, when we see someone killed by the police, that’s the worst manifestation of police violence but it doesn’t get to the daily police violence that doesn’t end in death, the daily degradation that black Americans face. The fact that these communities have been preyed upon by predatory lenders, you know, it goes on and on. And so when we think about someone taking action to take something from some big box main store, it’s symbolic. 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.”
Ms. Jones recently won a Pulitzer Prize for her work featured by The New York Times, in spite of the fact that she had to issue corrections due to errors in the piece. After its initial publishing, the 1619 Project started a school curriculum that is used by various school districts across the United States. Many conservatives, and historians, have publicly come out against the use of the work as it claims that slavery is what the United States was founded on.
If Ms. Jones used her position to be an advocate for peaceful protest, instead of making excuses for criminals, she would help improve society, instead of harming it.
While many conservatives and liberals are uniting during this difficult time in the United States, standing up to the rioters and looters, it is scary that someone who has such a large following seems to be making excuses for those that are abusing the tragic death of George Floyd. If Ms. Jones used her position to be an advocate for peaceful protest, instead of making excuses for criminals, she would help improve society, instead of harming it.
