"An Open Letter To Those Who Condemn Looting" by Evan Calder Williams (2011)

(Listen to the audio version of this letter read by Resonance Audio)

My short review: 

A powerful and passionate letter to all of us in these times of riot, rebellion, and mayhem. Instead of seeing those who dissent the perpetuation of classicism and racism, particularly by the hands of the police, as apart from the whole (indeed, of humanity), Williams asks us, in well reasoned vexation, to take notice of our blind spots and understand how to fathom these chaotic rebellions as natural responses to injustice, greed, and ignorance. Whether you are part of the rebellion or one who witnesses the death and destruction from your velvet couch, the point here is not so much an urge for you to dis/continue setting fires or to move from your meditative position in order to stoke it, but rather to consider the actions leading up to such hellish disruption; a consideration that hopefully leads to a connective point disavowing all the structures set in place that makes class and race ideologies *OK*. For they are not. For these fine lines of class, these fine lines of race, become ever more fine, ever smaller, Williams seems to say. And they are but mere imaginations built by structures we ourselves can barely grasp unless understood as a whole: not they who riot, but us who force them to, then condemn them for it. How do we begin to work ourselves into, or out of this fix?

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