DeRay McKesson
Over the course of the past year, DeRay Mckesson has become the most visible activist and spokesperson for racial justice in America. So it isn't surprising that those who oppose what he stands for would attempt to discredit him every chance they get. What's wild about this is that Mckesson is about the most calm, measured, methodical, thoughtful spokesperson this movement could ever have and instead of seeing him as such, conservative pundits and politicians have consistently attacked him as the enemy.
The recent attack comes from Rand Paul and Fox News. After Mckesson was invited to be a guest lecturer for a few days at Yale University in early October, Fox News first began blasting Yale for hiring a "race hustler" as a professor. Facts don't matter at Fox, because DeRay wasn't hired as a professor and the term "race hustler" is a demeaning, derogatory slur used to describe anyone who truly cares about addressing racism in America.
Soon, presidential candidate (if you can honestly call him that) Rand Paul decided he needed to weigh in on the content of the guest lecture. In the course, DeRay had required reading for the students. One such article, among many, was entitled "In Defense of Looting." It's a fascinating and important read about a topic that is far more complicated and nuanced than soundbites want to make it.
It was a small part of the lecture, but important nonetheless.
Because no conservative talking heads actually took the course, they just caught wind that the article was used in it. Conservatives then do what they do and reduced, in the most racist way possible, the entire experience to Mckesson teaching Yale students how to loot.
Read on to find out what conservatives were really objecting to.
Rand Paul found this to be a life and death matter of national security and had to weigh in.
“I frankly wouldn’t pay for my kids to take a class from somebody lecturing on the benefits of looting or why looting is OK,” Paul told The Blaze on Wednesday. “There are some crazy courses out there on a lot of campuses.”
Deniqua Washington, a first year student at Yale Divinity School said that’s not what happened at all, calling Paul’s response “uneducated” given that he wasn’t in the room.
“We talked about the effects and history of looting, trying to really get down to the core of it and understand where it comes from,” Washington said. “It wasn’t about why we should be looting and why we should glorify and romanticize it as if it’s this great thing. We intellectualized looting in a way that I’ve never done before.”
Another student, Andrew Doss, said the text helped illuminate for him how anger and pain play out in protest. With looting, the outcry is manifested “in ways that people might not necessarily agree with.”
But here's the deeper point that needs to be made.
Conservatives are pretending to have a principled problem with looting. Their problem is not with theft, or destruction, or violence: Their true problem is with black rage and anger.
So conservatives truly have a problem with looting, with people taking what doesn't belong to them, with destruction? Let's examine some perplexing contradictions.
In this decade alone, the New York Police Department and the Chicago Police Department have forced local taxpayers to spend billions of dollars on police brutality settlements. When counting settlements nationwide, we may cross as much as $5 billion that has been given to victims of police brutality.
However, this violence and extreme expenditure of taxpayer money really isn't a problem for conservatives.
At least $6.1 billion is missing and completely unaccounted for in spending on the Iraq war. Is that not looting?
In fact, this country was fundamentally built on the core concept of looting. The vast majority of indigenous people were killed and all of their sacred lands were stolen, but conservatives are outraged that an activist is taking an intellectual dive into black rage in the age of police brutality? GTFOH!
For hundreds of years African resources were looted during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and the extended period of European underdevelopment, but conservatives are appalled at folk in the inner city stealing diapers and gadgets?
Was the financial meltdown of 2007-2008 not the biggest conservative period of modern looting in American history?
Rand and friends: Let's be intellectually honest here. You don't have strong principles on looting. Your heroes, your founding fathers, your role models, were looters of the first degree. Your problem is with African-American agitation.