@carcinopithecus
Interviewer: How would you
define someone who
smashes in the window of a
television store and takes
what he wants?

James Baldwin: Before I get to
that, how would you define
somebody who puts a cat
where he is and takes all the
money out of the ghetto where
he makes it? Who is looting
whom? Grabbing off the TV
set? He doesn't really want the
TV set. He's saying screw you.
It's not judgment, by the way,
on the value of the TV set. He
doesn’t want it. He wants to let you know he's there. The

question I'm trying to raise is a very serious question. The
mass media-television and all the major news
agencies-endlessly use that word “looter”. On television you
always see black hands reaching in, you know. And so the
American public concludes that these savages are trying to
steal everything from us. And no one has seriously tried to
get where the trouble is. After all, you're accusing a captive
population who has been robbed of everything of looting.

I think it's obscene.