In an interview published in NPR earlier this week, author Vicky Osterweil defended looting from businesses in the name of social justice and dismissed concerns about rioters attacking essential businesses such as grocery stores and pharmacies.
“When it comes to small business, family owned business or locally owned business, they are no more likely to provide worker protections. They are no more likely to have to provide good stuff for the community than big businesses,” Osterweil told NPR.
The left-wing author, whose recent book is aptly titled “In Defense of Looting,” also bizarrely called the idea of respecting small business owners a “right-wing myth,” suggesting that it isn’t true that small business owners create jobs and are part of the community: “It’s actually a Republican myth that has, over the last 20 years, really crawled into even leftist discourse: that the small business owner must be respected, that the small business owner creates jobs and is part of the community. But that’s actually a right-wing myth.”
“A business being attacked in the community is ultimately about attacking like modes of oppression that exist in the community. It is true and possible that there are instances historically when businesses have refused to reopen or to come back. But that is a part of the inequity of the society, that people live in places where there is only one place where they can get access to something [like food or medicine],” said the author. “That question assumes well, what if you’re in a food desert? But the food desert is already an incredibly unjust situation. There’s this real tendency to try and blame people for fighting back, for revealing the inequity of the injustice that’s already been formed by the time that they’re fighting.”