At the present time, the world is at an impasse. This can only mean one thing: not that there is no way out, but that the time has come to abandon all the old ways, which have led to fraud, tyranny, and murder.
Aimé Césaire
I’m not here to explain Black anarchism, because Black anarchism explains itself. The times we’re living in speak to its relevance. Politics that can conceive liberation only through the nation-state apparatus cannot truly serve people who always fall outside of its considerations.
Those who are the most marginalised are not being liberated by the state forms that have only ever killed, excluded and kicked them around. Poor people, stateless people, migrants and oppressed people of all sorts are rendered disposable by the world’s ruling classes.
Radical transformation looks like power directly in the hands of people themselves, without minimising diversity in the name of borders, citizenship, and homogenising national identities.
What would it mean if people represented themselves directly, instead of the administrations of nation-states, politicians and ruling classes speaking on their behalf? In the US, during the civil rights and Black Power eras, this question led to the development of Black anarchism(s) and Black autonomy, through the work of Black radicals who turned to stateless socialism and more.
Lucy Parsons, a formerly enslaved Black woman, was one of the earliest identifiable Black anarchists. Pivotal in the labour movement of the 1920s and known as a powerful orator, she was described by the Chicago Police Department as “more dangerous than a thousand rioters”. Parsons had a complicated relationship with her racial identity, which is part of her long, dynamic story.
Parsons came long before the breakaway from civil rights era reformism and Black Power era statist politics that represents modern Black anarchism. The US-based cohort responsible for developing this includes, but is not limited to, radicals like: Martin Sostre, Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, Kuwasi Balagoon, JoNina Ervin, Ojore Lutalo and Ashanti Alston.
Sostre, who died in 2015, was an internationally known, self-described “politicised prisoner” who almost single-handedly transformed the prison system through his lawsuits. He was a community educator and won victories for the rights of those in prison, from political and religious freedoms to restricting the use of solitary confinement, to contesting the censorship of prison literature.
Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, who was mentored by Sostre, is a former Black Panther and activist at the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a key organisation in the American civil rights movement. JoNina Ervin, who eventually wed Lorenzo, is also a former Panther and was the last editor of the Black Panther Party newspaper.
Alston, Lutalo, and Balagoon were former Panthers and Black Liberation Army members. Lutalo was introduced to anarchism by Kuwasi, who brought his own unique perspective as a New Afrikan anarchist.
These are just some of the Black revolutionaries who decided that instead of choosing new representation, new reform and new masters, they wanted no masters at all.
I came into Black anarchism over ten years ago and sat with it quietly in the dominant state-socialist Left movement spaces where it didn’t fit. I watched anarchism in general be harangued as utopian, chaotic, white and impractical, while people regurgitated age-old political maxims about building a reformed or revolutionary state. I once held many of the same views about state-building and state-reform before I understood anarchism on its own terms, not based on popular misreadings or individuals.
The history of Black anarchism was completely neglected and, in retrospect, I see why it needed to be. Anarchism is a threat many can agree on. Not making populations an appendage of the nation-state poses a grave danger to the order of the world we know. The fact that statist factions on boththe Left and the Right utilise the anarchist bogeyman as a target is crucial. Those who are preoccupied with attaining or weaponising state power for their own ends will regularly feel threatened by those who don’t see the state as the sole harbinger of liberation.
Black anarchism rejects coercive authority and oppressive top-down hierarchies as they exist across the entire political spectrum. It doesn’t pretend that anyone who claims (or has claimed) to be a liberator, speaking on behalf of the masses, cannot commit atrocities. And it recognises that acknowledging this, rather than denying it, is how stronger movements will grow.
In my new book ‘The Nation on No Map’, I expand my thinking around ‘the anarchism of Blackness’ as it’s appeared via the stateless condition of Black people throughout the African diaspora. This is not just about theory. What I’m highlighting is the reality of Black migration (forced or otherwise) and enslavement. That’s why in my book, I make a case for how Black anarchist history can appeal to a newly reinvigorated abolitionist movement, among other things.
The lives of many of the historical Black anarchists I have mentioned trace a familiar path of growth and development. Many traversed from the civil rights movement to Black nationalism and Black Power movements before arriving at anarchism. They are by no means one thing and should be allowed their diversity. There are multiple Black anarchisms, autonomies and anarchic tendencies. What they did with anarchism when they arrived at it is just as multifaceted as historic classical anarchisms are. A similarity many share is a rejection of what Sostre called “the wooden party line”. He rejected “some abstract political line or ideology” in favour of struggling for “human beings with lives to fulfil”.
Sostre is one reason that I see Black anarchism as a part of politics and history that’s not so nebulous it becomes incoherent. Rather, it’s realistic enough to hold the weighty truth of difference that has regularly gotten lost historically in the wills of individual leaders claiming to represent ‘the people’. The people are the people themselves, not a rhetorical football for whomever hopes to make use of them. We are all part of ‘the people’.
We are fighting for an existence where there are no states to deport, dispossess, murder, detain, imprison, pollute and police us on behalf of the ruling elite of the world. We’re talking about destroying the machinery of oppression, not renaming it or repurposing it so that it can be used to oppress again. That’s why for me, Black anarchism means moving away from and transcending all leftisms inundated with oversimplified ‘either/or’ sectarian binaries. We are struggling for something much greater.
There’s a way out. It’s an exit sign I’m pointing at – don’t get stuck staring at my finger.
___
From the Firestorm Cooperative …
Writer and activist William C. Anderson shares his latest work, The Nation On No Map, in a live virtual conversation with feminist writer Robyn Maynard. The Nation on No Map examines state power, abolition, and ideological tensions within the struggle for Black liberation while centering the politics of Black autonomy and self-determination. Amid renewed interest in Black anarchism among the left, Anderson offers a principled rejection of reformism, nation building, and citizenship in the ongoing fight against capitalism and white supremacism. As a viable alternative amidst worsening social conditions, he calls for the urgent prioritization of community-based growth, arguing that in order to overcome oppression, people must build capacity beyond the state.
William C. Anderson is a writer and activist from Birmingham, Alabama. His work has appeared in the Guardian, MTV, Truthout, British Journal of Photography, and Pitchfork, among others. He is the co-author of the book As Black as Resistance (AK Press 2018) and co-founder of Offshoot Journal. He also provides creative direction as one of the producers of the Black Autonomy Podcast. His writings have been included in the anthologies, Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? (Haymarket 2016) and No Selves to Defend (Mariame Kaba 2014).
Robyn Maynard is a Black feminist scholar based in Toronto. She is the author of Policing Black Lives: State violence in Canada from slavery to the present, published with Fernwood Publishing in 2017. She is the co-author, with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, of Rehearsals for Living, an epistolary text that explores the local and global dimensions of abolitionist and anti-colonial thought from Black and Indigenous feminist perspectives, forthcoming with Knopf (Canada) and Haymarket’s Abolitionist Papers series (US) in June of 2022. Her work has also appeared in the Toronto Star, the Montréal Gazette, Scholar & Feminist, and has been translated into French and German.
___
Anarchism is the “inheritance” of the dispossessed, the legacy of slaves and fugitives, toilers and recalcitrant domestics, secret orders and fraternal organizations. It is the history that arrives with us – as those who exist outside the nation, as the stateless, as the dead, as the property, as objects and tools, as sentient flesh. In meeting the heinous violence of the colony and the plantation, we have resisted, we have battled, we have fought to defeat our oppressors, we have struggled to live and to survive. In this protracted war, we have created networks of mutual aid, maroon communities, survival programs, and circles of care. We are Black in anarchy because of how we have lived and how we have died. We are Black in anarchy. The Nation on no Map illuminates the potentiality that resides there.
Saidiya Hartman, from the “Forward” to The Nation on no Map: “Forward: Black in Anarchy”
There they are. Thirty at the corner. Black, raw, ready. Sores in the city that do not want to heal.
II THE LEADERS
Jeff. Gene. Geronimo. And Bop. They cancel, cure and curry. Hardly the dupes of the downtown thing the cold bonbon, the rhinestone thing. And hardly in a hurry. Hardly Belafonte, King, Black Jesus, Stokely, Malcolm X or Rap. Bungled trophies. Their country is a Nation on no map.
Jeff, Gene, Geronimo and Bop in the passionate noon, in bewitching night are the detailed men, the copious men. They curry, cure, they cancel, cancelled images whose Concerts are not divine, vivacious; the different tins are intense last entries; pagan argument; translations of the night.
The Blackstone bitter bureaus (bureaucracy is footloose) edit, fuse unfashionable damnations and descent; and exulting, monstrous hand on monstrous hand, construct, strangely, a monstrous pearl or grace.
III GANG GIRLS
A Rangerette
Gang Girls are sweet exotics. Mary Ann uses the nutrients of her orient, but sometimes sighs for Cities of blue and jewel beyond her Ranger rim of Cottage Grove. (Bowery Boys, Disciples, Whip-Birds will dissolve no margins, stop no savory sanctities.)
Mary is a rose in a whiskey glass.
Mary’s Februaries shudder and are gone. Aprils fret frankly, lilac hurries on. Summer is a hard irregular ridge. October looks away. And that’s the Year! Save for her bugle-love. Save for the bleat of not-obese devotion. Save for Somebody Terribly Dying, under the philanthropy of robins. Save for her Ranger bringing an amount of rainbow in a string-drawn bag. “Where did you get the diamond?” Do not ask: but swallow, straight, the spirals of his flask and assist him at your zipper; pet his lips and help him clutch you.
Love’s another departure. Will there be any arrivals, confirmations? Will there be gleaning?
Mary, the Shakedancer’s child from the rooming-flat, pants carefully, peers at her laboring lover …. Mary! Mary Ann! Settle for sandwiches! settle for stocking caps! for sudden blood, aborted carnival, the props and niceties of non-loneliness— the rhymes of Leaning.
Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Blackstone Rangers,” from Blacks (Chicago: Third World Press, 1987).
___
For more writing by William C. Anderson, see his website here.
William C. Anderson: State reform isn’t enough. Our times demand Black anarchism
We share again an essay by William C. Anderson, who continues to pursue his important work in black anarchism.
State reform isn’t enough. Our times demand Black anarchism
For many who are marginalised, the state has only ever kicked them around. Redress looks like power directly in the hands of people themselves
William C. Anderson
Open Democracy, 30/04/2022
At the present time, the world is at an impasse. This can only mean one thing: not that there is no way out, but that the time has come to abandon all the old ways, which have led to fraud, tyranny, and murder.
Aimé Césaire
I’m not here to explain Black anarchism, because Black anarchism explains itself. The times we’re living in speak to its relevance. Politics that can conceive liberation only through the nation-state apparatus cannot truly serve people who always fall outside of its considerations.
Those who are the most marginalised are not being liberated by the state forms that have only ever killed, excluded and kicked them around. Poor people, stateless people, migrants and oppressed people of all sorts are rendered disposable by the world’s ruling classes.
Radical transformation looks like power directly in the hands of people themselves, without minimising diversity in the name of borders, citizenship, and homogenising national identities.
What would it mean if people represented themselves directly, instead of the administrations of nation-states, politicians and ruling classes speaking on their behalf? In the US, during the civil rights and Black Power eras, this question led to the development of Black anarchism(s) and Black autonomy, through the work of Black radicals who turned to stateless socialism and more.
Lucy Parsons, a formerly enslaved Black woman, was one of the earliest identifiable Black anarchists. Pivotal in the labour movement of the 1920s and known as a powerful orator, she was described by the Chicago Police Department as “more dangerous than a thousand rioters”. Parsons had a complicated relationship with her racial identity, which is part of her long, dynamic story.
Parsons came long before the breakaway from civil rights era reformism and Black Power era statist politics that represents modern Black anarchism. The US-based cohort responsible for developing this includes, but is not limited to, radicals like: Martin Sostre, Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, Kuwasi Balagoon, JoNina Ervin, Ojore Lutalo and Ashanti Alston.
Sostre, who died in 2015, was an internationally known, self-described “politicised prisoner” who almost single-handedly transformed the prison system through his lawsuits. He was a community educator and won victories for the rights of those in prison, from political and religious freedoms to restricting the use of solitary confinement, to contesting the censorship of prison literature.
Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, who was mentored by Sostre, is a former Black Panther and activist at the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a key organisation in the American civil rights movement. JoNina Ervin, who eventually wed Lorenzo, is also a former Panther and was the last editor of the Black Panther Party newspaper.
Alston, Lutalo, and Balagoon were former Panthers and Black Liberation Army members. Lutalo was introduced to anarchism by Kuwasi, who brought his own unique perspective as a New Afrikan anarchist.
These are just some of the Black revolutionaries who decided that instead of choosing new representation, new reform and new masters, they wanted no masters at all.
I came into Black anarchism over ten years ago and sat with it quietly in the dominant state-socialist Left movement spaces where it didn’t fit. I watched anarchism in general be harangued as utopian, chaotic, white and impractical, while people regurgitated age-old political maxims about building a reformed or revolutionary state. I once held many of the same views about state-building and state-reform before I understood anarchism on its own terms, not based on popular misreadings or individuals.
The history of Black anarchism was completely neglected and, in retrospect, I see why it needed to be. Anarchism is a threat many can agree on. Not making populations an appendage of the nation-state poses a grave danger to the order of the world we know. The fact that statist factions on both the Left and the Right utilise the anarchist bogeyman as a target is crucial. Those who are preoccupied with attaining or weaponising state power for their own ends will regularly feel threatened by those who don’t see the state as the sole harbinger of liberation.
Black anarchism rejects coercive authority and oppressive top-down hierarchies as they exist across the entire political spectrum. It doesn’t pretend that anyone who claims (or has claimed) to be a liberator, speaking on behalf of the masses, cannot commit atrocities. And it recognises that acknowledging this, rather than denying it, is how stronger movements will grow.
In my new book ‘The Nation on No Map’, I expand my thinking around ‘the anarchism of Blackness’ as it’s appeared via the stateless condition of Black people throughout the African diaspora. This is not just about theory. What I’m highlighting is the reality of Black migration (forced or otherwise) and enslavement. That’s why in my book, I make a case for how Black anarchist history can appeal to a newly reinvigorated abolitionist movement, among other things.
The lives of many of the historical Black anarchists I have mentioned trace a familiar path of growth and development. Many traversed from the civil rights movement to Black nationalism and Black Power movements before arriving at anarchism. They are by no means one thing and should be allowed their diversity. There are multiple Black anarchisms, autonomies and anarchic tendencies. What they did with anarchism when they arrived at it is just as multifaceted as historic classical anarchisms are. A similarity many share is a rejection of what Sostre called “the wooden party line”. He rejected “some abstract political line or ideology” in favour of struggling for “human beings with lives to fulfil”.
Sostre is one reason that I see Black anarchism as a part of politics and history that’s not so nebulous it becomes incoherent. Rather, it’s realistic enough to hold the weighty truth of difference that has regularly gotten lost historically in the wills of individual leaders claiming to represent ‘the people’. The people are the people themselves, not a rhetorical football for whomever hopes to make use of them. We are all part of ‘the people’.
We are fighting for an existence where there are no states to deport, dispossess, murder, detain, imprison, pollute and police us on behalf of the ruling elite of the world. We’re talking about destroying the machinery of oppression, not renaming it or repurposing it so that it can be used to oppress again. That’s why for me, Black anarchism means moving away from and transcending all leftisms inundated with oversimplified ‘either/or’ sectarian binaries. We are struggling for something much greater.
There’s a way out. It’s an exit sign I’m pointing at – don’t get stuck staring at my finger.
___
From the Firestorm Cooperative …
Writer and activist William C. Anderson shares his latest work, The Nation On No Map, in a live virtual conversation with feminist writer Robyn Maynard. The Nation on No Map examines state power, abolition, and ideological tensions within the struggle for Black liberation while centering the politics of Black autonomy and self-determination. Amid renewed interest in Black anarchism among the left, Anderson offers a principled rejection of reformism, nation building, and citizenship in the ongoing fight against capitalism and white supremacism. As a viable alternative amidst worsening social conditions, he calls for the urgent prioritization of community-based growth, arguing that in order to overcome oppression, people must build capacity beyond the state.
Website: https://firestorm.coop/
William C. Anderson is a writer and activist from Birmingham, Alabama. His work has appeared in the Guardian, MTV, Truthout, British Journal of Photography, and Pitchfork, among others. He is the co-author of the book As Black as Resistance (AK Press 2018) and co-founder of Offshoot Journal. He also provides creative direction as one of the producers of the Black Autonomy Podcast. His writings have been included in the anthologies, Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? (Haymarket 2016) and No Selves to Defend (Mariame Kaba 2014).
Robyn Maynard is a Black feminist scholar based in Toronto. She is the author of Policing Black Lives: State violence in Canada from slavery to the present, published with Fernwood Publishing in 2017. She is the co-author, with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, of Rehearsals for Living, an epistolary text that explores the local and global dimensions of abolitionist and anti-colonial thought from Black and Indigenous feminist perspectives, forthcoming with Knopf (Canada) and Haymarket’s Abolitionist Papers series (US) in June of 2022. Her work has also appeared in the Toronto Star, the Montréal Gazette, Scholar & Feminist, and has been translated into French and German.
___
Anarchism is the “inheritance” of the dispossessed, the legacy of slaves and fugitives, toilers and recalcitrant domestics, secret orders and fraternal organizations. It is the history that arrives with us – as those who exist outside the nation, as the stateless, as the dead, as the property, as objects and tools, as sentient flesh. In meeting the heinous violence of the colony and the plantation, we have resisted, we have battled, we have fought to defeat our oppressors, we have struggled to live and to survive. In this protracted war, we have created networks of mutual aid, maroon communities, survival programs, and circles of care. We are Black in anarchy because of how we have lived and how we have died. We are Black in anarchy. The Nation on no Map illuminates the potentiality that resides there.
Saidiya Hartman, from the “Forward” to The Nation on no Map: “Forward: Black in Anarchy”
___
The Blackstone Rangers
By Gwendolyn Brooks
I
AS SEEN BY DISCIPLINES
There they are.
Thirty at the corner.
Black, raw, ready.
Sores in the city
that do not want to heal.
II
THE LEADERS
Jeff. Gene. Geronimo. And Bop.
They cancel, cure and curry.
Hardly the dupes of the downtown thing
the cold bonbon,
the rhinestone thing. And hardly
in a hurry.
Hardly Belafonte, King,
Black Jesus, Stokely, Malcolm X or Rap.
Bungled trophies.
Their country is a Nation on no map.
Jeff, Gene, Geronimo and Bop
in the passionate noon,
in bewitching night
are the detailed men, the copious men.
They curry, cure,
they cancel, cancelled images whose Concerts
are not divine, vivacious; the different tins
are intense last entries; pagan argument;
translations of the night.
The Blackstone bitter bureaus
(bureaucracy is footloose) edit, fuse
unfashionable damnations and descent;
and exulting, monstrous hand on monstrous hand,
construct, strangely, a monstrous pearl or grace.
III
GANG GIRLS
A Rangerette
Gang Girls are sweet exotics.
Mary Ann
uses the nutrients of her orient,
but sometimes sighs for Cities of blue and jewel
beyond her Ranger rim of Cottage Grove.
(Bowery Boys, Disciples, Whip-Birds will
dissolve no margins, stop no savory sanctities.)
Mary is
a rose in a whiskey glass.
Mary’s
Februaries shudder and are gone. Aprils
fret frankly, lilac hurries on.
Summer is a hard irregular ridge.
October looks away.
And that’s the Year!
Save for her bugle-love.
Save for the bleat of not-obese devotion.
Save for Somebody Terribly Dying, under
the philanthropy of robins. Save for her Ranger
bringing
an amount of rainbow in a string-drawn bag.
“Where did you get the diamond?” Do not ask:
but swallow, straight, the spirals of his flask
and assist him at your zipper; pet his lips
and help him clutch you.
Love’s another departure.
Will there be any arrivals, confirmations?
Will there be gleaning?
Mary, the Shakedancer’s child
from the rooming-flat, pants carefully, peers at
her laboring lover ….
Mary! Mary Ann!
Settle for sandwiches! settle for stocking caps!
for sudden blood, aborted carnival,
the props and niceties of non-loneliness—
the rhymes of Leaning.
Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Blackstone Rangers,” from Blacks (Chicago: Third World Press, 1987).
___
For more writing by William C. Anderson, see his website here.