(Note: the title is a quote from in a recent interview with )

On the Guardian letter (kinda)

That the Islamic Republic of Iran is, de facto, an anti-imperial State in our present international context is not a question. That carcerality is a defining feature of modern States, a core colonial-imperial infrastructure exported from and upheld to an outsized degree by the west (especially the US and Israel), is not a question. That the Guardian letter does not properly articulate this — that it does not offer a constructive analysis of the resulting tensions nor a useful outlook for anti-carceral international solidarity, insofar as revolutionary internationalism is concerned — is clear. There is no need to defend the letter or its signatories on these points.

It is, however, frustrating that many segments of the western left are sooner jumping to defend the anti-imperial position of the Islamic Republic than to clarify how their anti-imperialist praxis contends with carcerality across contexts and present an alternative anti-carceral outlook within their critique. It’s even more frustrating that this is so unsurprising.

The sib X, from HoodSchoolNYC, hit the nail on the head when they penned this:

I think a lot of the western left, and right for that matter, engages politics like sports teams mascots. There’s a certain decadence to an “anti imperialism” that never requires a drop of your blood — only statements, open letters and unfounded audacity… It’s all so unserious. Safiya Bukhari said, “it could be that, after all, we don’t want the same things”, maybe that is true. What frustrates me most is that despite freedom dreams or slogans, the proverbial big bad wolf of imperialism sleeps peacefully each night in the house we all live in.

The evident lack of substantive anti-imperialism in the west — that is, the kind which would position progressive and anti-war forces against empire’s existence in their ‘internationalist’ practice — is telling. Where is the solidarity with teeth so needed in this moment?

At present, ‘anti-imperialism’ in the west largely amounts to sectarian navel gazing, sideline cheering, and moral posturing of the sort we see in the Guardian letter.

‘Narrative war’ is waged between factions of leftists in a virtual ‘marketplace of ideas’ in a propaganda economy that metabolizes their open letters and statements — fueling their hostilities and feeding off their content, rendering the bulk of their interventions materially insignificant, relegating them to silos in our current media ecosystem. Here, ‘anti-imperialism’ is largely assessed by one’s rhetorical fealty to whatever stance or analysis their niche of leftists has deemed correct. “Hollow”, ironically, characterizes this all quite well.

Criticisms can be pointed at the individuals, groups, media outlets, and social media accounts comprising these factions — many, justifiably so. But at what point does this counterproductive form of practice itself receive greater scrutiny?

At what point do insights from those who have been naming the issues of this approach to ‘solidarity’, analyzing the conditions from which it emerges and the forces perpetuating it, get foregrounded? At what point will the work of developing material bases of power at the grassroots level become the primary site from which revolutionary internationalism is conceptualized and discussed, specifically among ‘anti-imperialists’ in the west?

To these ends, non-statist and anti-statist frameworks (e.g. anarchism, autonomism) have great value. But a pervasive left anti-anarchism is blurring this reality.

Reflection on left anti-anarchism

Elder Ashanti Alston made multiple crucial points at the 2025 National Black Radical Organizing Conference.

During a panel discussion , anarchism and anti-imperialism had been presented as fundamentally at odds. Having an affinity for anarchism was presented in one case, by elder Ajamu Baraka, as emblematic of one’s unpreparedness “to subject themselves to the discipline of structure, the discipline of organization.” He described it as a form of ‘individualism’, that “plays into the fundamental liberalism of this capitalist, backward society.”, and which ultimately undermines a truly revolutionary praxis in both national and international contexts.

Ajamu’s characterization of anarchism and what prompts many radicals (especially Black and Indigenous) to draw upon it in their praxes was off. In the context of Black radicalism, anarchism has proven especially useful in developing alternative forms of organization and concepts of how our liberation struggle may look, as decentralized and horizontal practice are two of its ideological tenets. This has enabled deeper reflection on and more direct confrontation with how we reproduce (and have upheld) oppressive systems in and through our own movements.

Elaborating this, and anarchism’s utility in this regard, Ashanti said:

We have really got to see ourselves, like Jalil Muntaqim says, as our own liberators… [When] it comes to leadership, the culture of it has to change so that we can really see how the contamination of this empire is in us. That’s that trojan horse, within us. And if we do not factor that in, we will eventually repeat the madness of this empire and defeat our own goals. So it has to change.

He went on, with reference to the ‘People’s Senate’ elder Jihad Abdulmumit presented on, to highlight the urgency of coming together to make practical gains at the local level:

Don’t give up what you do or who you are, but we have got to find a way to be on some common page… so we can do things like a united front, because we all got so much to offer [in practice]. We should not feel like we’re battling, different organizations, because we’re not on some ideological agreement… Where I’m at now, up in Providence, there were beefs between one organization and another over ideological shit. And I said to them, “What block do you control?” What are you beefing about? As if you’re on the precipice of capturing State power tomorrow. Be real.

What have you organized? Where and with whom? To what ends and by what means? What material impact have your efforts had? These are the questions being displaced by progressives and ‘anti-imperialists’ who insist statism must define the terms of internationalism.

It’s annoying (at times, aggravating) to watch leftist geopolitical back and forths persist to no end. Especially when these back and forths have little to no impact on (nor basis in) conditions and struggles on the ground, in places those talking live. And even more so, when they fail to think beyond approaches to international solidarity that have proven ineffective time and again.

The posturing of ‘activist’ influencers and academics — projecting radical aesthetics, referencing revolutionary traditions, enlisting the language and imagery of liberation struggle — to bolster their stances in debates steeped in liberal assumptions. The detached spectating and speculating on global realities they, nor those in their audience in most cases, have the capacity to materially impact due to their lack of locally organized power and their neglect of liberation struggles where they are. This routine is tired.

The centering of ‘official’ political arenas, ‘recognized’ political actors, and legality when analyzing our terrain of struggle and talking ‘movement strategy’. The incessant appeals to western governments and institutions, which (we should all be aware) would be destroyed by their own hand and take the whole planet down with them before they would act outside or against their colonial-imperial imperatives. These methods are played out.

The conflation of people with States, and accompanying assumptions of some homogenous position inherent to people in the imperial core, especially those within the borders of the US. The extension of these assumptions to people on the imperial peripheries in relation to the States they live under. The erasure of perspectives and insights from those, both in the core and on the peripheries, whose lives cannot be secured and whose liberation cannot be realized through any State. These analyses are lacking.

The marginalization of people and collectives doing so much necessary work on the ground — building and organizing autonomously where they are, in ways that can cultivate an anti-imperialism with real teeth. The dismissal and demonization of non-statist and anti-statist tendencies, which conceptualize and struggle to materialize internationalism ‘from below’ toward decolonization, abolition, and autonomy. Is this what’s passing as ‘principled anti-imperialism’ now?

What are we doing here? Help me understand.

What value is there in brushing aside radical Black and Indigenous insights on the basis of them resonating with or drawing upon anarchism? In remaining ignorant as to how the internal colonization and slow genocide of Indigenous and New Afrikan peoples/nations persist as the foundations of US settler-empire? In neglecting to consider the ways this reality bears on the ‘hows’ of liberation struggle on Turtle Island; of what those ‘hows’ may mean for revolutionary internationalisms emanating from the imperial core; of why these things unsettle statism as an ideological tenet? There is none.

What is principled about infantilizing and erasing revolutionary ancestors, elders, and contemporaries because their anarchist/autonomist politics unsettle your analytical frame? About alienating radicals in ‘international solidarity’ spaces because their anarchic/autonomous approaches to struggle do not fit in your brand of leftism? About calling on ‘anti-imperialists’ to “eradicate anarchism”, as Evan Katsounis did in a Vocal Politics interview earlier this year; saying it “should not be tolerated” in formations that “want to be effective”; all while anarchists are being actively targeted and repressed to an outsized degree in the imperial core? Nothing.

What serious reason is there to not embrace autonomous struggle within the belly of empire; to not run toward the challenges and possibilities it presents for anti-imperialism? Or to delude ourselves into believing no principled autonomous struggles are being waged by people on the peripheries; to convince ourselves those in anti-imperial States are not developing analyses and strategizing around similar challenges and possibilities therein? There is none.

What good is holding firm to statist lines (reformist or revolutionary) when they are doing nothing to further the development of a substantive anti-imperialism where we are?

Across the array of Black anarchic radicalisms, outlooks on international solidarity between Afrikans and other globally oppressed peoples against imperialism have been (and are being) articulated. These ought be highlighted more.

In A Soldier’s Story, revolutionary ancestor Kuwasi Balagoon laid out a means, grounded in autonomous struggles of internally colonized peoples, through which he believed anti-imperialism must develop within the US settler-empire:

I feel that we [Indigenous and New Afrikan people] must build revolutionary institutions that buttress on survival through collectives, which in turn should form federations. Grassroots collective building can begin immediately… We must begin where we are, with each other and the time we don’t waste. I think that the building of revolutionary collectives and forming of federations of collectives is the most practical and righteously rewarding process of preserving and enhancing life and developing the character of all nations. We can change ourselves and the world.

The Black Autonomy Federation presented a framework of African Inter-Communalism, through which anti-imperialism can be conceptualized and materialized ‘from below’:

The Black Autonomy Federation’s / Anarchist ideals lead logically to internationalism or more precisely trans-nationalism, which means beyond the nation-state… [We] must organize for inter-communalism, or world relations between African people and their revolutionary social movements… The Black liberation movement needs an organization capable of international coordination of the Black liberation struggle, a world federation of African peoples… It would involve the masses of people themselves, not just national leaders or nation states.

In Anarkata: A Statement, the Afrofuturist Abolitionists of the Americas articulated an “explicitly pan-Afrikan” vision, oriented against western imperialism and the ecological devastation produced by it, as a core component of anarkata politics:

Finally, we take Anarkata politics to be relevant to Pan Afrikan liberation — the liberation of Black peoples worldwide — in an age of massive climate instability. If Black struggle and liberation of the planet are intertwined, then environmental issues force us to center Black/Afrikan people suffering under Western imperialism and neocolonialism. We put Afrika at the center of the extractive processes of capital that uphold global ecocide. Afrika must be emancipated and those who are unjustly domesticated in the belly of the beast, in the imperial core… have a duty to fight against the militarism and imperialism that have pushed the planet to disaster.

These are just a few examples among many from Black anarchic radicals.

Non-statist and anti-statist frames (particularly those of colonized peoples) offer unique analytic and practical clarity around interlocking oppressions in relation to revolutionary internationalism. These frames develop further through the very tensions around anti-imperialism that progressive and anti-war forces in the west are unwilling or unable to contend with head on in principled ways.

The practices they articulate as imperative require us to be embedded in the struggles where we are — accountable to our communities, to the process of acting on our conditions toward revolutionary ends here and now. And the ends they take as objectives necessitate the use of anarchic means, which turn empires ire against us in our struggles insofar as we are effective.

Revolutionary internationalism requires a shared investment in the collapse of empire and the entire international order developed through its lording over the world. It requires unyielding struggle within the core that rejects the sanctity of legality, government, and the infrastructures through which these things are upheld. It requires, as the authors of Black Armed Joy put it, “unmediated and uncompromising conflict with the State and Capital.”

This conflict, and the autonomous struggles through which it is surfaced, is where anti-statist frames articulate anti-imperialism from — especially as it ought materialize in the imperial core.

Considering this all. What’s the beef about? Really.

In closing

I have no interest in carrying water for anarchism, nor in backing individual anarchists’ positions regarding geopolitics.

I also refuse to pretend anarchism has nothing, or little, to offer concerning revolutionary internationalism. I refuse to pretend contributions have not been (and are not being) made by anarchists and anarchic radicals — especially Black and Indigenous siblings. Any person or group peddling “anarchism bad” narratives is ignorant or confused; either way, they shouldn’t be taken serious on this subject.

No individual, collective, organization, or tendency has it all right. None of us really have this thing figured out. If we did, imperialism wouldn’t be a topic of conversation — nor would carceral systems, capitalism, patriarchy, or anything else of the sort.

Some internal humility and self-criticism from those advocating anti-imperialism surrounding what is really being done — in these back and forths, and on the ground — is sorely needed. For many, dropping the dogged anti-anarchism would be a good start. There are valuable insights being lost and important work being overlooked, for the sake of leftisms that are not meeting the moment we are in.

Tighten up.

For those in the west truly committed to bringing US settler-empire to its knees and realizing the liberation of oppressed peoples everywhere. For those who want to materialize a substantive anti-imperialism; who want to develop a revolutionary internationalist praxis where they are — a solidarity that has teeth. Here are three suggestions that may prove useful:

1. Get active locally (if you aren’t already) to build power outside and against the State you are in. It doesn’t need to be flashy, and you don’t need to have the perfect plan. Just get with some other folks with similar commitments, identify an issue or need, and organize around it without roping any ‘official’ governance bodies in.

2. Question statism. Ask how internationalism may look beyond nation-States, and how it may be developed (or is developing) between oppressed people engaged in autonomous struggle. Consider why such questions may be necessary in our (historic and geographical) context, and who has been asking them longer than you. While doing so, examine internal colonization. Consider how the ongoing colonial oppression of Indigenous and New Afrikan peoples/nations on Turtle Island bears on the terrain of struggle in the imperial core.

3. Learn as you walk. Allow yourself to say “I don’t know.”, and “I’m still thinking through this.” Push yourself to ask “Why’s that?”, “What isn’t being considered?”, “Who is being left out?”, “How can we do this better?”, and so on.

Stop trying so hard to be “on the right side of history”. Make history. Help write the end of empire through struggle.

My baseline understandings

1) There is no such thing as a ‘revolutionary State’, and statism — or State essentialism, in its varying forms — must be rejected to most effectively conceive of and struggle toward liberation. ‘States’ function to absorb or suppress people’s on-the-ground movement; to exert authority over how people within their jurisdiction organize themselves and relate to each other (domestically and abroad), such that a particular social-political-economic arrangement is reproduced and the position/power of a societies’ ruling classes is sustained. ‘Statism’ is a liberal philosophy which conceptualizes States as essential for the (societal scale) organization and protection of a nation/people. There are many complexities in conversations around national sovereignty and international order. These complexities can be most comprehensively and usefully engaged through non-statist and anti-statist frameworks.

2) States also exist in relation to other States and, depending on their position within an international order, they may be anti-imperial in a given context. Their being so does not make them revolutionary, and it does not mean they are vehicles for liberation. It instead signifies their relation to political-economic hegemony in a particular international context — where States function as the recognized subjects (i.e. sovereign political actors). That States have become the recognized subjects shaping national and international concepts of organization and struggle, that statism is a logic undergirding most nationalisms and internationalisms (hegemonic and counter-hegemonic), is a problem of a (neo)liberal/(neo)colonial politics developed through euro-amerikan imposition on the world. These politics define the terms of ‘order’ in our geopolitical context. An ‘anti-imperial’ State or bloc may reconfigure the international order; but so long as the politics remain, liberation is not realized. This is why I’m not invested in an ‘anti-imperialism’ that cheers on counter-hegemonic States and blocs.

3) I believe in a practice of situating oneself in relation to struggle, and analyzing from where one is at. This is the reason you rarely hear heavy criticisms from me aimed at anti-imperial States, or at revolutionary movements outside US-occupied Turtle Island. I do not believe it is my place to speak in condemnation of such things, nor do I think it is of much consequence given our conditions of extreme disempowerment and popular apathy here. My solidarity is with oppressed peoples in their struggles for reprieve and liberation. My reprimand is for those, especially situated where I am, presenting as authorities on ‘anti-imperialism’ (or anything else of the sort) while neglecting liberation struggles where they are.

Share

Subscribe now

Thanks for reading!

If you enjoyed this piece, consider joining my Patreon. In addition to pieces like this; I’m sharing my reading notes, shorter musings, and livestreams.

Becoming a member (free or paid) gives you access to everything. Paid memberships help support me financially.

Join my Patreon

Some reading and video recs

Black Anarchism in the US (William C. Anderson)

The Dragon and The Hydra (Russell “Maroon” Shoatz)

Organization and Spontaneity (Kimathi Mohammed)

Kickbacks, Ancestors, and Wildcats (Nsambu Za Suekama)

Pan-African Revolt for a New Century (Atticus Bagby Williams & Kamau Hawkins)

When I transition, I want to tell our martyrs and ancestors what we won.

I want to tell them how we carried their lives and struggles forward through our own, what we left for our siblings to carry forward.

And when Judgement Day comes, I pray my posture says “Allahu A’lam”.

Struggling against oppression (internally and externally) for truth and justice is an obligation on Muslims, whether we take it up or not.

As Imam Jamil Al-Amin would say, “Islam is [in part] a methodology of struggle.” One premised on the fact that the condition of our nafs bears on the state of our ummah bears on how we act within and upon this dunya. Jihad is all encompassing in that way.

I personally can’t recite Surah Al-Fatiha in an attentive manner without this fact coming to mind. Without feeling our obligation to struggle in my stomach. Without questioning if the way I’m relating to the oppressions within myself, in and across my communities, and of this world is reflective of the words I’m reciting in that moment.

It’s an unsettling experience to hit that mat knowing I’ve neglected this part of my deen, because salat forces one to confront what that neglect means.

It’s a deeply affirming and humbling experience to hit the mat knowing I’ve been intentional with that part of my deen, because salat feeds that intention and forces one to reflect on where it can deepen.

If I don’t get up struggling with how I can be in better alignment with the will of Allah SWT, and more substantively oriented against oppression, I believe my prayer was insincere on some level and I’m making a lie out of my Shahada.

This undergirds everything for me.

Still, my sense of responsibility to our ancestors grounds my desire to win and deeply informs my ‘hows’ in struggle.

Our responsibility to learn from the lives and struggles of those who came before us; their work, their relationships, their successes, their mistakes. That’s our responsibility to be in proper relationship with our ancestors.

To respect what they teach/offer, and to walk with/in that respect. Even where we depart on particulars of their ‘hows’.

When we neglect this responsibility, we hit a wall every time. We struggle, but them means and ends... yeah, those get confused real quick.

We wind up pretending our ancestors don’t exist. Refusing to be in ongoing relationship with them, being dishonest about their lives, erasing parts of their complexity. No go.

I’d be ashamed to look those who came before us in the eye knowing I’ve been moving that way, because it’s disrespectful; just like I’d be ashamed walking up to my moms having done wrong by her.

When I transition, I want to tell our martyrs and ancestors what we won. I want to tell them how we carried their lives and struggles forward through our own, what we left for our siblings to carry forward.

And when Judgement Day comes, I pray my posture says “Allahu A’lam”.

Share

Subscribe now

Thanks for reading!

If you enjoyed this piece, consider joining my Patreon. In addition to pieces like this; I’m sharing my reading notes, livestreams, and educational materials I work on.

Becoming a member (free or paid) gives you access to everything. Paid memberships help support me financially.

Join my Patreon

Video Imam Jamil quote is from

My (first) politicization experience from 2018 to 2022 went from a process of deradicalization to an ongoing constraint of my radical energy through the ‘critical Black American’ framework I was originally deradicalized through. There’re a good deal of essays and speeches from this time — many of which I put out or gave publicly — where I hold to, and speak toward, this ‘critical Americanism’ grounded in ‘Black American’ identity to articulate my understandings of ‘the plight of Black America’.

I put in hella hours and energy building frameworks, bringing people together, and running educational programming around these understandings. I sat with more “movers & shakers” in university admin and local/state governance than I like to remember; discussing, proposing, and in some cases negotiating things through these (and adjacent) understandings over and over. I’ve been platformed by these folks, given opportunities by these folks, and in certain instances learned from or worked under these folks.

Over the first two years or so of this period, I became an increasingly critical, connected, and aspirational Black amerikan nationalist. Then, from late 2020 through 2022, an extended barrage of deaths to friends and family, other encounters with death, and struggles I faced due to my Madness (schizo diagnosis) hit me hard. All of these linked directly, in varying ways, to what had truly made me angry in my younger years; the anti-Black systems I couldn’t name then, but was encountering language to point out now.

By 2022’s end, I had become an enraged and pessimistic Black amerikan nationalist, in a state of heightening disillusionment. Over the course of 2023 I would break from the amerikanism I had wrapped my Blackness up in thus far.

During this time I had also become central to a lot of campus organizing work at Virginia Tech (Black activist, student governance, and Palestine solidarity stuff). Anarchism deeply informed how I approached this, and in that context I saw the value in its analysis of power, critique of hierarchy, and clarity on means-ends unity in real time.

The space making work we did through Black Mindedness during this time was very reflective of anarchism, as were my writings and public remarks. The broader organizing and activist efforts I played a key role in on campus tended toward the tendency as well; at least when I wasn’t dismissed or demonized within the organizing group. Over the past 3 years much of this work has proven effective, culminating in multiple substantive shifts, especially in the Black community at Virginia Tech. I attribute this, in large part, to the anarchic methods we tested through practice.

This is the period I believe I stopped being a Black amerikan nationalist in any way. My politics went from critical Black amerikanism, to anti-nationalism, to specifically anti-amerikanism (in a Black radical register). My writings and speeches on amerika chronicle the progression hilariously well: America’s Boots: The Role of Alpha Phi Alpha (late 2022); Molding Consensus: To Re-Root the American Tree (early 2023); Toward No Americas (late 2023); Radical Exhaustion: America Says I’m Crazy, Do You Agree? (early 2024); To Hell With Amerikkka! We Gonna Live! (late 2024). Queen Mother Moore’s classic rendition of ‘My Country Tis of Thee’ captures the sentiment I arrived at perfectly (watch below).

My break from amerikanism, through anarchism and Black radicalism, is what clarified the fundamental antagonism between our people and amerika (i.e., the US settler-empire) for me; as well as the confusion amerikanism sews within us. That clarification, nested within my anti-statism, is what decoupled ‘nation’ from ‘State’, and the assertion of nationhood from ‘statism’, for me.

By 2025 my politics had become Pan-Afrikan, but more so in the autonomist way Modibo Kadalie and Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin talk about than the statist way Kwame Nkrumah conceived of. This is when and why national questions began holding significant weight in my thinking, despite them bearing less apparently on our on the ground work. I reflect on how these questions informed my own relationship to national identity while discussing the value of asserting New Afrikan nationhood in my piece, The problem with ‘Black American’ identity.

Internationalism has become a much less abstract concept for me and numerous siblings I work with.

Over the past year or so, exploring revolutionary Black/Afrikan nationalist analyses — considering their relationships to autonomist struggles (on Turtle Island especially), seeing what understandings emerge through this engagement and how they translate to our work — has become more important to me for this immediate reason. It’s felt almost like a natural development in efforts to articulate a more principled and pointed frame in our work.

I said once, “I don’t think I’ve ever held a politic and not tried to put it into practice.” That wasn’t a lie. Further, I’ve never held a politic (reactionary or revolutionary) and not tried to articulate it for the sake of sharing with others, in real life and in relative mass.

I think often when I speak toward the value of us asserting anti-colonial peoplehood and nationhoods, and the importance of us getting clear on national identity (namely, New Afrikan); the questions I’m thinking through and understandings I present may be perceived as having developed through simple (ungrounded) abstraction, or some inconsequential hyper-fixation on my part. But I share a lot of what I share having walked through the contradictions being named and their consequences publicly, offline, and oftentimes loudly.

Share

Thanks for reading!

If you enjoyed this piece, consider joining my Patreon. In addition to pieces like this; I’m sharing my reading notes, shorter musings, and livestreams.

Becoming a member (free or paid) gives you access to everything. Paid memberships help support me financially.

Join my Patreon

Some great works to check out

Ashanti Alston — Beyond Nationalism, But Not Without It

Chokwe Lumumba — The Roots of the New Afrikan Independence Movement

Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin — African Inter-Communalism

A note: This is a (lightly edited) essay I wrote for my metaphysics class in Fall 2024. After reading Huey P. Newton’s Revolutionary Suicide, I wanted to revisit topics of freedom and determinism (my favorites in high school & early undergrad); the ‘I am We’ epilogue inspired this writing, as well as my deeper engagement with the concept of Ubuntu down the line. Nagel’s The View from Nowhere is the book being referred to throughout, as it was required for class, but the ideas would be better detailed in conversation with more works. I intend on re-articulating what’s here further down the line, insha’Allah. Nonetheless, when I re-read the essay (literally just now lol) I thought, “This is pretty alright, worth posting!” So I hope you find some value in it and it inspires your inquiry, insha’Allah.

Peace in struggle,
Emon

We aim here to make clear any discussion of freedom filtered through the logic of atomization will prove fruitless. By ‘fruitless’ we mean there will remain an unresolved tension between what Nagel calls the “external perspective” on freedom and the “internal perspective”. This fruitlessness is not evidence that discussions of freedom are pointless in themselves, nor is it evidence of some inherent disconnect between the internal perspective and the external perspective. It is evidence of a false premise. The false premise can be put like this: I am just me; you are just you; when combined, to make us two, a separate ‘we’ emerges out of me and you.

We reject this logic outright, and reject conceptions of the internal and external perspectives, autonomy and responsibility, and ultimately freedom which are rooted in this logic (i.e. the logic of atomization). We, instead, root our conception of these things in a logic of interconnectedness. This logic can be put this way: I am We; you are We; we can be nothing other than We; through our oneness We may be free.

The following sections will: one, layout Nagel’s conception of the internal and external perspectives on freedom; two, elucidate the logic of atomization undergirding Nagel’s conception; and three, articulate a basis, in the fundamentality of interaction, for rooting our conceptions of autonomy, responsibility, and freedom in a logic of interconnectedness.

Nagel’s Conception of the Internal and External in Relation to Freedom

Two problems, on Nagel’s account, are generated from one’s taking up the external perspective on freedom — that of autonomy, and that of responsibility. These problems are generated out of a tension between the internal and external — the internal perceiving one’s actions and those of others as free, and the external presenting these actions as deterministic. The external perspective, through this lens, is a threat to one’s security in believing (assuming) the internal perspective to be true. As one further engages and takes on the external perspective, their self-association with freedom comes further and further under scrutiny.

This self-association, however, does not subside. Instead it “rebels”, sustaining itself in one’s mind through their intuitive sense of their own autonomy and responsibility, along with that of others. With this intuition comes confusion. Nagel states, “[While] we can easily evoke disturbing effects by taking up an external view of our own actions and the actions of others, it is impossible to give a coherent account of the internal view of action which is under threat.”

This confusion, for Nagel, “naturally suggests that the threat is unreal, and that an account of freedom can be given which is compatible with the [external] view…”, but at the same time, “[all] such accounts fail to allay the feeling that, looked at from far enough outside, agents are helpless and not responsible”. These understandings, paired with the fact that, “it [is not] possible simply to dissolve our unanalyzed sense of autonomy and responsibility… either in relation to ourselves or in relation to others.”, leads Nagel to say, regarding freedom: “We are apparently condemned to want something impossible.”

Evident here is an apparently unresolvable tension between the internal and external when one engages the question of freedom. Because a “coherent account” can be given of the external and not the internal, though, Nagel takes the external perspective to be superior (i.e. providing a more complete view) to the internal. On these grounds, he subordinates internal/subjective appearance to external/objective reality. He conceives of one’s sense of autonomy, responsibility, and thus freedom, as a manifestation of the internal; and one’s recognition of an objective, deterministic, reality of which they are a part (with no agency), as a manifestation of the external. All this leaves Nagel with a conclusion regarding freedom characterized primarily by the previously mentioned unresolved tension. He states, “[It] seems to me that nothing approaching the truth has yet been said on this subject.”

Atomization: Conflictual Relationship of the Internal and External

Within Nagel’s perception of this tension lies an unquestioned presumption regarding the relationship between the internal and external — that the relationship is conflictual and irreconcilable on the question of freedom. This is what his engagement with and conceptualization of autonomy, responsibility, and freedom is filtered through.

In taking the internal and external to be irreconcilable on the question of freedom, this presumption takes the prospect of arriving at something “approaching truth” regarding the existence of freedom (or the lack thereof) to be contradictory to the nature of the relationship between the internal and external perspectives. What is implied, here, is that something “approaching truth” could be elucidated only if one of the perspectives was totally suppressed by the other. If one taking on the external perspective could fully stymie their intuitive sense of the internal, for instance, one could be sure that such a thing as freedom does not exist.

This perception and its accompanying presumption take the internal to be a perspective which is only challenged in a substantive way by the external. It takes the individual — whose mind, upon reflection, this conflictual relationship plays out in — as being necessarily segmented away from the rest of the world and static in their reflection on the question of freedom. It takes the material world to be a threat to one’s sober reflection upon the internal and external. In short, it takes for granted that something “approaching truth” on the question of freedom can only arise out of the atomized individual.

Because of this, the tension between the internal and external is acknowledged but not explored and engaged substantively. It is instead taken to exist as a foil in the atomized individual’s pursuit of something “approaching truth on this subject” of freedom; an ever present, insurmountable, obstacle in the pursuit of truth — as opposed to an entryway for inquiry in pursuit of understanding.

This lack of substantive engagement with the tension between the internal and external, along with the lack of engagement with the interaction of multiple internals, results from the logic of atomization. Engaging the question of freedom through this logic leaves Nagel with something like a non-conclusion because the logic itself is inadequate for comprehensively inquiring on the subject of freedom — nevermind thoroughly addressing the question.

Interconnectedness: Symbiotic Relationship of the Internal and External

We reject the logic of atomization and opt instead for a logic of interconnectedness. The necessity of engaging the question of freedom through this logic is made evident through an exploration of the interaction of multiple internals, and through an exploration of the materialization of the external. If we presume restrictions on / threats to freedom lie outside the individual, for those restrictions/threats to become real (expressed materially) interaction is necessary.

If I want to kill myself by getting hit by a car, and I make a decision to walk in front of the first moving car I see (intending and expecting to die), and I am pulled back and restrained by another individual right before the car would’ve hit me, one of two things, on Nagel’s view, must be true: one, from the internal perspective, both my free action (movement) and free choice (intention) were stifled, and thus my freedom was restricted by another individual via their free choice and action overriding my own; or two, from the external perspective, what I intended and expected to happen was in disalignment with what was to happen, and what was to happen was materialized through the concurrent action of another individual. What lies at the center of both of these possible explanations is mediation.

In the first explanation, my attempt to materialize my vision of a future world (one where I am hit by the car and die) comes into conflict with another’s vision upon seeing my attempt. Upon this other individual’s intervention, our visions come into interaction, and out of this interaction the other’s vision materializes, nullifying my vision and leading us both to have new visions in lieu of our present reality.

This explanation assumes the freedom of each individual at all times. It takes reality at each moment to be the emergent result of all the (material) interactions between the visions of everyone and everything. The mediator between the internal (one’s vision) and the external (reality), here, is the interaction of multiple internals through the free action of multiple agents.

In the second explanation, what was to happen was going to happen. My attempt to materialize my vision of a future world was determined; it was bound to be overridden through the objective future world’s materialization. The medium this materialization happened through was another individual’s determined action interacting with my own.

This explanation assumes determinism. It takes reality at each moment to be the emergent result of each individual’s determined actions playing out together, interacting with each other. The mediator between one’s vision and reality, here, is the medium through which the objective future world materializes itself — the interaction between multiple actors.

In both explanations, what would become reality required mediation to materialize; reality required a mediator in order to be, and this mediator was interaction. This sort of phenomenon of mediation can be observed all around us. For water to be, a mediator — the interaction (bonding) of two Hydrogen atoms and one Oxygen atom — is required; there are many more examples you can and may be thinking of now. Mediation, then, is a necessary quality of any emergent reality (such as our own). With this, and drawing on the consistent mediator we’ve identified thus far (interaction), we can say that reality emerges through the mediation of interaction.

Conclusion

Freedom, whether it exists or not, is irrelevant to this fact about reality. However, this fact gives us a more dynamic and comprehensive perspective to engage the question of freedom through — that of interaction. With this perspective comes a necessary discarding of the presumed atomized individual; because if interaction is a necessary quality of reality, the logic of atomization will always prove insufficient for thoroughly understanding freedom. The relationship between the internal and external, which Nagel sees as conflictual, we understand to be continuous and symbiotic — made expressed through necessary and ongoing interaction.

From this recognition, we can name the interconnectedness as fundamental to our reality. Our conceptions of autonomy, responsibility, and as such freedom, therefore, must be rooted in a logic of interconnectedness. We must say, ‘I am We’.

Share

The epilogue I mentioned

I Am We (huey P Newton)

103KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

A Note: This isn’t some comprehensive read. It’s just me reflecting on where I’m at literally right now, and musing on what the deen is to me.

It’s really easy to fall into a funk. And a funk doesn’t always feel funky; but when you realize you’re in it, it takes a lot to ignore. We are told in Surah al-Baqarah, “Fasting is prescribed upon you, as it was those before you, that you may become mindful [of Allah].”

When Ramadan came to an end, I committed myself to some very simple things — continuing some very simple, very constructive, practices. One that’s of note here is a commitment I made to fast Sunnah (Mondays and Thursdays). Upon making this commitment in particular, I felt good, excited even. Because I had a fresh sense of how keeping up with it may benefit me and improve my work.

Over the past few weeks though, I’ve skirted on this commitment (as with most of the others). And you know, when one is skirting on commitments to the self, those obligations to others become that much harder to keep up.

About two weeks ago, when I found myself up at 3am doing something close to 50 rakat tryna make up prayers, it was evident I was falling off my center. I’ve found that my consistency and promptness with salat is a tell-tale sign of my follow through with everything else I have going on. As I find myself here now, naming what I could’ve been frank about then, it’s clear I didn’t take heed the way I would’ve been wise to.

Imam Jamil Al-Amin (may Allah grant him Jannah), across many of his khutbahs would say, “You can’t beat anybody if you can’t beat yourself.”

In light of having not fasted Sunnah the past few weeks, when I’d committed myself to doing so, I am not surprised by the difficulty I’ve had following through on my commitment of writing and releasing something (literally anything) every other week. I am not surprised by the more important organizational commitments I’ve dropped the ball on over the past few weeks. I am not surprised by my skirting once on our community clean-up, then nearly flaking again after rescheduling it.

This isn’t to reprimand myself. Things like this happen. It’s, instead, to clarify my action in light of my commitments. It’s about mindfulness of the inner (greater) struggle to stick to those commitments.

The struggles we each wage within ourselves are what we carry into the struggles we wage together against the deception, corruption, and oppression of this world. The way we each engage in the latter is reflective of our practices in the former. This is why jihad al-nafs is called al-jihad al-akbar.

Tomorrow, insha’Allah, I will fast. Not to get out of my funk but to actually stick to a commitment I made to myself at Ramadan’s end.

Islam is a deen. It’s a way of life. Often people take Islam to be about submission without engaging what is being submitted to.

Allah has 99 names which clarify this. A few are Al-Haqq (The Absolute Truth), Al-Adl (The Utterly Just), Al-Wasi (The All-Encompassing). We should consider what it means to submit our will to a truth and justice that is absolute and all encompassing.

Allah is Al-Hasib (The Reckoner). What may it mean to be mindful of this, to accord our actions with this, to embrace an inevitable, unavoidable, reckoning — all with the recognition there will be no hiding from what is true, and no denying what is just, when this reckoning comes upon us?

Allah is Al-Basir (All Seeing), Al-Sami (All Hearing), Al-Khabir (All Aware). What may it mean to be mindful of this being the nature of absolute truth and of what is utterly just?

That no one can escape what is true and what is just, that these things are ever present across space and time, may tell us a reckoning with them is always upon us. Allah knows best.

We are also told in Surah al-Baqarah, “wherever you may turn, there is the face of Allah.” To be mindful of this in our reflection and action is Taqwa (consciousness of Allah). To submit ones will to Allah (The Absolute Truth, The Utterly Just, The All Encompassing) is to practice Islam.

Something I’ve learned over the past 2 years is that the benefits of Islam are not for Allah, but for those who struggle (internally and externally) for the sake of struggling better. For one to embrace it as their way of life is to commit oneself to lifelong jihad in the way of Allah — Ar-Rahman (The Most Merciful), Ar-Rahim (The Especially Merciful).

Deen (way of life) bears on jihad (struggle). We can understand struggle itself, then, to be a site of ongoing reckoning. One where what is true and just becomes clearer through one’s proper alignment with principle — against deceit and oppression. Maybe the greatest mercy is found in that clarity; and the harshest judgement found in its obfuscation.

Share

A video I appreciate & that feels relevant

The following is a condensed overview of her embrace of Islam and revolution from the time she joined the Black Panther Party (BPP) up through her time as a political prisoner; and a brief reflection on some lessons from her experiences we should internalize.

Her full account of this time period and others, and her analyses on different aspects of revolutionary struggle, can be found in her book, The War Before. All the information here is drawn from there.

Coming into Revolutionary Commitment

Bukhari began working with the New York chapter of the BPP in 1969, helping with the Free Breakfast Program. Not too long after, in 1970, having experienced the lies, brutality, and repressive practices of the police first hand, she decided to become a full-time Party member; dropping out of college to struggle for our people’s liberation.

After the BPP split in 1971, with the intensified war being waged against Panthers by the State, Bukhari’s role as an aboveground liaison for the Black Liberation Army (BLA) and ongoing Panther work made her a target for police. Her unflinchingness, effectiveness, and deep connection with New York Black communities made her a threat to be neutralized in the eyes of the State. These same things kept her relatively well protected from the police in New York.

Early in 1975, though, she was captured and imprisoned in Virginia on baseless charges, given 40 years and facing the death penalty for some time. Upon her arrest, the FBI reported her to be, “notorious, dangerous... and known by law enforcement agencies nationwide”. Bukhari had been a Muslim for 4 years at this point.

Coming into Islam

Bukhari was introduced to Islam while defending the rights of the ‘New York Three’. Nuh Qayyam (may Allah grant him Jannah) was one of the three political prisoners she was defending, and is who she says, “made me see things differently [about God and Islam]”, when many of her comrades objected to the mix of Islam and revolution.

Bukhari had grown up in the church, become disillusioned witnessing the hypocrisy of the ‘saved’, and “decided there could not be a God if these people were going to heaven and others weren’t.” Nuh turned her toward a text that answered many of her questions about religion, namely those concerning the hypocrisy of professed ‘believers’. Upon reading the Quran for herself she decided to seriously study the ‘Islamic way of life’.

Bukhari notes:

As I studied, I learned that Allah makes Muslims, man does not. Which to me meant that simply declaring, “There is none worthy of worship but Allah”, does not make you Muslim. It is the intentions in your heart and your determination to struggle in the way of Allah that makes you Muslim.

This was clarified further for her in Surah 2, Ayat 190-193:

Fight in the cause of Allah those who oppress and fight against you, but do not exceed the limits... fight them until there is no more oppression... for oppression is surely worse than slaughter.

Her revolutionary commitment then, like that of Nuh and so many other Black revolutionaries, was not in conflict with Islam. It is, in fact, prescribed upon the Muslim to struggle against oppression, in alignment with that very commitment. With this knowledge, Bukhari says, “I declared Shahada [in 1971] and determined that I would stay and struggle in the ‘straight way’.” Her experiences and study in prison (1975-83) would test her deen, strengthen her imaan, and deepen her commitment to revolutionary struggle on all fronts.

Jihad in Captivity

The day she had taken her shahada, the Imam had given a khutbah (sermon) on jihad. Bukhari had learned that there are forms of external jihad, where one struggles against injustice and falsehood around them; and there are forms of internal (greater) jihad, where one struggles to resolve injustices and falsehood within them.

In prison, Bukhari saw and faced injustices spanning from a lack of religious accommodation, to near fatal medical neglect on the part of the prison, among other targeted abuses by the institution (including solitary confinement).

She struggled against the former with relatively quick success. Her first ramadan in prison, she fasted in her cell while not being allowed any meals from sundown to sunrise (no iftar and no suhoor). While there were other women there who ‘considered themselves Muslim’, they had not observed Ramadan or upheld other practices, and this meant there was no precedent for the fast on the part of the institution. Bukhari explains, “I began purchasing necessities from the commissary and as the women in the institution observed my practice, they began to make things available to me.” The following year, she (and presumably others who observed) were accommodated during the month of Ramadan. The medical neglect she faced, would require a more sustained struggle.

The Struggle for Medical Care

A little under two years after her imprisonment, Bukhari escaped the institution. There was a track record of horrid medical treatment there. She recounts the experiences of just a few prisoners:

Their lives are in the hands of a “doctor” who... examines a woman who has been in prison for six months and tells her that she is six weeks pregnant and there is nothing wrong with her. She later finds her baby has died and mortified inside of her. Alternatively, he tells you you are not pregnant and three months later, you give birth to a seven pound baby boy.

Bukhari had been dealing with health issues since her arrival. On her initial evaluation, she was told she had, “two tumors the size of oranges”, but she was denied care inside the prison for their fear of chancing her hospitalization and subsequent escape; “they preferred to take a chance on [her] life.” The neglect came to a head when she appealed her denial of outside care, and was told the matter was a ‘difference of opinion’ by the institution’s authorities.

She decided to escape prison, and while a fugitive, she was examined, and informed that her condition had reached a point where if she didn’t get surgery in that moment, she would be in pain the rest of her life. At this moment, she was reminded of Allah’s command to Muslims, “Wage struggle against tyranny and oppression wherever it may be found.”

The issue of horrific medical treatment received by women there, herself included, was one to wage struggle over. Recognizing this and knowing she would eventually be recaptured, Bukhari decided to use her condition and the ongoing lack of medical care as her defense for escaping prison to expose the incompetence and neglect of the institution’s medical facility, and to pressure them into allowing her proper care.

Bukhari chose to represent herself in court when tried for her escape. She had received wide-ranging support in preparing her case, but, “the most unforeseen and extremely appreciated came from the people of the town of Goochland [Virginia] who sat on the jury.” Over the course of the trial, she excavated the injustices of the prison and its medical facility. She explained clearly the neglect she dealt with. She laid out (with witnesses) the sorry, sometimes deadly, excuse for treatment many other women suffered in the institution.

In the end, Bukhari received a year long prison sentence from the jury, only because the judge threatened them with contempt of court if they didn’t issue her a guilty verdict. She recalls, following the trial, “[The jury members] waited outside the court until I was brought through on my way back to jail. There, they apologized for giving me the year.”

Her efforts were clearly successful in raising awareness about the injustices of the prison against women. Her attempt to pressure the institution was successful as well, as she was given the right to outside medical care with some choice over the doctor. When Bukhari finally received adequate treatment, though, everything but one of her ovaries had to be removed. She says of this time:

When I was recaptured... I realized one of the reasons I was incarcerated was that Allah had a plan for my life. You see, nothing happens without Allah allowing it to happen.

The Struggle against Shirk

The most incorrect thing for any Muslim is to believe there is something more worthy of worship or fear than Allah. There is no greater sin than shirk. Bukhari recalls having been told this from the day she took her shahada, having felt like she “had that one down pat”; but a contradiction within her became clear during her time in prison:

I knew that there was no God but God... The problem was that I also had an overwhelming fear, an uncontrollable and irrational fear. This fear superseded and overshadowed even my faith in Allah. “What could that be?” you ask. I was scared beyond reason of snakes.

Elaborating the stakes, she explains further:

I was facing the death penalty [for 30 days]. That didn’t worry me. I was alone in a hostile environment. That didn’t worry me. What worried me was how I would handle it if [the police or feds] attempted to use snakes to obtain information about my comrades and activities in the BPP or BLA. I didn’t know how I would stand up to that type of interrogation.

Though she knew how real and intense her fear of snakes was, Bukhari had never thought of it as shirk. Coming face-to-face with one, by mere chance, changed this for her.

When Bukhari was recaptured and imprisoned again, she was taken back to the maximum security unit and placed in isolation for 3 years and 7 months. She was taken to the downstairs area of the building one day. Soon after the door was shut behind her, she noticed a snake and lost control:

I started screaming and running for the door... it was locked. There was no way to get out, so I slid down the wall, curled myself into a fetal position, and kept screaming. It was as though I was outside my body... I could not stop myself... I had sunk into the darkest recesses of my mind to protect myself. My fear of snakes was clearly greater then my belief in and love of Allah.

After being taken back to her cell, and reflecting on the situation for some time, Bukhari came to an understanding that her fear of snakes, “made a lie of [her] statement of belief, that there was nothing more worthy of worship or fear than Allah.”; she identified her reaction as “deifying the snake itself”, as indicating the snake had more power over her life than Allah. So, over the following month, Bukhari set out to sort through this contradiction and resolve her issue with shirk.

She reflected on her embrace of what Huey Newton called ‘revolutionary suicide’; how the possibility of death was something she walked with and through by virtue of holding firm to her revolutionary commitments; how she was clear on the US government not being worthy of fear. She reflected on the outcomes that could come from an encounter with another snake, namely, her getting bit and dying. She held these things in tension with her knowledge that ‘nothing happens but by the permission of Allah’, and if she died, all that would be left before her is the judgement of Allah.

With this, Bukhari got clear internally on how her fear was misplaced, and corrected herself. Upon being released from prison in 1983, she tested her belief:

[The] first opportunity I got, I went to the Bronx Zoo... I walked into the reptile house and looked at all the snakes, walking throughout the reptile house making sure I took my time and observed everything. I emerged from that place with the courage of my convictions intact... There is nothing worthy of worship or fear but Allah.

Why Me?

When reflecting and acting on the world around us, we tend to center our present circumstances. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with keeping circumstances in mind when planning and orienting ourselves. But when circumstances become central to our reflection and action, the primacy of (principled) struggle gets lost.

Subordinating struggle to circumstances, adverse or advantageous, we ask, “What’s the way out of this? What will it take to capitalize off this?”, without concern for how we’re moving through our present circumstance, or why we’re moving the way we are. Here, “the path of least resistance, of going with the flow to maintain the status quo”, becomes the path we look toward. Bukhari’s life and embrace of Islam and revolution teaches us to subvert this impulse.

Over a decade removed from her imprisonment, she reflects:

Often, over the past ten years, I’ve gotten to the point where I question what this was all about... whether the sacrifices of the lives of comrades and friends were in vain and whether the continued incarceration of so many political prisoners and prisoners of war has been for nothing. As my mind returns to the beginning of my politicization... all those years ago, I wonder whether I made the right decision.

Reflecting further, Bukhari recalls how choosing ‘the path of resistance’ shaped her life.

In college, when she learned of Black children in New York living in deprivation, going to school hungry every day, she could’ve ignored it, but she didn’t. She began working with, and learning from, the Panthers in New York. Her circumstances still granted her an opportunity to achieve, “a dream of what [she] could accomplish in America as it was.”

When Bukhari stuck up for a Panther brother against the police, and got arrested and faced abuse from officers for doing so, she could’ve pretended as though she didn’t care to fight back. She could’ve convinced herself it was meaningless, and capitalized on what college offered. But she joined the BPP, even if reluctantly, and deepened her commitment to struggle. She chose the path of resistance. This path would mold her anger into commitment, her doubt into imaan, and fear into resolve.

She learned discipline from Robert Webb; she learned that ‘the people’ were the center of the work from Bashir Saunders. She learned the importance of defining who one is and the principle’s one holds for oneself from Afeni Shakur. Afeni exemplified what Bukhari’s mother and grandmother always told her, “If you’re woman enough to do it, be woman enough to tell the truth about it.” Cetewayo Tabor taught Bukhari to “deal with principle not personality”, and reaffirmed her when she acted the rule out under duress. Nuh Qayyam “turned [her] toward Islam, and then he helped [her] to understand the true teachings of Islam.”, which she came to internalize in captivity.

While being held as a political prisoner, Bukhari recounts having often asked, “Why me?” Her answer and takeaway post-release is instructive:

The process of killing those things within me that undermined my ability to submit myself to the will of Allah, as well as what Che Guevara knew early on, that “a true revolutionary is motivated by great feelings of love”... Now I conduct my life based on two things. I follow the dictates of my conscience [and] I remember Allah in all things.

Bukhari came to embrace revolution as a process of “change [that] begins with rebuilding the character into a revolutionary character, of which the central component is love. That means the love of yourself and the love of the people.” She came to embrace Islam as a spiritual anchor and ethical imperative toward internal and external jihad in the way of Allah (what is true and just), which clarified the how and why behind her movement in that process.

Choosing the path of resistance brought Safiya Bukhari to Islam and revolution. Principled struggle lies at the core of both.

Share

A great video to watch

‘Ruling class’ names power in relation to the ‘ruled’. It’s a simplification that prompts thinking centered on one’s position in relation to the ‘ruling class’ — in a broader class structure. When thinking on it, we intuitively ask: “Am I the ruler or the ruled?”; “How do I know if I am being ruled?”; “Who is ruling me, and what enables them to keep ruling me?”; “Who around me is also being ruled? How, and why?”; and so on.

Even if one doesn’t have a comprehensive grasp of the system being discussed, ‘ruling class’ gives them language to analyze their conditions through relational, systemic, thinking. And that is necessary for consciousness.

‘Epstein class’ names power held by a group. It’s a reduction, because it prompts thinking centered on the internal happenings & character of the ‘Epstein class’. When thinking on it, we intuitively ask: “Who’s all tied up with Epstein?”; “What all did these people do, and how did they get away with it?”; “How do they keep the government from holding them accountable?”; “What else are they hiding?”; “Who & what all do they control?”; and so on.

If one doesn’t have a solid understanding of the systems at play — and the analytical tools necessary to situate Epstein & his bunch within those systems — ‘Epstein class’ gives them language to investigate that group through conspiratorial, grand-narrative, thinking. And even if one does have that understanding, and is equipped with those tools, that reactionary way of thinking still flows naturally from the term. This is a barrier to consciousness.

If you float around activist/organizing spaces I work in or have helped shape over the past three years (on campus or in community), it won’t be long before you hear someone joking me about triangles.

“Here he goes: ‘We gotta turn the triangle from right side up, to upside down!’”, and they’ll do the hand motion showing it. It really is a meme at this point, and it makes me laugh every time; because I really have presented ‘systems of oppression’ and ‘all power to the people’ the exact same way more times than I can count — and to well over a hundred people at this point.

What I do is draw a triangle, with a line splitting it horizontally, on the board (or on a paper). Then on the top part I write ‘oppressor’, and on the bottom I write ‘oppressed’ (sometimes I’ll use ‘exploiter/exploited’ instead). I point at it and say, “Here we have a power hierarchy. It’s where the top group has power over the bottom group. Where there is oppression, this is the set up.” Then I ask what oppressions folks see in the world.

The three that come up most often are race, class, and gender (but here, I’ll just focus on race). I draw another triangle — ‘White’ over ‘Black’ (White Supremacy). I say, “There’s more complexity than what’s shown here, but right now, we’re all gonna just think about how power shows up in this system and how we see it in the world.” Then we start conversing — either as a full group, or in small groups.

By the stopping point of this discussion, we have (almost always) surfaced two important things about white supremacy (and power hierarchies in general) — the top group has privilege relative to the bottom; and some people, who’s identity puts them in the bottom group, have certain privileges similar to the top group.

This is the moment where I introduce or (more often) foreground the words ‘position’ and ‘access’. I say something like: “My position in a power hierarchy determines my privilege under that hierarchy; the more I fit in the top, the more power I have to oppress the bottom, and the more privilege I have under that hierarchy. So this white supremacist hierarchy isn’t just about white and Black people; it’s more about who has access to oppressive power, ‘white power’, and the privileges that come with it under white supremacy.”

From here, we’re able to discuss why some people from oppressed groups have privileges most don’t in a more structured way; and we can better identify what an ‘enemy’ or ‘traitor’ is. This comes from us asking, “Where are the Black masses positioned under white supremacy?”, and answering clearly, “At the bottom.”

Discussing how that came to be, and how it’s maintained, grounds our discussion of white supremacy in historical and present ‘conditions’. Black people are oppressed by ‘white power’ and blocked from having access to that power in mass; white people have access to this power by virtue of being white, and it is only used against them if they challenge it. So it becomes clear: “The white masses are ‘enemies’ of the Black masses, unless they become ‘traitors’ to white power. And, although some Black folks might be granted access to some privileges — by becoming ‘traitors’/’enemies’ to our people in some capacity — the Black masses will always be at the bottom of the white supremacist hierarchy.”

Arriving at this point is usually where we take a break to allow some space to process the discussion thus far. When we come back, I recap what we went through — with reference to the two triangles I drew.

We then start talking (social) revolution as a process of flipping the power hierarchy upside down. This has generally been the easiest part for people to grasp, and start thinking through, because of how intuitive it is following our discussion of power hierarchies. “‘Black power’ is revolutionary because it flips the triangle and ‘white power’ crumbles under its weight, bringing an end to white supremacy.”, is not hard to internalize at all (hence, the jokes LOL).

From there, conversations about how the few in the top group are held up by the masses/dispossessed in the bottom group — about how ‘oppressors’ cannot keep their position without keeping the ‘oppressed’ in their place — flow naturally. These help us identify the (structural) interests of ‘oppressors’ with ‘systems of oppression’; and the (structural) interests of the ‘oppressed’ with some form of ‘liberation’. And because power hierarchy is the set up that gives one power over another, we know that any real liberation must mean ‘all power to the people’. We crush the oppressors by making their system crumble — by organizing ourselves to become empowered together, and asserting our power against the systems oppressing us.

All the understandings here emerge organically from us thinking and conversing through the analytical framework those triangles I drew model. This process (that we usually carry out over 1.5 to 2 hours, depending on the context) is one of consciousness raising through guided dialogue. So by the end, the statement, “We gotta turn the triangle from right side up to upside down!”, has some concrete meaning.

A phrase I got from an older (still young) union organizer when he came back to Virginia Tech to hold workshops for some of us is, “There’s no shortcuts to effective organizing.”; and often, the difference between working effectively and working to our detriment is us recognizing the shortcuts available to us, and consciously refusing them in favor of intentional struggle. Consciousness raising is no different.

If you want to raise class consciousness, simplifying conversation to ‘workers’ and ‘owners’ (using ‘owning class’) when chatting with your co-workers about how your workplace issues result from capitalism may help spur a more structural understanding of y’all’s conditions and lead y’all to deeper commitment to ‘working class struggle’  —  much like ‘ruling class’ can do in social movement contexts. ‘Epstein class’ (much like ‘billionaire class’) does not have that same effect though, no matter how much left and right wing agreement we see on the depravity of rich men.

Yes, making things plain is important, and how we do it is just as important  — maybe, even more so. Because not all consciousness is revolutionary, and we exist in a society shaped by systems built to fuel and spread false consciousness amongst the people made to suffer within it.

As Kwame Ture put it:

[To] make people think in America is an extremely difficult job. The difficulty arises from the fact that… the capitalist system seeks to make the people think they’re thinking when, in fact, they are not thinking. And it is extremely difficult to convince someone who thinks they’re thinking that they are not thinking. It is, but it is our responsibility. (Kwame Ture, 1979)

The job of anyone committed to liberation struggle is to recognize the difference between revolutionary consciousness and false consciousness, and do what’s necessary to heighten the former while subverting the latter at every turn. This means being critical of our own framing, of the ways we present complex ideas, and of the entry points we offer people (online and off) into radical politics. It means thinking about the methods we use to get others thinking.

I’m not telling you not to use the term ‘Epstein class’ if it really does work in your context (although it is a reduction). I am saying that popular appeal, even with phrasing, often functions as a shortcut that takes us away from intentional struggle. And just like with organizing, there’s no shortcuts to raising revolutionary consciousness.

Share

The video the quotes came from

A Note: This is a seminar paper I recently wrote to complete my ‘Readings in African History’ class from Fall of 2025. It draws on recurring themes across certain required readings for the course. I mention this to clarify the historiographical work I did here is engaging (contemporary) historical literature of a more liberal-academic variety — though, the analysis is grounded in a clearly Black (anarchic) radical frame. When presenting Pan-Africanism — especially as it came to be articulated in the 60s by Nkrumah — I move away from the required readings.

I have not researched the things here extensively. So in a way, posting this is more a gateway for me and others to further explore historic and contemporary articulations of Pan-Africanism — through a lens that can situate ‘nuance’ within the structural realities postcolonial analyses surface. But I don’t believe that takes away from what I’m trying to parse through here. In any case, critique, reflections, recommendations, etc. are very very welcome.

Inshallah, I hope reading this sparks a deeper interest in these histories, and inspires more critical inquiry on them, for you — as writing it (per usual) has for me.

Peace in Struggle,
Emon

Across contemporary literature historicizing Africa and its diaspora, historiographies foreground the complications African agency surfaces in prior historical framings. A recurring foil these historiographies identify within postcolonial literature especially – which is often the immediate object of critique – is European colonialism’s overdetermination of African histories and potentials. During the rise of numerous anti-colonial movements on the continent, and the solidifying of multiple African nations’ independence through State consolidation and recognition, such emphasis served as a “response to assumptions of Africa’s perennial backwardness, the positivism of modernization theory, and colonial administrations’ refusal to acknowledge long-term economic traumas wrought by their policies.”^[i]

Critical postcolonial (re)tellings of African histories in relation to the world were naming the violence of European imposition, extraction, and dispossession – which treated Africa as a site for colonial and imperialist imaginations to be realized – along with the material impacts of such violence. These sought to cohere the historical making of a (trans)national Africa, as well as African diasporic and continental conditions and positionalities, by framing the continent and its people as bound through and confined by their subjection to a common set of oppressive systems which served a common oppressor.

Such framing, in conjunction with the successes of multiple African anti-colonial struggles, provided a seemingly different ground for African (trans)nationalisms (namely, Pan-Africanism); allowing for a more sympathetic reading of woes on the continent, inspiring a diasporic pride in continental histories beyond those of pre-colonial civilizations, and connecting African people globally to the struggle for a liberated and unified Africa.^[ii] In this turn, Pan-Africanist articulations would shift in their center of gravity. What were diasporic (primarily, Afro-American) return-redemption visions – reflective of Euro-American colonial imaginations – would become visions of continental sovereignty and development with diasporic empowerment and return as reproductive byproducts.

The following seeks to surface a lingering (Western chauvinistic) logic under-riding the prior mentioned shift by drawing on the critiques baked into contemporary historiographies of African historical literature. We will: further elaborate this shift in Pan-Africanist articulations, as represented in Meriwether’s, Proudly We Can Be Africans; then, examine a (light) number of contemporary historiographies, identifying their common thread in historicizing Africa, and situating them in relation to postcolonial insights; and last, read the shift through the lens of contemporary historiographies  – as stretched in this paper  –  which foreground African agency.

‘American Negro’ Sentiments & Early Pan-Africanist Frames

Meriwether chronicles the changes – from 1935 to 1961, alongside relevant surrounding years – in Afro-American perceptions of and relations to Africa in Proudly We Can Be Africans. Despite his more liberalized read of the histories post-1960, the accounts he draws upon clarify and contextualize early 20th century Pan-Africanist articulations in a way that will prove generative for us here.

At the onset of 1935, Afro-American posture toward Africa and Africans on the continent embodied a sense of superiority to continental Africans. This sense of superiority was grounded in, and taken as legitimate (or worth legitimating), because of their pasts and presents being shaped by Europe and America.

Afro-American assimilationists – usually elites, who embraced ‘Americanism’ and sought the fruits attaining ‘first-class citizenship’ in America could bear – grounded their dismissal of and disassociation from Africa in Western chauvinistic logics, which took slavery to be essentially a force of evolution for the Africans trafficked by way of the middle passage. That Afro-Americans were barbarians civilized through their enslavement by Euro-American society, and that continental Africans who were not subject to this enslavement could be civilized similarly through colonial subjection under European rule, was taken as a given. Progression for assimilationists, then, was conceived as best pursued through a severance of ancestral ties and contemporary concern with Africa – accompanied by a zoning in on domestic opportunities and mobility for who they called ‘American Negros’.

The forms emerging aspirational visions of Pan-Africanism among Afro-Americans took on were reflective of these logics. Despite rejecting the horizon of assimilationists, and despite invoking a glorious pre-colonial African past, a mix of Christian missionary and redemptive savior imaginaries shaped their concepts of international relations with contemporary Africa and continental Africans.

Marcus Garvey, for instance, articulated a Pan-Africanist vision of the continent and its people redeemed through diasporic return and leadership. His invocations of pre-colonial Africa served to mobilize people and resources in his ‘back to Africa’ movement; but what was being gone back to, in his eyes, was a fallen nation incapable of rebuilding itself. African diasporic emigrants (or rather, returners) from the Western hemisphere, then, were charged with “civilizing the backward tribes of Africa” in their making of a unified African nation that could recapture the glory of its pre-colonial histories.

W.E.B. DuBois (pre-1930s), in contrast, articulated a Pan-Africanism characterized by liberal incrementalist notions of progress; his was primarily a transnational “pan-Negro” advocacy project rather than an African nation-building project. African pre-colonial histories evidenced a misrepresentation of negros by Euro-American society that needed to be pushed against if the race was to progress anywhere. Additionally, progress was not to be found within the American political project, but instead a redeemed Africa and an African people (continental and diasporic) who could assert their freedom to secure their own rights.

The role of Afro-Americans – at least, those within the political class and intelligentsia – was to bring Negros across the diaspora together to demand fair treatment of Africans by Europe and America, and to determine the direction of political efforts on the continent and across the diaspora. These efforts (emblemized in the Pan-African Congresses from 1919 to 1927) did not seek to affirm nor advocate “the complete independence of African colonies” however, taking contemporary Africa and continental Africans to be unfit to determine their own destiny.

We can see here (in both Garvey and Dubois’s articulations) that these early Pan-Africanist notions carried Western chauvinistic logics akin to ‘American Negro’ assimilationist thinking – just with an alternative political horizon, and more sober (even if romantic) understanding of Africa’s pre-colonial histories. This explains why, as Meriwether states, “Early-twentieth-century pan-Africanist approaches linked African Americans with Africa, yet at the same time did so in the hierarchical manner that so characterized the nineteenth-century relationship with Africa.”^[iii]

A Shift in Pan-Africanist Articulations

In the time between 1935 and 1961, numerous African struggles on the continent against European colonialism for national independence infused a respect, pride, and aspirational character into Afro-American’s perceptions of and relations to Africa. By 1960, there was little to no credence a serious Afro-American observer could give to notions of an infantile, barbaric, incapable Africa. Even assimilationist horizons would see a shift in their engagement with African pasts and presents; integrationist political projects aimed at Black uplift within America, in the coming decades, would work to reclaim ‘African’ and fold it into the same Americanism that animated earlier dissociations with the continent and its people.

This shift in popular Afro-American understandings of Africa, and the material assertions of African sovereignty against European nations which induced these new understandings, were reflected in newly articulated Pan-Africanist visions. The definition Kwame Nkrumah would come to of Pan-Africanism as a specific political objective situated on the continent captures the throughline of these visions succinctly:

“The total liberation and unification of Africa under an All-African Socialist Government must be the primary objective of all Black revolutionaries throughout the world. It is an objective which, when achieved, will bring about the fulfillment of the aspirations of Africans and people of African descent everywhere.”^[iv]

Nkrumah, and mid-late 20th century Pan-Africanist revolutionaries (continental and diasporic), upon participating in or witnessing multiple African nations on the continent win independence, began conceptualizing diasporic political gains and ultimately liberation as flowing from the sovereignty and unity expressed on the continent itself. The role of Afro-Americans, then, was primarily to support movements and broader efforts by African continental nations to unite, push Euro-American powers off their lands, and keep those powers out of their affairs – as these things would allow for the assertion of a national African sovereignty spanning across the States on the continent.

Where DuBois and Garvey (in the early 20th century) had articulated a diaspora-centric Pan-Africanism – where entry, leadership, and strategizing from without would bring forth the redemption of Africa and a liberated future for African people on the continent and (specifically for DuBois) across diaspora geographical contexts; Nkrumah’s Pan-Africanism would be a continent-centric one – where strategy, development, and struggle would be primarily from within Africa itself, with diasporic struggle shaped by and oriented toward the furtherance of those things.

This shift was not arbitrary. It was informed by anti-colonial struggle and theoretical interventions of the time, and it was grounded in three core premises: one, that “all peoples of African descent [no matter where they live] are Africans and belong to the African nation”^[v]; two, that the basis of any nation’s freedom is land; and three, that the continent of Africa is ‘for the African’. As such, all Africans (diasporic and continental) concerned with their own freedom ought to be concerned first with the “liberation and unification of Africa”.

African Agency within Colonial Reality

In Domesticating the World, Jeremy Prestholdt seeks to identify African agency in the making of Africa’s present by engaging an historically ”crucial question [that’s been] insufficiently explored: What did Africans seek in precolonial exchanges?”^[vi] Reading African pre-colonial histories through this question, he draws out patterns of demand which provide insight on the social, political, and cultural elements in pre-colonial Africa that enabled, invited, or undermined further engagement with Europe. In this, he extends the approach of David Richardson, who argues, “both the structure and profitability of the English slave trade were contingent, to a significant degree, on African patterns of demand and English abilities to adapt to this demand.”^[vii]

This approach moves to unsettle those of postcolonial frames by highlighting the ‘multi-dimensionality of global integration’ as evidenced by, “the interests and the repercussions of acting on these interests for everyone, even seemingly marginal people.” Globalization, Prestholdt notes, “is never unidimensional or unidirectional… [it didn’t and doesn’t spread] from the west to ‘the rest’.” So, the pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial conditions in Africa are not things to understand or read primarily through European imposition; but instead, through the dynamic (social, economic, political, and cultural) relations and intra-, inter-, and trans-contextual interactions of Africans and Europeans (among other groups). Taken at face here – and maybe even as intended – European colonialism’s apparent overdetermination of African histories and potentials is something to be acknowledged, contextualized, and corrected through historical nuancing.^[viii]

For us, however, nuancing of this sort is not generative. It flattens positionality, taking the trend of overdetermination in the historiographical record to evidence reductive scholarship. When one seriously considers African positionality under European colonialism – reading through the conditions accompanying that structural position – the trend of overdetermination clarifies itself as reflective of the colonial reality out of which the historiographical record emerged. The loss of African agency – or its being rendered peripheral – within this record then is not something to be corrected through the prior mentioned nuancing. Instead, it is something to read nuancing information through – as African agency in relation to others’ would come to produce the colonial reality under which both national and global histories and potentials were forged.

Early in ‘Part IV’ of The World and a Very Small Place in Africa, Donald Wright frames Third World (many African) nations’ trade decisions in relation to competing global powers of the time (the U.S. and the USSR) as expressions of those nations’ agency, while maintaining implicit reference to how the hegemonic positionality of the U.S. (and, more broadly, Euro-American capitalist powers) shaped how the agency could look in a global economic context. He explains:

“…more countries saw the practicality of accepting the inequalities and working with the wealthy, capitalist nations. These countries recognized the need for money to develop; saw that their major means of getting it was through exporting the lone resource or the small group of resources they had been exporting; wanted access to the material goods industrial nations could supply; and thus established policies that made for open trade and stimulated resource production. Early forms of development in these countries tended to focus on… greater trade and more money, which could then be tapped for better medical care or improved education…. poor nations worked with a consortium of public and private institutions in and around the wealthy nations to tie themselves more thoroughly to the world economy and build up their national wealth as the first step toward development.”^[ix]

Here, the decisions of poor countries are foregrounded, and the logic underlying those decisions is treated as primary in their being solidified and carried out. In this, our understanding of the relationship between the U.S. and the poor countries – the latter who would develop a relationship of dependency and exploitation therefrom – capture the agency of the poor nations, treating them as rational agents, acting within the context of global economic conditions. It is clear still, though, that those conditions are overdetermined by Euro-American capitalist powers, because of the hegemonic position of the U.S.

Development for the marginal (many newly independent African) nation-States, in this context, came through gaining greater proximity to the center (Euro-American powers). That proximity, given the U.S.’s moves to further a less confined, more intentionally globalized, transnational capitalist order – while solidifying, and to strengthen, its position in the geopolitical landscape – came through advancing the interests, serving the ends, of capital. Thus, for State officials, Wright explains further:

“If foreign banks and multinational corporations were involved in a poor nation’s economy more deeply than its citizens might wish, well, so be it in this necessary stage toward general betterment.”^[x]

We see, then, that national agency expressing itself through the State did not necessarily align with national agency as imagined amongst the people. The interests and rationale guiding decisions of State actors, under the prior mentioned conditions, sat in tension with those informing the imaginaries and movement of the people. So, sovereignty and development as manifest in and consolidated through the nation-State, at least under U.S. hegemonic order, we can say, sits in tension with sovereignty and development as conceptualized and moved toward amongst the people making up a nation – insofar as the people seek rupture from Euro-American centered order, rather than movement toward closer proximity and greater access to Euro-American power.

A Lingering Logic

‘American Negro’ assimilationist thinking harbored Western chauvinistic logics in its dismissal of Africa and Africans on the continent; conceptualizing Euro-American domination as a civilizing force, which made Afro-Americans different (less barbaric) than continental Africans because of their proximity to Euro-American power. Early Pan-Africanist frames harbored Western chauvinistic logics in their visions of a return-redemption arc characterizing the diaspora’s relationship to the continent, and of diasporic Africans (especially Afro-Americans in the political class and intelligentsia) as the stewards and negotiators of the continent’s independence and its people’s rights; these conceptualized contemporary Africans as incapable of / inadequate at building, imagining, or leading their nations on their own terms due to ‘backwardness’ on the continent.

The shift in Pan-Africanist articulations upon the wave of national liberation movements and wins among continental African nations undermined the concepts of contemporary Africa and continental Africans under-riding ‘American Negro’ assimilationist thinking and early Pan-Africanist frames. These articulations – represented clearly in Nkrumah’s definition of Pan-Africanism – centered on the continent, and conceptualized Africa as sitting in the sort of vanguard of global African liberation struggle. What Pan-Africanism became was a nation-building and consolidating project, seeking to unify the continent in a nation-State formation for the sake of leveraging Africa’s richness, vastness, and derivative power to counter Euro-American colonial-capitalist power.

That Nkrumah’s Pan-Africanist objective of, “The total liberation and unification of Africa under an All-African Socialist Government”, was not achieved when first proliferating African continental and diasporic consciences, and has not been achieved up to this point, may be explained in several ways when accounting for African agency in the way we elaborated earlier. On a read centering the agency of African State officials across newly independent nations on the continent, we may conclude, as Meriwether asserted, “Few leaders of national liberation struggles willingly diluted the new powers that their nations had gained by enrolling in an inchoate, Ghana-centered, Pan-African structure.”^[xi]

A postcolonial analysis, here, may elucidate the Western chauvinistic logic fueling those State officials’ investment in the Euro-American order at the expense of a counter-hegemonic African (trans)nationalist project. And contemporary historiographical frames may complicate this interpretation, highlighting that the agency these leaders were exercising found its basis in their rationale regarding their own interests or the interests of their nation. One may consider this complication and deduce Nkrumah’s Pan-Africanism itself is informed by Western chauvinistic logics – seeking to center and raise a single national Africa at the expense of a plural-national reality and the varying, unique, visions of national sovereignties therein.

On our read, however, diasporic conditions – especially those of Afro-Americans, who constitute an internally colonized nation on multiple historic Black nationalist accounts (like those the New Afrikan Independence Movement emerged out of) – complicate (and complicated) the basic premises of this Pan-Africanist articulation in much the same way national agency as expressed amongst the people complicates national agency as vested in the State.

Assuming such conditions necessitate rupture from Euro-American centered order for national liberation to be realized; to assert a counter-hegemonic project aimed at de-centering the West in the geopolitical landscape at the expense of African diasporic ruptural/liberationist projects would be to preserve the order shaped by Euro-American power. It would mean asserting the colonial-capitalist order we know to be more worth preserving than any alternative forged through transnational African (continental and diasporic) liberation struggle.

In this, we see the Western chauvinistic logic linger at the level of national structure and imagination – despite a shift in Pan-Africanism’s center of gravity. The question of how it may be subverted seems to be answerable, however, through an examination and analysis of non-statist and anti-statist African (trans)nationalist imaginaries, articulations, and movements.

Share

References

Meriwether, J. (2009). Proudly we can be Africans: Black Americans and Africa. The University of North Carolina Press.

Nkrumah, K. (n.d.). What is the AAPRP? AAPRP-INTL. https://aaprp-intl.org/what-is-the-all-african-peoples-revolutionary-party-aaprp/

Nkrumah, K. (1970). Class Struggle in Africa. International Publishers New York. https://leninists.org/images/d/d1/Class_Struggle_in_Africa.pdf

Prestholdt, J. (2008). Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization. University of California Press.

Wright, D. R. (2018). The World and a Very Small Place in Africa: A History of Globalization in Niumi, The Gambia. Routledge.

Endnotes

^[i] (Prestholdt, 2008, 5)

^[ii] (Meriwether, 2009)

^[iii] (Meriwether, 2009, 23)

^[iv] (Nkrumah, n.d.)

^[v] (Nkrumah, 1970, 87)

^[vi] (Prestholdt, 2008, 20)

^[vii] (Prestholdt, 2008, 22)

^[viii] (Prestholdt, 2008, 174-175)

^[ix] (Wright, 2018, 200)

^[x] (Wright, 2018, 200)

^[xi] (Meriwether, 2009, 241)

A mentor and teacher of mine was the first to clarify what organizing is and is not for me. She was raised by folks in the 1960s-70s Black liberation movements, and has been organizing most her life.

Without ever telling me what to do, her lessons have deeply informed my understandings of ‘the work’ and her guidance (in word & practice) has oriented me toward deeper, more grounded, commitment to our people and our struggle — organizationally especially. The spaces her words have rang most clear for me have often been spaces she wasn’t in.

My experiences in activist spaces — specifically my three or so years deep in campus activist spaces — drove me up the wall. There are many reasons why. But the most relevant for us here, I had once put like this:

I don’t want to ask every single question, and I shouldn’t have to. I want everyone to think as ORGANIZERS, and not spectators, fans, supporters, or whatever else. We need to ask questions.

At the time, I chalked up the (lack of critical) action and reflection frustrating me to a ‘liberal tendency’ within the spaces causing a general resistance to radical ways of thinking and acting.

This wasn’t untrue. That tendency was there and it did stifle the emergence of any truly radical politic or praxis in the spaces. But, after being out of those spaces for a while, I realized my bigger issue was that barely anyone knew (or cared to learn) how to actually organize.

What resulted was something I had named openly before even entering these spaces, and something I pointed to often while proposing alternative approaches — reactive response activism, and mobilization after mobilization with no real organizational gains.

Activist work has a lot to do with responding to urgent situations. What’s often brushed under the rug, though, is the importance of our responses being reflexive instead of reactive. Because reactivity, or reactive responses, just require high energy in the space activism is happening.

Take the endless rally and protest cycles we see as an example. Something bad happens. There’s a lot of energy and high emotions around it, and the activists say, “Okay, let’s put on a rally. Let’s mobilize people around what just happened.”

Because the energy is high, there’s obviously a big turnout, and because there’s a big turnout, the activists see it as a success. But the question on everybody’s mind at the end of the rally is, “What did this do? What did this serve?” And if that rally was not grounded in a broader program, in broader organizing efforts, then the answer is, “It was cathartic.”

This will always be the result of our response efforts, so long as they are reactive. Reflexivity or reflexive responses require much more than high energy though.

They require a clear objective or set of objectives (often demands or the cultivation of certain conditions). They require people who are committed to and actively doing the work necessary to meet those objectives. They require a structure to guide the ways people doing that work engage with each other, the ways they build up their capacity to meet their objectives, the ways they bring people in, and generally just the way they struggle in that context. And they require analyses and strategies that can hold the tension between the urgency of certain moments and ongoing efforts to change, build, or undo systems.

Reflexivity in our activist efforts, reflexive responses coming out of our activist spaces, require organization to be present in those spaces. When organization is present — when organizing is happening — that rally mentioned earlier serves a completely different purpose.

The rally stops being about capitalizing off of high energy, making a moment out of heightened emotions. It becomes about funneling that high energy into sustained and committed action. Catharsis is no longer the primary result. Higher organizing capacity, a stronger base, more imaginations in our activist spaces, is.

We should all be doing our best to bring organization to the core of our activist efforts, because that’s what’s necessary for such efforts to be effective. To this end, it’s important for us to distinguish organization from mobilization.

Now, a lot of times when we imagine what organization is — when we try to draw the distinction between mobilization and organization — we assume that any community action that isn't a rally falls under organization. But organization cannot be defined by whatever action is being taken. It's not just about the 'what'. It's also, equally as much, about the 'how'.

Your group might recognize that there is an issue around hunger in a particular area and decide, "Hey, we should probably go about passing out food here." One way y'all could do that is through an event, or a series of events, where y'all fundraise to get food and then bring people out or promote the event to get volunteers to help pass out the food. Each time you all do this event, y'all are mobilizing resources and people to help meet a particular need; you're doing mobilization for a community service event.

Now this is a good and important thing to do, but it's not organization in itself. Because organization isn't just about easing a particular burden or relieving a particular pain. It's also about empowering people to change the conditions which produce those burdens and that pain.

When you and your group mobilized that community service event, you all met a need in a moment.

Now ask yourselves these questions: Have we set up any processes to understand how we can help meet this need in a more sustained fashion? Have we helped set up any infrastructure through which the community can access and mobilize the same resources and people we did without having to go through us? Do we have pathways through which people who want to get more deeply and consistently involved can in a substantive way? Are we developing relationships with the people we're mobilizing, both inside and outside the community, that lend to us better building with them rather than just telling them what to do? And are we developing a relationship with the people we're serving that lends to us building with them rather than just doing for them?

If your community service event or series of events is an organizing effort, then the answer to multiple of those questions should be "yes".

Because organizing is about helping people become empowered to change their conditions and build their futures on their own terms. That requires a lot of back end work and asking a lot of questions before and after these mobilization efforts. But if we're consistently and sincerely doing that work and letting our questions improve our work, then what will emerge from the efforts we put in is something much more sturdy than what mobilization efforts can produce on their own.

“Show me your organizing wins.”, is a line I’ve internalized from the mentor I mentioned earlier.

Organizing wins aren’t just major changes in, or the transformation of, the condition of deprivation and dehumanization our people face — although, that is our horizon. Organizing wins aren’t just policy changes in campaigns around specific issues — although, those may be the objectives of a particular group or community at a time.

Organizing wins are also relationships built, trust earned, people brought into ‘the work’, catalyzed efforts, greater political and praxical alignment; and, crucially, lessons learned.

Organizing wins happen when urgency is situated in sustained work; when reflection is a structural component of the space work is happening in; when questions, aimed at us becoming empowered with our people to struggle for our futures and to live on our own terms, come to the fore.

Organizing wins are what we achieve when we “think as organizers” — letting our work inform and sharpen that thinking.

If you’re gonna do activism, start being an organizer first.

Share

A video to check out

Author’s Note: The term ‘New Afrikan’ emerged in the late 1960s with the New Afrikan Independence Movement. It drew on the thinking of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X), among other revolutionary Black nationalist (namely, Queen Mother Moore) and communist (namely, Harry Haywood) influences; expanded and sharpened analyses from the Black Power era which theorized Black communities in the “U.S.” as being internal colonies; and materially furthered the struggle for Black/African self-determination — a struggle many New Afrikan revolutionaries, nationalist and anarchist, are carrying out today.

I mention this to make clear for anyone who may not know, ‘New Afrikan’ nationhood is not a new concept, and ‘New Afrikan’ identity is not a new idea. This language predates the recent popularization of the term ‘Black American’ by decades.

I adapted some reflections and notes on my relationship to nationhood and Black/African identity to show the harm embracing ‘Black American’ identity can cause, and to highlight (in the small capacity I can here) the value in asserting ‘New Afrikan’ nationhood.

Inshallah, I hope this will prompt your own reflection and movement toward deeper commitment to our people’s liberation.

Peace in Struggle,
Emon

I’m aware why many of us use ‘Black American’ to identify ourselves and our histories as Black people in the “U.S.”. I used this term for years, and much of my family still does.

I remember, in seventh grade, the local NAACP chapter visited a youth mentorship program I was in to present on ‘African American’ history (it was February). I don’t recall the presentation well, but the memory of one particular interaction I had with the chapter’s president in the discussion at the end is still vivid.

I said, “Why do you say ‘African American’ history when we’re just Black? We suffer because we’re Black, and we’ve progressed here [in America] as Black people. Our culture and history as Black people is here [in America]. If you’re gonna say we’re American, why not just say ‘Black American’?”

Of course, I knew little to nothing about Africa; about the many cultures and histories of our people on the continent and across the diaspora; about the ways we suffered and the struggles we engaged in across the globe as African people; nor about how any of that had anything to do with me or Black people in the U.S. specifically — beyond the cliche, “We were sold away by the Africans.”, narrative. I was ignorant in the true sense of the word.

Regardless, my comment stumped the president at the time, as he’s told me and others on a few occasions over the years. I do not take pride in the type of “thinking” it may have incited in him, and (hopefully not) in others, that day. Such “thinking” is reactionary. Today, I’d argue it requires no thinking at all.

Interactions like this were regular for me until about midway through high school. But the (very Amerikkkan) “thinking” underlying them stuck with me through my early college years, and it would only be seriously called into question once I began trying to live in intentional alignment with my budding Black radical politic.

‘Black’ is not a national identity. It is the name imposed on us through the genocidal violence carried out against our people globally. It is what serves to justify our condition of ongoing death and dehumanization under colonial, carceral, and capitalist systems in the social orders we live under. It is the mark that signals our position as ‘non-human’ in this anti-Black world to political actors (apparatuses, institutions, and people) that deprive, cage, rape, and kill us just because.

Asserting “human rights” as their political program, they show us ‘human’ means white. If white nations and their societies are any indication, it’s clear this world’s ‘human’ projects are structurally depraved. And Amerikkka is the most depraved of them all.

My commitment to Black liberation struggle (beyond my politic & prior work) really started when I stopped identifying with Amerikkka in any positive way. At this point, I was strictly calling myself ‘Black’, and would check anyone who added the settler empire’s label behind ‘Black’ when referring to me.

I knew I was African. I admired the many histories and cultures of our people on the continent. I felt the interconnectedness of the struggles there with ours here in my body, and acknowledged it in my speech. Still, it just felt off to say “I’m African”.

I had trashed ‘American’ (mashallah), but I was wary of what I may lose by embracing ‘African’. I didn’t want to flatten the specificity of our histories, culture, circumstances, and struggle here by folding it all into a broad (trans)national identity.

My conversations with some BAP and AAPRP folks changed this. These folks held a hard Pan-African line. They were firm in their identification with Africa and alignment with global African struggle. There was one thing they clarified for me: We are African and discounting that fact is harmful to our struggle.

‘African’ is a (trans)national identity. It was constructed and is imposed on us through colonial and imperialist oppression perpetrated against our people on the continent and across the diaspora — namely, in Amerikkka’s internal Black colonies (‘the ghettos’). Our varying nations share in the colonial and imperialist oppression we face (there’s lots of nuance here I’m not gonna get into). As such, we each have a shared stake in the struggle for Pan-African liberation.

To erase our African identity is to turn a blind eye to the colonial and imperialist oppression our people face. It’s to ignore the material stake we have in the outcome of anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, struggles for the liberation of African nations (both on the continent, and across the diaspora). It’s to treat Pan-African solidarity in our shared struggle as optional when it’s not.

It took some time for me to internalize this; but after a while, it felt like common sense. So I started embracing it.

When asked “What are you? Where’re you from?”, I’d say, “I’m African”. But as we all know, especially with Africans who (rightfully) embrace their specific nationality, it’s never that simple. The next thing was always, “Oh cool, where about?”.

This always threw me for a bit of a loop; because really, how am I, how are we, supposed to respond?

“West Africa”? “The boat”? “The plantation”? “The run”? “Amerikkka”?

It’s a real brain spinner! And it was really uncomfortable sitting in that tension, even though I was the only one who really made anything of it.

My partner is African and tapped well in with her nationality; she can answer that second question without pause, and point to where on the continent she’s talking about. She was affirming when we’d chat about these interactions, and always big on me not stressing too much when getting that question. During one of our chats, I said, “I think the stress may be historical trauma from how my ancestors wound up here.”

More recently, I’ve started re-asserting the significance of that trauma and the specificity of our circumstances, cultures, and histories here (in the “U.S.”) more openly while maintaining that crucial line: “I’m African”.

This got me more curious about ‘New Afrikan’ identity, which a friend/comrade/mentor of mine consistently asserts. They have explained it quite a few times in the past, but it never really clicked for me until late last year. Every time I reflect on it now, I’m like, “Wow, that really makes things so much more clear!”

New Afrika cannot be understood solely as a nation of Black people descending from Africans stolen and brought to the “U.S.” in chains. New Afrikan nationhood is not ‘Black American’ identity.

New Afrika is an African nation, amongst many African nations, that was forged through our people’s condition of captivity and colonial subjection in the “U.S.”.

New Afrikan nationhood is an African anti-colonial project internal to the Amerikkkan settler State. Its assertion materially requires the settler State to crumble. In this way, New Afrikan sovereignty is intertwined with the sovereignty of Indigenous nations here. It’s won through the decolonization of Turtle Island. “Free the Land” and “Land Back” are movements in a shared fight.

New Afrikan nationhood is an African anti-imperialist project within the belly of the beast that is Amerikkkan Empire. Its assertion materially requires Empire to fall. In this way, New Afrikan sovereignty is intertwined with the sovereignty of all of Africa and the Global South. It’s won through the collapse of Empire; by striking at it’s heart till it can no longer stretch its arms across the globe, then delivering the death blow. “Free the Land” makes “Hands Off” an inevitability.

Blackness is imposed on us politically, and we relate to it in political ways. It is not a national identity or cultural heritage, but the national identities and cultural heritages we tie ourselves to shape Blackness’ political horizon.

The problem with ‘Black American’ identity is the political horizon it folds our Blackness into. The U.S. is a settler-colonial, capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacist, Empire oppressing our people on the continent and oppressing us in our communities here. Amerikkka is a depraved nation built on and reproduced through Black deprivation, Black suffering, Black death.

To allow the aspirations of a nation, an Empire, that requires our ongoing dehumanization for its existence to shape our political horizon is to spit in the face of every one of our ancestors martyred in the struggle for Black liberation. Because to do so is to fold Black resistance, Black refusal, Black struggle, into a project of anti-Black world-making. We should be wary of this, and refuse identification with Amerikkka.

The problem with ‘Black American’ identity is the “thinking” it incites and the reaction it invites in our struggle. Reaction that can easily slip into full on dismissal of African suffering and struggles on the continent and across the diaspora. Reaction that has a notable amount of people acting like African immigrants “aren’t even Black!” (yes, I’ve heard this numerous times)

As I’ve studied, conversed, and worked to unlearn this “thinking” and reaction; I’ve come to think of ‘Black’ as signifying a condition we all share as people of African descent. A condition where we’re dehumanized for the (re)production of this anti-Black world. A condition for us Africans and our nations to build solidarity around in the struggle against global anti-Blackness.

‘New Afrikan’ is the term that best identifies our specific stakes in Pan-African struggle to end empire and indigenous struggles to bring down the settler State.

In this, our Blackness remains an (anti)political force oriented toward a totalizing rupture that can end this anti-Black world. And Amerikkka remains the devil.

Share

Three Readings to Check Out

On the Term ‘New Afrikan’

Beyond Nationalism, But Not Without It

A Soldier’s Story: Revolutionary Writings by a New Afrikan Anarchist

Author’s Note: This is a seminar paper I completed for my ‘Readings in African History’ class in Fall of 2025. My aim here was to draw out the limits of our (Black anarchist) framings of marronage when historicizing the practice. I am not discounting the fact that we draw upon the ‘untapped resonances’ I signal toward here in our work presently (both in our theory and practice). It is the fact that we do so, and fairly often point toward maroon histories/legacies in the process, that prompted me to even start thinking about this.

I intend on elaborating all this further, and in a more practice-centered fashion, down the line, inshallah. Right now though, I hope reading this sparks some questions for you and a desire to engage these histories further — as writing it has for me.

Peace in Struggle,
Emon

On a 2025 virtual panel titled, Borderless Intimacies: Black Anarchism and Internationalism, Andrew Sage (‘Andrewism’ on YouTube) said of marronage, “I think of it as a perfect encapsulation of that social revolutionary spirit [in Black anarchism]… A destruction and creation. You know, rejection of slavery and an [active] assertion of freedoms.”^[i]. This sense of resonance was, and is, not unique to him – neither in sentiment nor expression. As Atticus Bagby-Williams and Nsambu Za Suekama have said, “Black anarchism centers on historical and contemporary struggles for Black self-determination and against white supremacy… [It] owes more to Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, the Maroons, and African influences [as ideological pregenitures] than to [white/Euro-American] anarchist thinkers.”^[ii]

There is a case to be made that the maroons, in both their liberatory horizons and methods of struggling to live free, are one of (if not) the most intuitive and rich historic examples for Black anarchism^[iii] to map onto and for Black anarchists to draw inspiration from. Across the sea of Black anarchist analyses, praxes, and concepts of Black/African liberation, we can find many remnants of maroon histories – implicit nods toward the legacies of resistance, refusal, and autonomous living maroons and their communities left behind. Upon further engaging Black anarchist material explicitly referencing these histories however, Black anarchism’s capacity to map onto, and Black anarchists’ to draw inspiration from, the maroons can appear somewhat underwhelming compared to what we may initially intuit.

While we may feel the “social revolutionary spirit” and see a “rejection of slavery and an [active] assertion of freedom” – both grounded in a foundational refusal of the prevailing social order, and expressed through maroon autonomies often perceived as an existential threat to that social order^[iv]; we have yet to elaborate the resonances between Black anarchism and marronage in ways that move – depth-wise – beyond elucidations of certain aspirational and featural components they share. This, we will see, results in large part from the limits of older analytical frames Black anarchists have used to engage maroon histories and understand marronage as an historic practice that may be instructive for us today.

Contemporary works historicizing marronage in North America have moved beyond those older frames – the most prominent of these, and most relevant to us, being the grand/petit frame – for recognition of their inability to capture the reality of marronage in the North American British colonies and the early United States.^[v] These works introduce and experiment with frames grounded in maroon landscapes/geographies^[vi], and maroon relations to the prevailing social order, moving the center of discussion from questions concerned with what defines/d a maroon to questions inquiring on how “marooning”^[vii] occurred across contexts and shaped those contexts. In so doing, they have surfaced – without explicit announcement or further pursuit – certain resonances between Black anarchism and marronage which underlie those prior mentioned elucidations. We may find that the analytical frames these works have used to understand and explain the histories of North American maroons can make way for deeper elaborations of these resonances, unearthing those initially intuited capacities of Black anarchism and Black anarchists in relation to maroons.

Here we will inspect Black anarchist historical framings of marronage as represented primarily in select works on Great Dismal Swamp marronage by the late revolutionary, Russell “Maroon” Shoatz, and the revolutionary-academic, elder Modibo Kadalie – identifying the limitations of these framings; and then, provide a concise overview of contemporary shifts in framings of marronage as they appear in recent works on North American maroons – displaying briefly how ‘marooning’ can surface a deeper resonance for further Black anarchist elaborations.

Black Anarchist Framings of Marronage

On that 2025 virtual panel, Andrew would go on to say, “Marronage… really wherever slavery was practiced, took two forms. The petit and the grand marronage.”^[viii] This analytical frame (i.e. the grand/petit frame) has historically been used to characterize marronage through a temporal lens. In Black anarchist material, this is the standard frame used to clarify the type of marronage being engaged with – guiding the focus of, and elaborations presented, in a given work. Although grand marronage tends to be the sole form discussed in Black anarchist material – as is the case in both Shoatz’s and Kadalie’s work – the lack of explicit Black anarchist engagement with petit maroon histories is worth inspecting.

Petit Marronage

H.L.T. Quan’s engagement with Stephanie Camp’s Closer to Freedom when discussing ‘the conceits of governability’ provides a socio-historic analysis of ‘outlying runaways’ and colonial governance surrounding them that will be generative for our aims here.^[ix] In her own work, Become Ungovernable, Quan quotes Camp:

In 1748 Virginia’s lawmakers distinguished between outlying runaways (short-term runaways, those historians now call ‘truants’) and outlawed escapees (now known as ‘runaways’ or ‘fugitives’). Surprisingly, it was not the outlawed that most concerned the assembly, but the outlying. In that year, in response to the ‘injuries’ that lurking truants were said to cause, lawmakers went so far as to make outlying a capital offense.^[x]

These ‘outlying runaways’ were slaves whose “routine rebelliousness… struck the greatest fear in the minds of slavocrats… as it [belied] many claims of governability, exposing the vain attempt of total domination.” Beyond reproducing structural domination and visible subjugation, governing, Quan says, must also regulate “the relational and liminal.” The penalties for ‘outlying’, then, reflected a core necessity of the prevailing social order; to establish bounds through which Black life could be divorced from the acceptable mode of Black existence (chattel slave). As such, the spaces where, “However furtive and momentary, [Black] communal living [came] alive”, were spaces ‘beyond the pale’.^[xi]

They are not ascribed the label, but these ‘truants’ were effectively petit maroons – slaves who escaped the plantation for a short-time to then return to the plantation. Understanding their ‘outlying’ activities as petit marronage highlights their periodic maroon existence as a temporary reprieve, an escape, from their ongoing reality of chattel enslavement. However, characterizing these activities as such cannot fully capture the ongoing threat maroon existence, in itself, was perceived as posing to the prevailing social order.

Petit maroons may have stolen back time for themselves – pointing to an episodic or periodic “rejection of slavery and an [active] assertion of freedom” on their part. But what about their marronage moved them from, as the Savannah River Anti-Slave Traffick Association described, “holding a position [of chattel slave] in the framework of society, [to becoming] a serpent gnawing at its vitals or a demon ready with knife and torch to demolish its foundations”^[xii] beyond the temporal space their maroon existence occupied?

The grand/petit frame here can account for, and elaborate the nature of, an initial act that made one a maroon and the time in which they existed as such; but it cannot capture the residual effects of this act, nor extend one’s maroon existence beyond their period away from the plantation.^[xiii] Historical framings of ‘petit marronage’ specifically, then, forgo the type of socio-spatial analysis Black anarchist framings of ‘grand marronage’ tend to foreground when elaborating resonances. This may explain the lack of explicit Black anarchist engagement with petit maroon histories, despite these histories’ deep intuitive resonances with concepts of Black fugitivity and wayward living.

Grand Marronage

Andrew provided further context during the 2025 virtual panel regarding the resonances between Black anarchism and marronage, explaining:

The grand marronage is really the sort of thing we tend to be talking about here. You know, it’s the establishment of [runaway slave] communities on the fringes, in the forests, in the mountains… [Maroons] using geography and secrecy and guerilla tactics to defend themselves… and in some cases even going on the offensive.^[xiv]

What these maroon communities represent for Black anarchists is the need for a material basis, a land-based foundation, to ‘bounce off of’ in Black/African liberation struggle. Cooperation Jackson’s ‘build and fight formula’ – along with adjacent, complimentary, approaches to furthering Black self-determination – reflect a core fact that lies at the center of grand marronage and its practical resonance with Black anarchism; that is, “We need something to fight for, something to defend. We need a [sort of] base of operations [to ground our autonomy in].”^[xv]

This core fact and practical resonance – amongst others relating to social organization in and across maroon communities – has been a touchstone for explicit Black anarchist engagement with, and historical analyses of, marronage. However, although generative, the grand/petit frame leaves deeper, even more pointed, elaborations of these resonances and others to be presented on the part of Black anarchist material.

Great Dismal Maroons

In his 2005 writing, The Real Resistance to Slavery in North America, Russell “Maroon” Shoatz presents a historical account of marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp aimed at outlining: the tendency of maroon communities to countervail (to a notable degree) racial hierarchy internally; their attraction of demonization and general scorn from the outside world; and their effective resistance against encroachment and to sustain their autonomy for over 150 years – resulting in these maroon communities being key (albeit largely erased) players in the social-political struggles of the time.^[xvi]

At the core of Shoatz’s historicization of Great Dismal maroons lie questions of infrastructural and organizational capacity – internal to maroon communities, across their swamp networks^[xvii], and in social-political relation to white colonial society. On the latter, he states:

More than anything, the Dismal Swamp [post American revolution] was viewed and accepted like it was a foreign, independent, hostile territory. It was a place, above all, [for members of white society] never to venture into for fear of its fabled terrain and elusive, crafty and untamed inhabitants. It was a “spooky place”, or so the surrounding enslaved Blacks were taught to believe, which over time kept most of them from seeking refuge there amongst the Maroons.^[xviii]

Great Dismal maroons developed robustly situated infrastructure internal to each community, and these communities coordinated effectively – especially militarily – to the point of being ‘unbeatable’ in the swamp and capable of “mounting larger raids on the surrounding areas” when necessary. “[They] lived an independent existence, only periodically interrupted by mostly futile incursions and searches”, which was reflective of the internal power they had to shape their own lives in and across their communities.^[xix]

The maroons’ internal infrastructural and organizational capacity enabled them to remain ‘alive and safe’ in the swamp across varying political contexts. In moments of prolonged opportunity – namely, the American Civil War – this capacity also enabled them to free an innumerable amount of slaves, consistently neutralize or undermine confederate military efforts, and expand their social-political power beyond the swamp – coming to control “whole counties and areas of [North Carolina]” for years, as Shoatz recounts:

So, within two years of the outbreak of the war the Maroons had pulled together enough available forces [to drive out the slavers]... Afterwards, in those “liberated areas”, the Maroons and their allies set up a rudimentary framework for a new social order that the rest of the South would not know of [and put down] until the Reconstruction era.^[xx]

The Great Dismal Swamp up to this point was effectively maroon territory; and throughout, to white colonial society, its population growth was something to be subverted.

However, Shoatz qualifies this, stating, “the losses… suffered because of the Maroon presence in the swamp were not enough to alter [white colonial society’s] course, so the Maroons came to accept and absorb what they couldn’t otherwise change.”^[xxi] In this qualification, Shoatz identifies an apparent insufficiency in the maroons’ capacity to function as a social-political force undermining the prevailing social order.

This apparent insufficiency on the maroons’ part becomes more pronounced when analyzed through the historical lens of Modibo Kadalie’s book, Intimate Direct Democracy^[xxii]. In ‘Part One’, Kadalie elaborates the necessarily conflictual relationship between the ecology of the Great Dismal Swamp and white colonial society in contrast to its symbiotic relationship with the emerging ‘eco-communities’ of the maroons, highlighting:

To [the colonialists], this was indeed a “new world”, a world to be dominated… a place to be bent to their purposes and exploited for their benefit. The swamp stood in their way. To Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans [however]… the swamp was a place of peace and refuge from those frightful European conquerors… Only hostile conquerors [saw] the swamp as a troubled place in which humans could not prosper.^[xxiii]

The Great Dismal Swamp was a natural hindrance to the expansion of white colonial society, its infrastructures of ‘capitalist monocrop agriculture’, and the hierarchical forms of social organization through which these oppressive arrangements were reproduced. For maroon ‘eco-communities’, whose inhabitants’ were fleeing such oppressive arrangements, the swamp’s highly complex ecology, “unsuitable for [colonial] settlement or [capitalist] farming”, made it a hotbed for near totalizing forms of alternative living – which ongoing Euro-American expansion was making more and more untenable outside the swamp. Striving, out of necessity, toward greater symbiosis with the ecology, Great Dismal maroon infrastructures and organization took non-colonial, non-capitalist, non-hierarchical forms reflective of the complexity and dynamism of the swamp itself.^[xxiv]

As the Great Dismal Swamp was an ecological blight on the prevailing social order, so were Great Dismal maroons a social-political blight on that same social order. Like the swamp, they “stood in the way” of colonialist and slaver ambitions, hindering the expansion of white colonial society – its infrastructures and forms of social organization – into spaces they occupied, and negating oppressive arrangements in and across their communities.

Despite never warring with Euro-American colonial powers in a way that mirrored other well-known grand maroon populations (e.g. the Haitian maroons, the Suriname maroons, the Seminoles); the conditions for Great Dismal maroons to present as an actively counter-hegemonic force in the same way those maroon populations do are evident in Shoatz’s account, and made sharply visible when contextualized by Kadalie’s. That Great Dismal maroons do not present in this way – instead appearing as a non-hegemonic network of militant eco-communities, whose influence (not existence) was episodically counter-hegemonic – may seem to affirm their apparent insufficiency in capacity to function as such an undermining social-political force. However, this misalignment can be better (i.e. more generatively) explained as resulting from limits internal to the (grand/petit) frame Shoatz and Kadalie historicize Great Dismal Swamp marronage through.

Limits of the Grand/Petit Frame

We engaged earlier with the lack of explicit Black anarchist engagement with petit maroon histories despite their deep intuitive resonances with concepts of Black fugitivity and wayward living – concluding that this may result from the foregoal of socio-spatial analysis historical framings of ‘petit marronage’ tend toward. As such, though there is more to pursue and elaborate toward that point, we will leave our engagement with the ‘petit’ side of the grand/petit frame there and instead elaborate the limits specific to the ‘grand’ side of this frame in relation to Black anarchism.

Inspecting Shoatz’s and Kadalie’s accounts, we can see clear aspirational and featural resonances between Black anarchism and Great Dismal Swamp marronage. Aspirationally, these turn on the centrality of autonomy – beyond the prevailing social order’s logics and structures – to maroons’ pursuit of freedom in the Great Dismal Swamp. Featurally, these turn on the material basis maroons grounded their autonomy in, along with their simultaneous development and protection of alternative modes (infrastructural and organizational) of surviving and struggling. These resonances are reflected in Black anarchism; but they are not reflective of Black anarchism. And this is the distinction we will foreground here, as it elucidates a major limitation of the grand/petit frame in relation to Black anarchism.

Socio-spatial analysis is necessary here to properly situate the temporal permanence of ‘grand marronage’, conceptualize sites of autonomy through a grand maroon lens, and thus understand the depth of aspirational resonance between Black anarchism and Great Dismal maroons. Because grand maroons sought permanent escape from chattel enslavement, their flight had to land them in spaces functionally outside the reach of white colonial society and effectively beyond the bounds of the prevailing social order. Such spaces (i.e. spaces of negation) were where permanent (intra- and inter-) community infrastructures and organization could be developed, protected, and sustained on the maroons’ terms – to be directly responsive to their needs and irresponsive to the will of their antagonists – across temporal circumstances (both periods with and without outside encroachment). Spaces of negation could and would become sites of autonomy for grand maroons. That these spaces were also spaces of contestation^[xxv] – where a site of autonomy would necessarily undermine the prevailing social order – cannot be ascertained through, and is not relevant to, the grand/petit frame.

With this, we can understand why, in both Shoatz’s and Kadalie’s work, Black anarchism is reflected in the maroons’ aspirations but the maroons’ aspirations are not reflective of Black anarchism’s. The centrality of autonomy to Great Dismal maroons’ aspirations is clear; but this autonomy can only be historicized through the grand/petit frame as functioning outside the control of white colonial society – not necessarily against white colonial society. The existence of the Great Dismal Swamp as a site of autonomy for these maroons can be identified as a social-political blight on the prevailing social order through the grand/petit frame, but it cannot be elaborated as a necessarily existential threat undermining the prevailing social order through that same frame. Because the grand/petit frame can only draw out aspirations based in structural negation; those based in structural contestation lie outside the frame’s purview. Here then, the freedom pursued by Great Dismal maroons cannot be historicized as necessitating rupture – even if we can intuit, or read in, rupture’s structural necessity to their achieving this freedom through another lens.

This limitation extends to the features of Great Dismal Swamp marronage. While through the grand/petit frame we can identify the land-base Great Dismal maroons grounded their autonomy in, alongside their infrastructural and organizational capacity to function alternatively to white colonial society within and between their sites of autonomy; we cannot elaborate how the structural antagonism between Black people and the prevailing social order, which informed where said grounding occurred, may have necessitated Great Dismal maroons’ sites of autonomy becoming spaces of contestation – making Black survival and struggle at such sites counter-hegemonic in itself. Here then, the practices of Great Dismal maroons can be historicized as existentially non-colonial, non-capitalist, non-hierarchical, but only episodically anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, anti-hierarchical (i.e. anarchist).

Aspirationally, Black anarchism takes Black people’s pursuit of freedom to be a necessarily ruptural process because of our being necessarily dehumanized by the prevailing social order. Featurally, it takes our building, protecting, and sustaining alternative modes of survival, struggle, and sustenance – grounded in social arrangements which negate those of white colonial society, and are oriented toward furthering our pursuit of freedom – to be necessarily counter-hegemonic.

The resonances between Black anarchism and Great Dismal Swamp marronage in present Black anarchist historical accounts^[xxvi] do not capture the possibility of these histories being reflective of Black anarchism (aspirationally and featurally) because the grand/petit frame they historicize through qualifies out the structural antagonism Black anarchism draws upon in its analytical and praxical expressions. This structural antagonism made Great Dismal maroons’ pursuit of freedom one necessarily positioned against white colonial society and oriented toward a rupture of the prevailing social order. That these maroons were ultimately unsuccessful in this specific pursuit is a fact which may prove generative for Black anarchist understandings and struggles upon deeper engagement. But this deeper engagement can only come through frames capable of historicizing marronage without erasing or hedging the structural realities Black anarchism names.

Contemporary Shifts and their Utility

Slavers and colonial authorities during and before the antebellum period referred to the maroons in their midst as “outliers… runaways and banditti; and in the same spirit never called maroon settlements by their name or gave them any… negating their very existence.” The standard positions of historians on the question of North American marronage prior to and – to a waning degree – following Herbert Aptheker’s 1939 and 1947 interventions^[xxvii] were ones presuming the “absence of a maroon dimension in the South”, or calling the dissidents and Black self-emancipators, “[who] typically huddled in small units”, maroons “only as a courtesy.”; and where such positions took relatively serious account of North American maroon existence, engagement with their experiences practically amounted to a footnote.^[xxviii]

Indeed, until recently, marronage in North America^[xxix] has seldom been the subject of extensive study, historical or otherwise. Rather than resulting from coordinated, intentional, processes of erasure though; this pattern of dismissal seems to have resulted in large part from limitations characteristic of the grand/petit frame. As Sylvaine Diouf explains in Slavery’s Exiles:

The absence of large colonies and the lack of “maroon wars,” both thought of as characteristics of marronage, may explain why American maroons have for the most part remained under the radar… The overall invisibility of the American maroons thus seems to be due to restrictive definitions of marronage that do not correspond to the reality, whether in North America or in the rest of the hemisphere.^[xxx]

The inability of the grand/petit frame to effectively capture North American marronage – its internal complexities and relationship to early white colonial society – has hindered efforts in “noticing [and] understanding [the] experiences of a large number of maroons”^[xxxi]. It has limited our capacity to identify and historicize marronage across contexts and, therefore, our capacity to comprehensively understand marronage itself – along with its resonances with present day Black struggles (liberationist or otherwise).

Recognizing these limits, a number of contemporary scholars have developed new frames for historicizing and analyzing marronage – to better elaborate and draw upon maroon histories in North America. These frames destabilize the temporality-centric foundations of the grand/petit frame, grounding accounts and analyses of marronage in questions of: maroon’s socio-spatial proximity (intralimital/extralimital) to the ‘capitalistic enslavement mode of production’/CEMP in white colonial society^[xxxii]; its revolutionary or transformational effect on white colonial society or the prevailing social order in a given context (sovereign/sociogenic); and several other aspects of marronage and maroon life (e.g. the ‘psychic’, the ‘individual/collective’).^[xxxiii]

For us, and Black anarchism, however, contemporary frames centering on ‘marooning’ as an active practice under the conditions of chattel enslavement may prove especially generative for deeper engagement with maroon histories.

Marooning as Resonant

In Dismal Freedom, Brent J. Morris develops such a frame, capable of “[accommodating] the diversity of those who sought freedom in the Dismal Swamp”, by adopting a starting point which sees their marronage as “encompassing the entire process of self-emancipation.”. Explaining the utility of such a starting point and its derivative frame, he asserts:

A maroon, then, is someone who has self-extricated from enslavement, or is born to maroon parents, and lives in defiance of the laws of the enslavers that would limit their freedom. Once we begin to see the act of marooning as a verb, then the expansiveness of maroon life comes into focus.^[xxxiv]

Marooning, here, can be understood as a practice of living otherwise – within, without, and against the prevailing social order – which may be engaged in temporarily or permanently, individually or collectively, on the fringes or beyond reach, through insurgence or through seclusion, and so on.^[xxxv] The practice itself was a counter-hegemonic force, no matter the specific form it took on, which emerged from the positionality of the slave.

That slaves could maroon was a threat to white colonial society, reflective of the structural antagonism Black anarchism names. When slaves did maroon – whether they intended to or not – they necessarily undermined the prevailing social order which based itself in their dehumanization. In this, we see a deeper resonance come to the surface between Black anarchism and marronage by way of an expanded and more comprehensive frame. Upon further engagement, ‘marooning’ and other contemporary frames can unearth more foundational resonances which Black anarchists may be able to draw upon in efforts to identify and situate counter-hegemonic Black forces presently. In so doing, the “social revolutionary spirit” embodied in maroon refusal and “assertion[s] of freedom”, may become better embodied and channeled into effective Black liberation struggle today.

Share

References

Atlanta Radical Book Fair, Sage, A., & Semiyah. (2025, October 25). Borderless Intimacies: Black Anarchism and Internationalism. YouTube.

Bagby-Williams, A., & Za Suekama, N. (2023). Black Anarchism and the Black Radical Tradition: Moving Beyond Racial Capitalism (S. Fawkes, Ed.). Daraja Press.

Diouf, S. A. (2014). Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons. New York University Press.

Kadalie, M. (2022). Intimate Direct Democracy: Fort Mose, the Great Dismal Swamp, and the Human Quest for Freedom (A. Zonneveld, Ed.). On Our Own Authority! Publishing.

Morris, J. B. (2022). Dismal Freedom: A History of the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp. University of North Carolina Press.

Quan, H. L. T. (2024). Become Ungovernable: An Abolition Feminist Ethic for Democratic Living. Pluto Press.

Sayers, D. (2014). A Desolate Place for a Defiant People: The Archaeology of Maroons, Indigenous Americans, and Enslaved Laborers in the Great Dismal Swamp. University of Florida Press.

Shoatz, R. M. (2018, March 18). The Real Resistance to Slavery in North America. Libcom.org. https://libcom.org/article/real-resistance-slavery-north-america

Winston, C. (2023). How to Lose the Hounds: Maroon Geographies and a World Beyond Policing. Duke University Press.

Endnotes

^[i] (Atlanta Radical Book Fair et al., 2025)

^[ii] (Bagby-Williams & Za Suekama, 2023, 19)

^[iii] Throughout, to prevent over-complication, the term “Black anarchism” will be treated as one encompassing adjacent (Black anarchic/anarchistic) ideological frames (e.g. Black autonomism, Neo-Panafricanism, Black communalism, Anarkata tendencies, etc.); Black anarchism as a current in the Black radical tradition lends to this type of treatment. “Black anarchist”, then will also encompass the Black anarchic/anarchistic.

^[iv] (Morris, 2022, 11)

^[v] (Morris, 2022, 5)

^[vi] This is true especially in Diouf’s Slavery’s Exiles (Diouf, 2014, 6), and Winston’s How to Lose the Hounds (Winston, 2023, 1-2).

^[vii] (Morris, 2022, 6)

^[viii] (Atlanta Radical Book Fair et al., 2025)

^[ix] Though H.L.T. Quan is not Black, her engagement with Camp’s historicization of petit marronage through an anarcha-feminist lens here mirrors many Black anarchist analyses of ‘fugitivity’ and ‘waywardness’ (among other things) in relation Black life, freedom, and struggle. Because of the sparse historical framings of petit marronage across Black anarchist literature, Quan’s engagement here is useful to inspect.

^[x] (Quan, 2024, 38-39)

^[xi] (Quan, 2024, 39)

^[xii] (Quan, 2024, 40)

^[xiii] This is pointed to in Dismal Freedom when Morris accounts a trend among historical and anthropological scholars to discount petit marronage as insignificant. (Morris, 2022, 5)

^[xiv] (Atlanta Radical Book Fair et al., 2025)

^[xv] (Atlanta Radical Book Fair et al., 2025)

^[xvi] (Shoatz, 2018)

^[xvii] These networks existed across the entire Great Dismal Swamp, which at the time “stretched at least one

hundred miles one way, and sixty miles the other… almost as large as the state of Delaware.” – even if no particular one intentionally spanned the entirety of the swamp. (Shoatz, 2018)

^[xviii] (Shoatz, 2018)

^[xix] (Shoatz, 2018)

^[xx] (Shoatz, 2018)

^[xxi] (Shoatz, 2018)

^[xxii] Arguing the social organization of maroon communities was non-hierarchical and oriented toward symbiosis with the swamp’s ecology by necessity, Kadalie illuminates the Great Dismal Swamp as a valuable historic reference point for Black anarchist social ecologic study and praxis. (Kadalie, 2022, 16-17)

^[xxiii] (Kadalie, 2022, 43)

^[xxiv] (Kadalie, 2022, 41-46)

^[xxv] Spaces where active struggles between maroon autonomies and white colonial society were central (not just instrumental).

^[xxvi] As represented in Shoatz’s and Kadalie’s work here.

^[xxvii] These “established the existence of maroons, [without analyzing] their experience.” (Diouf, 2014, 3)

^[xxviii] (Diouf, 2014, 3-4)

^[xxix] Excluding “those of Florida, who lived in large communities and fought in Seminole Wars”, as their marronage is reflective of those forms seen across South and Central America and the Caribbean which have attracted much attention due largely to their scale. (Diouf, 2014, 3-4)

^[xxx] (Diouf, 2014, 4)

^[xxxi] (Diouf, 2014, 5)

^[xxxii] (Sayers, 2014, 79-80)

^[xxxiii] (Morris, 2022, 5)

^[xxxiv] (Morris, 2022, 6)

^[xxxv] (Morris, 2022, 6)

When folks hear 'All Power to the People', they often think of it as a solution to be demanded. But it's better understood as a condition to be struggled toward. Because power isn't something that can be granted from above. It's something that is built up, embodied and exerted from below.

There may be a Man standing on top of a mountain, and he may say, I want this mountain to move. Of course, he can't move the mountain himself, but he sees a whole bunch of people down below kicking it, and he's like, “Well, if I can get them to come over here and pick up this mountain and walk, the mountain will move.” Although he doesn't have the power to make his imagination a reality. He recognizes that the people do. So he asks himself these questions: “Under what conditions can power be built in the way I need?”; “Under what conditions will that power be embodied where I want it to?”; “Under what conditions will that power be exerted toward what I want to see?”; in essence, “Under what conditions can I decide how the people are organized, where the people are organized, what end the people are organized toward?”

In this way, the power is already with the people. The only question is, who decides how it's built up? Who decides where it's embodied, and who decides to what end it's exerted? Who decides is determined by the conditions under which the people are organized.

The conditions we live under are ones in which our needs are weaponized against us to force our compliance. The conditions we live under are ones in which both naked and systematic violence is mobilized against us to force our compliance. These are the conditions for domination and oppression. These are the conditions under which the people move the mountain because the Man said so. And although the power is always with the people; under these conditions, it's controlled by the Man. So the way power is structured, the way the people are organized, says "power to the Man". This structural arrangement is hierarchy.

'All power to the people' is the negation of this structural arrangement (anarchy). It's a condition under which the people’s power is controlled by the people. It’s a condition under which the people decide how they are organized, where they are organized, and what ends they are organized toward — together, on their own terms. It's a condition that undermines attempts at domination and oppression and to struggle toward this condition means to struggle against those systems of violence and deprivation that keep us moving the mountain for the Man.

Share

Under the boot of Amerikkka’s repression, State terror, and heightened surveillance; the people across Minnesota just pulled off the first general strike the “U.S.” has seen in over eighty years. With the devil eyeing them down and pushing their hand, they have risen up. Mashallah.

I have not gotten to read much on this. I do not know the details. But I have seen the size of this action — and that’s what it seems to be, an ACTION. I have seen multiple videos of people discussing the hyper-localized, well organized and networked work being done on the ground out there in Minneapolis. I have seen an embrace of tactics — often scoffed at in activist and “formal” organizing spaces — which do not seek to control and direct but instead activate and disperse. And I have seen a popular awe of mass resistance happening in our present moment that is usually reserved for mass resistance of the past.

The progressions since the turn of the year (2026) have been rapid. The murder of Renee Nicole Good has sparked an energy and attention around militancy that can be described as popular (or at least, not niche). I have seen this popular appeal around militancy in the heightened attention and engagement given to marginal groups and spaces.

Under what other circumstances could a clip of Paul Birdsong (a Black man), semi-auto shotgun in hand, saying publicly of ICE pigs, “I’ll put a hole in they chest the size of a window.”, spread like wildfire and be received positively? For about a year now, I have seen him and the group he represents as chairman publicize their practices of confronting police pigs, passing out food, and patrolling communities in Philly. They say they are a chapter of the Black Panther Party.1

Whether they are legit or not, there has been a general embrace of them amongst leftist, and even some progressive liberal, activist spaces ever since they began receiving mass attention early this month. They have captured the imagination of many as of late, despite skepticism. Under what other circumstances would a fringe group attaching itself to a massive historic legacy be taken serious enough to even be given time of day?

This may be the historic moment.

Still, the popular resistance hasn’t spread across the country as of yet. Out here, in Southwest VA, the conditions are getting worse without question, but the local circumstances are not what are being seen in Minneapolis. I’m sure it’s not lost on anyone what the broader circumstances are, but the urgency is not as felt. I’m trying to situate myself in relation to all this.

Just a year and a half ago (mid 2024) — a few months removed from the Gaza solidarity encampment moment that spread across U.S. colleges & universities — on Virginia Tech’s campus, we believed we may be in the historic moment at the school.

The night eighty-two of us had been arrested in April of that year, probably two thousand people were at the scene, and hundreds were chanting in support of us. In response to this demonstration, the university had quietly made several policy changes that systematically blocked us (recent arrestees) from student representative bodies, tightened restrictions on all student organizations, and restricted anyone with university affiliation’s ability to dissent without sanction.

The issues here were easy to agitate around, and with the memory of encampment fresh (in students’ and university officials’ minds), we seemed to have a real opening to turn a tide on Virginia Tech’s campus — and necessarily in Blacksburg itself as well. There were a decent few of us (I’d say about twenty-ish consistently) who put extensive effort into seeing this tide turn within the year. The student organizing that happened over the next eight or so months deserves more detailed recounting than I will do here.

Within three months, we were (at least perceived by university officials as) a viable threat to business-as-usual on campus. We had broken the new policies multiple times at this point (without sanction), established (what was intended to be) an alternative student representative body with over forty students upfront, developed a set of demands and an accompanying petition that reached over seven hundred signatures in under two weeks, and had both directly confronted and openly called out university officials in ways that prompted negotiations aimed at recuperating a previously disillusioned organization through its integration into liberalized inclusion talks. We had (it seemed) leverage, capacity, and the energy to make a push to turn a tide.

I remember at the time I could feel what the moment could be. Over the next five months though, things fell apart. Internal tensions surfaced in and across organizations in ways that fragmented the spaces organizing around popular student issues (at the time this was tightly connected to Palestine) was concentrated in. Structural issues became evident as many of us who were consistent started working through heavy burn out, and many others (consistent and inconsistent) started dropping off. Energy dropped off, capacity dropped off, and the leverage we had poofed away. There were no more negotiations, and we got sanctioned for breaking policy now.

Our circumstances signaled the historic moment, and we tried to seize the time by being responsive to these circumstances. We lost. The tide did not turn. What were circumstances became conditions we can no longer agitate around as issues. Subhanallah.

Over this same time span, the energy in the Black community at Virginia Tech began to noticeably shift. A year and a half prior (early 2023), out of frustration with the lack of any “radical pulse” in our community, I wrote an outline for an organization aimed at raising consciousness on campus — Black Mindedness — and began trying to find others to build it with.

By mid 2024, a group of six of us had developed a framework for the org that could be responsive to the Black community’s conditions on campus and started working with it (as a non-registered organization). The work done in, through, and to Black Mindedness from then onward — and ongoing — also deserves much more detailed recounting than I will do here.

When DEI began to come explicitly under threat of dissolution at Virginia Tech (early 2025), we (and two other student organizers) were turned to; there was a desire for a mass demonstration (a march). What would come of our efforts over about 3 weeks was the second largest demonstration in Virginia Tech’s history (the ‘We Won’t Go Back’ march). The role we (Black Mindedness) played was coordinating across student organizations (activist and cultural) to get as big a turnout as possible. This was not arbitrary.

Up to that point, we had been the only organization on campus that regularly door-knocked and flyered in any dorm; this was something Rafiki Morris (from AAPRP) emphasized we ought lean into when I had the pleasure of chatting with him at the 2024 SJP Conference, and it had served us well. We had also made introducing at least five Black students to our work per week part of our ongoing individual efforts. These practices, in conjunction with our focus on holding space consistently for politicized discussion and organizing conversations, had given us a reputation and made us familiar in Black and activist student spaces, as well as the broader local organizing scene. All of this had also given us the insight necessary to catalyze other organizing spaces which we could bring students and community members into.

We were in a distinct position where any mobilization could be channelled into sustained organizing efforts (accountable to something outside of our organization), and we were able to do that through ‘We Won’t Go Back’. These efforts would die down before becoming truly substantial — for many reasons; but a major objective of ours from the jump had been the emergence of a community care & organizing space that was not in the Black community at the time. That space did emerge, and exists in different (more effective and grounded) forms now.

By mid 2025, our organization had formally shifted our primary terrain from the campus to grassroots, but what we had been doing the year prior is still happening, and the character of the Black community at Virginia Tech is notably different.

DEI was dissolved. The wins of past students and faculty were rescinded. These were circumstances we expected to face, and their weight is heavy on students, faculty, and staff. But our conditions have always been the agitational point and what we have organized against. Our circumstances have only provided evidence for the value of our organizing and the spaces that have emerged through it. Subhanallah.

Amerikkka is on the back foot, and in far more ways than one. I do not grieve its impending collapse, and I will not mourn its death. I do dream of Black revolt, another 2020 uprising, being the nail in the coffin of this devil. I do hope to see more general strikes over the course of this year, and (inshallah) maybe one at nation-wide scale. I do imagine bearing witness to Amerikkkan flags burning in assertions of Indigenous and New Afrikan sovereignty. This may be the historic moment.

All the same, things feel slow out here. The work right now is about finding and keeping a consistent rhythm. The task is to show up, listen, support, invite, and repeat — doing it better the next time around, building with more of our people as we go. It doesn’t feel like the historic moment out here. It feels like the same issues, the same needs, the same struggle, in worsening conditions.

But if this is the historic moment, it will spread to here. And if we’re struggling properly, this time to come will be the people’s. Inshallah.

Share

Author’s Note: This is a slightly revised version of my senior capstone essay from Spring of 2025. It is focused on theorizing Blackness, specifically in relation to ‘order’, and how it functions within/out the political world.

Inshallah, I hope reading this will clarify something for you and spark further engagement with the works I mention.

Peace in Struggle,
Emon

The following is a contribution to the theorization of Blackness in relation to ‘the political’. It is rooted in the Black Radical Tradition — particularly, the second wave of Black anarchist thought (greatly inspired by Elder Ashanti Alston) — and informed by recent elaborations of anarchist thought (notably Daniel Baryon’s). The aim here is to shift our focus in conversations surrounding Blackness from individuals, institutions, and power structures, toward order itself (as manifest through ‘the political’.) And from there, move us toward an anti-political horizon, and vehicle of Black empowerment — a praxis of [DIS]ORDER.

Blackness, here, will reveal itself to be more than a social construct, more than an identity, more than even a force of resistance. Blackness will reveal itself as a force of ‘necessary disorder’ — anti-political in its essence, and ready-made to be harnessed by us in our struggle for liberation.

POWER & ORDER

Here, we want to lay out our framework for understanding, and our conception of, ‘the political’ and the political world. We will present, and elaborate, a multi-faceted conception of power, then relate it to a concept of order to form a basis for our conception of ‘the political’ and the political world.

Power

To understand ‘the political’ and the political world, we need to understand power. This is what’s at the core of everything, and there are two ways it manifests. Power manifests firstly as a capacity, and it manifests secondly, when people are organized together, as a social phenomenon.

As a capacity, we see power manifest as ‘power in’ (or ‘power within’) and ‘power to’. ‘Power in’ is the extent to which one can envision, conceive and synthesize their will / desired outcome. That is saying, “How well can I imagine and understand what I want to happen?” It doesn’t mean the capacity to actualize/materialize anything, just the capacity to see it, to conceive of it. So the greater one can conceive of their will, the more powerful one is internally (i.e. in terms of ‘power in’). ‘Power to’ is the extent to which one can actualize their will (i.e. make their desired outcome materially expressed).^[2] This is saying, “That thing I envision, that thing I want to happen, that thing I imagine happening; how capable am I of making it materially be?” These two, again, are capacities. They can be active (i.e. exerted), they can be latent (i.e. unused), they exist in every being, and they interrelate. As a social phenomenon (socially), we see power manifest as ‘power with’ or as ‘power over’.

‘Power with’ is horizontal power, structurally expressed through relationships of mutuality and sustained through autonomous self organization. When we say ‘power with’ is horizontal power, we mean it is the social phenomenon of power between people on equal footing. This power is structurally expressed through relationships of mutuality. That is to say, the more empowered I become, the more empowered you become; the more empowered the person next to us becomes, the more empowered we become; the more empowered anyone becomes, the more empowered everybody becomes; we’re all becoming empowered together. Because here everyone’s becoming empowered together, because we’re all on equal footing, everyone’s autonomy is structurally protected. In order to relate to one another and get things done together, we have to make individual decisions to organize together to get things done through/in an ongoing process of autonomous self-organization (the process of organization anti-politicality lends toward).

‘Power over’ is hierarchical power, structurally expressed through relationships of subjugation and sustained through the imposition of order.^[3] We say, ‘power over’ characterizes the political world, and what this means will be made clear throughout the rest of this section.

The Political World

We’re understanding ‘power over’ (i.e. hierarchical power) as the social phenomenon which is the source of subjugation.^[4] We’re understanding ‘the political’ as imposed order, made material through political apparatus(es) (for us, broadly, this means the state).^[5] And we’re understanding the political world (diagrammed below) to be: the world shaped by the social phenomenon of hierarchical power, sustained through the imposed order of the political, and manifest as the interplay between these things.

To explain each of these things (hierarchical power, ‘the political’, and the political world), and to give some rationale behind the understandings we’re working with, let’s look at the relationship between subjugation and imposed order.

In The State and Revolution, V.I. Lenin says:

[The] state arises where, when, and in so far as, class antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled and conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable.^[6]

To elucidate and elaborate Lenin’s claim regarding class antagonisms and the state’s existence, and to forward the understanding of ‘the political’ we presented before, consider this. Someone comes along and encloses the commons, saying forcefully (and, of course, being forceful), “This land is now my private property! Everything produced on it is owned by me, and all of you working on it must work for me [for a wage] or leave!” The people of the commons, who work the land, are now in the position of working for this now owner (so he can make a profit), a capitalist hierarchy is established (necessarily against the will of the workers) in which the owner is necessarily exploiting the workers. What will inevitably end up happening, here, is the workers will say, “We don’t have to be in this position of being exploited, and we shouldn’t be in it at all!”; they will understand that they can rise up against the owner and take back control of the commons for themselves collectively; they will realize that the hierarchy that is the source of their being exploited, itself, is unsustainable, and that it’s in their best interests to destroy it. The owner — recognizing the irreconcilability of his capitalist interests and the workers’ interests, knowing the source of his power is unsustainable on its own — realizes he needs an apparatus outside of himself, an external authority, to sustain the existence of the exploitative dynamic with the workers he’s benefiting from. So he creates a political apparatus (the state) to sustain and perpetuate his power through sustaining and perpetuating the capitalist hierarchy. This social phenomenon of the owner holding ‘power over’ the worker, then, becomes the defined order the state is built to impose.

Taking Lenin’s claim a bit further and expanding it with our terms, we say: ‘The political’ arises where, when, and insofar as a relationship of subjugation cannot be sustained by the subjugator himself, and ‘the political’ will only, and can only, take on whatever form is necessary to sustain the relationships of subjugation which define the order it is the imposition of. Conversely, the existence of ‘the political’ proves the presence of a relationship of subjugation.

For the state to arise, hierarchy must be present.^[7] For ‘the political’ to become manifest, that social phenomenon which is the source of subjugation, has to be present. We say this because the need for ‘the political’, the need for an imposed order, breeds ‘the political’, and that need only arises when an unsustainable social phenomenon becomes manifest and defines an order to be imposed. As such, when the political comes into being, sustaining and perpetuating hierarchical power, the political world [of subjugation] — shaped by the social phenomenon of hierarchical power, sustained through the imposed order of ‘the political’, and manifest as the interplay between those things — comes into being as well.

NECESSARY DISORDER

What we are striving toward, here, is an understanding of Blackness that can better explain its function in the political world. To do this, we’ll come to understand how, amidst the social phenomenon of hierarchical power, the subjugated respond to subjugation. We’ll come to understand disorder as necessary for the existence and persistence of ‘the political’, and as foundational to the political world. We’ll come to understand the inevitability of Blackness in the political world (i.e. Blackness as expressed through Black resistance under white supremacist capitalism), and come to understand the foundationality of Blackness to the political world (i.e. Blackness as disorder within the political world); and in understanding these two qualities, which Blackness holds, we will elucidate a conception of Blackness as ‘necessary disorder’ in the political world.

Inevitability (Resistance)

If X, then Y — when X equals subjugation, and Y equals resistance. What we’re saying here is that subjugation does not require resistance in order to exist, but there will inevitably be resistance where there is subjugation.

Consider this. There’s a slave and there’s a slave master. The slave does not fight against being subjugated — that is, they do not resist their enslavement. In fact, they lean into the dynamic; they accept their status as a slave and obey every order of their slave master. Here, there is no resistance on the part of the subjugated (the slave), but there is still subjugation (enslavement) because there’s still a slave and a slave master. So resistance is not a prerequisite for subjugation to exist.

But we understand, when looking at the world, historically, slaves have always resisted their enslavement. Historically, workers have always resisted their exploitation. Historically, all subjugated groups have always resisted in some capacity. Understanding this, we can say, just as a socio-historical fact, that there will be resistance where there’s subjugation.

Understanding the political world as being shaped by the social phenomenon of hierarchical power, which is the source of subjugation, we can understand hierarchical power, along with its resulting subjugation, as being a necessary aspect of the political world. With this, we say resistance is inevitable in the political world.

Foundationality (Disorder)

This next quality, which is foundationality, we’re associating with disorder, and it is specifically/exclusively tied to ‘the political’. Foundationality doesn’t have to exist in the context of a social phenomenon, because a social phenomenon doesn’t need any justification/legitimization to exist and persist - it just needs something to sustain it. This, again, is why hierarchical power creates ‘the political’, in order to be sustained and perpetuated, and why ‘the political’ is defined and shaped by hierarchical power.

‘The political’, however, as imposed order, needs justification for its institutions’ imposition; it needs something to legitimize its existence, along with that of its institutions. This need may be clearer when we put it like this: X, only if Y and Z — when X equals imposition of order, Y equals [the existence of a] defined order, and Z equals [the presence of] disorder (i.e. deviance from the defined order). We’re saying, here, that imposition of order is only possible when there is a defined order and disorder is present; for order to be imposed, order must be defined and there must be a situation of disorder. And, regarding ‘the political’, we’re saying that imposed order (i.e. ‘the political’) requires disorder for its existence (i.e. to justify its existence).

Think about it in this way. If I have a bunch of papers, in order for me to put them in order, I have to decide what order is. So I say, concerning the bunch of papers, “These papers being stacked in this particular way, is order.” If they’re already stacked in that way, I have nothing to do; there’s no order for me to impose on the papers. But say I, or someone else, scatters all the papers. Now, we have a situation that misaligns with my defined order. At this point, I have something to do, an order to impose on the bunch of papers, and my job is then to go about ordering (i.e. imposing order upon) these papers. My job, as the order-er of the bunch of papers, is legitimate insofar as there is a particular way the papers should be stacked which is considered “order” (i.e. insofar as there is a defined order), and insofar as the papers are not stacked in that way (i.e. insofar as there is disorder).

Disorder is where ‘the political’ — along with its institutions — finds its justification/legitimacy, and as such disorder is necessary for the existence and persistence of ‘the political’. With this, and understanding the political world as sustained through the imposed order of ‘the political’, we say disorder is foundational to the political world.

Blackness as Necessary Disorder

In relation to ‘the political’, as it’s manifest under white supremacist capitalism, Blackness itself is ‘necessary disorder’. This is both because of its inevitability in, and foundationality to, the political world. Its inevitability is expressed, because of the positionality of Black people under white supremacist capitalism, through Black resistance to subjugation. Its foundationality is made evident in the dissident modes of being, ways of living, methods of surviving, Blackness carries with it (one of these being Black resistance)— given what ‘the political’ relegates Black people to.^[8] To understand both of these qualities as features of Blackness — more vital for us is foundationality — we can look at two statements which highlight them.

Hermann Kreige, described in Anarcho-Blackness by Marquis Bey as, “A German American revolutionary and proto-socialist who, incidentally, opposed the abolition of slavery.”, in 1846, said this regarding the prospect of abolishing slavery: “That we should declare ourselves in favor of the abolitionist movement is if it were our intention to throw the Republic into a state of anarchy.”^[9]

Now, when Kreige says “state of anarchy”, he is not talking about this way of organizing society according to the principles of freedom, equality and solidarity — as the anarchists of his time and today advocate. What Kreige is talking about is a state of disorder, a state of chaos, and drawing on this, we can elucidate some realities about Blackness’ emergence — and existence — within the political world. We say, Blackness emerges within the political world as an element which must be chained to sustain order, and this enchainment, codified by ‘the political’, relegates Black people — and necessarily, the emergent force of Blackness — to a position of perpetual ordering by the state (as criminal).

Kreige says, if we were to abolish slavery, we would throw the republic into a state of anarchy (i.e. disorder, chaos), and this is his justification for keeping Black people in chains. Now, when slavery was eventually “abolished” in America, more vectors for enslavement (namely, the 13th amendment) were created through, and tied to, the notion of criminality. The label criminal signifies, in the context of ‘the political’, a threat to order, and serves as justification for putting people identified with the label in chains; it serves as a legitimizing category for repressive political institutions like prisons, police, surveillance/“intelligence” agencies, and others of those sorts. We understand Black people, the Black community, as being over-policed, over-surveilled, over-incarcerated — in a word, criminalized — as consequence of the positionality of Blackness under white supremacist capitalism; we say, in this way, Blackness itself is criminalized under white supremacist capitalism — identified as disorder justifying ‘the political’. Here, we see a display of Blackness’ foundationality.

Calvin Warren’s claim regarding contract law / law of chattel, in chapter 2 of Ontological Terror, further illuminates this foundationality. He says:

Contract law (law of chattel) is perhaps the hallmark of modern legal development, given the need to regulate commerce and specify the rights and entitlement of property holders. But this corpus of law emerges because one needs to integrate the slave into the world.^[10]

Here, the law itself, not the master-slave relation, not the logic underpinning chattel slavery — viewing Black people as property — but the law that codifies this logic, institutionalizes it, and which thus makes a master - chattel slave relation part of the imposed order of ‘the political’, is made to integrate Black people into the world — shaped by white supremacist capitalism — as propertied things. We can see here, Blackness emerges within the political world as that element which can, and must, be propertied to enshrine white supremacist capitalism, and this propertization, codified by ‘the political’, relegates Black people — and necessarily, the emergent force of Blackness — to a position of perpetual subjugation under hierarchy (as chattel slave).

Relegated to this position of perpetual subjugation, Blackness inevitably becomes a force of perpetual resistance under white supremacist capitalism. Here, we see Blackness’ foundationality to the political world expressed through its inevitability in the political world; because resistance against the hierarchy of white supremacist capitalism is also a struggle against the imposed order — against the propertization of Black people, and the perpetual subjugation of Blackness — and such a struggle occurring is disorder in the political world. Here we can see clearly the function of Blackness in the political world. We can see its positionality as making it a force of inevitable resistance, and this inevitable resistance being a force of disorder to ‘the political’.

Understanding the hierarchy of white supremacist capitalism to be a social phenomenon which defines the imposed order of ‘the political’, understanding its resulting subjugation as being a necessary aspect of the political world, and taking what we’ve made clear regarding the function of Blackness in the political world — we say, Blackness is ‘necessary disorder’ in the political world.

Dubian Adi illustrated, and elaborated, this understanding of Blackness as ‘necessary disorder’ beautifully and succinctly in Black is Crime: Notes on Blaqillegalism:

"Trapped within the confines of a structural and ontological position of unfreedom… Black enslaved were forced to occupy the cramped positionality… Here, blackness… [necessarily] stretches out against the walls meant to contain and regulate it, and in the most natural of impulses attempts to escape… the law deprived the enslaved not only of… personal freedom… but the very modes of personhood that enable freedom’s possibility… if containerization was the law’s basic function for blackness, then blackness could not help but break the law. Be it by accident, circumstance, resistance or necessity, blackness defied the boundaries of the law every day, precisely as this… struggle intrinsic to a people kept in bondage.^[11]

The law, here, does not serve the purpose of depriving Black people of personal freedom. The source of deprivation is the social phenomenon of white supremacist capitalism which is Blackness’ source of subjugation. The law codified the bounds — shaped by the hierarchy of white supremacist capitalism — of who/what could have access to “the very modes of personhood that [enable] freedom’s possibility”, of who/what are considered human under the guise of ‘the political’, in the political world; and Blackness, in emerging as that element which can/must be propertied under the imposed order, fell outside the bounds. As such, “the containerization”, the ordering, of Blackness; the sustainment of a condition of dehumanization for Black people, perpetual subjugation of Blackness; this “was the law’s basic function for Blackness” and is the basic function of ‘the political’ for Blackness.

Just as “Blackness couldn’t help but break the law”, Blackness can’t help but act as disorder in the political world. And “be it by accident, circumstance, resistance or necessity” Blackness defies the boundaries of ‘the political’ every day — because just to live as human beings, Black people have to deviate from the order defined by white supremacist capitalism. Precisely as a force which struggles “in a way that was intrinsic to a people kept in bondage”, Blackness is, as we have said, ‘necessary disorder’ in the political world.

FROM THREATENING ORDER, TO ESCAPING ORDER

We are striving, here, to expand our conception of Blackness as ‘necessary disorder’ through shifting our perspective from that of ‘the political’ to the anti-political. We’ll elaborate and illustrate how Blackness functions as ‘necessary disorder’ in the political world. We’ll come to recognize the limitations of ‘the political’ in perceiving/understanding Blackness. We’ll come to understand the anti-political, and analyze Blackness’ function through the anti-political lens. And out of this, we will arrive at a — loose and working — anti-political conception of Blackness.

Blackness as [Il]legible to ‘the Political’

Understanding Blackness as ‘necessary disorder’ in the political world [of subjugation], we can identify Blackness as a constant threat in the eyes of ‘the political’. Because Blackness is that force which perpetually deviates from the defined order, that force which political institutions must come into conflict with at all times to impose order, ‘the political’ can only perceive and characterize Blackness — in all its natural expressions — as threatening order (this is illustrated in the diagram below).

The defined order (left side on the diagram), shaped by white supremacist capitalism, categorizes Blackness as that element which can, and must, be chained (as criminal) and propertized (as chattel slave). ‘The political’, therefore, blocks Black people (insofar as they embrace and embody Blackness) from accessing human status, which grants freedom and self-ownership in the political world.^[12] In this way Blackness (as an element in the political world) signifies an individual’s non-humanness to ‘the political’, and this non-humanness of Blackness requires that Black people’s struggle for humanization extend beyond the bounds of the defined order.

This is where (right side of diagram on previous page) we see Blackness (as a force / as ‘necessary disorder’) pushing outward against the boundary codified by ‘the political’ — in Black people’s alternative process(es) of humanization — stretching it almost to the point of rupture, threatening to break order itself. Here, we also see how and why ‘the political’ is reproduced — we see how and why imposed order is malleable. Political institutions work to establish the defined order by pushing Blackness back inward — in a systemic process of dehumanization — preventing rupture, and reproducing a state of imposed order (i.e. ‘the political’). Because Blackness, as ‘necessary disorder’, cannot stop pushing outward, it is always threatening order — thus, ‘the political’ is continuously being reproduced to prevent breaking of order.

This is why we say, in the eyes of ‘the political’, Blackness is solely a threat. This is why repression [of Blackness], recuperation [of order], and assimilation/whitening [of Black people], is the state’s response to dissidence in the Black community — especially in its overtly constructive (i.e. humanizing) forms.

For us to take on the perspective of ‘the political’, to analyze Blackness only as it relates to ‘the political’, or even to look at Blackness only as it functions in the political world, would be to limit ourselves to a reductive conception; it would be to miss how ‘necessary disorder’ manifests socially, how Blackness relates to power and how it functions constructively. Because, to ‘the political’, Blackness is illegible beyond the bounds of order.

Blackness made Legible through an Anti-Political Lens

We need to move beyond defined and imposed order to understand how ‘necessary disorder’ manifests socially. We need to shift our perspective from one embracing ‘the political’, treating it as permanent/necessary, to one which rejects its legitimacy outright — to one critical of imposed order and the social phenomenon it sustains. As such, here, we’re shifting to an anti-political perspective, and that is to look at Blackness through a different lens — not through that of ‘the political’ but through an anti-political one. What comes with this perspective shift is a paradigm shift, a new power equation, a new social phenomenon held at center.

We say, the anti-political is the negation of ‘the political’. Where ‘the political’ has at its core the social phenomenon of ‘power over’, the anti-political has at its core the social phenomenon of ‘power with’. Where ‘the political’ is defined by hierarchical power (the source of subjugation), the anti-political is defined by horizontal power (the source of mutuality). Where ‘the political’ is the imposed order which sustains the political world, the anti-political is the autonomous self-organization which runs contrary to the political world. The anti-political emerges within the political world (having been expressed outside it) as a subversive undercurrent - undermining the legitimacy of the defined and imposed order by feeding into and playing off of disorder, moving the disorderly toward an embrace of anti-politicality and being moved itself toward a more disorderly expression, cultivating amongst the disorderly and within disorder itself alternative modes of being and ways of organizing which counteract those characteristic of the political world (i.e. liberatory modes of being and ways of organizing).

Blackness, as ‘necessary disorder’, tends toward anti-politicality in its expression at all times, precisely because (as we have said) it must push outward against the boundary codified by ‘the political’, it must move to escape ‘the political’, at all times. Black people must embrace alternatives — dissident modes of being and anarchic ways of organizing amongst each other — to pursue humanization, because the freedom of being human, that was stripped away by white supremacist capitalism, lies beyond the bounds of the defined order, and ‘the political’ lies between us and it.

Blackness here (diagrammed below), is moving to escape order by rupturing the imposed order. In doing this, it’s struggling not only to free itself, but to free everything contained within ‘the political’ from order.

If Blackness triumphs over ‘the political’ here, if ‘necessary disorder’ triumphs over imposed order, the social phenomenon of hierarchical power will be deprived of its means of sustainment. It will no longer be able to define order, and it will struggle with horizontal power to perpetuate itself. This hypothetical condition, we say, would be a state of disorder; the state out of which the social phenomenon of ‘power over’ may be rendered obsolete by structures of horizontal power, and which would be necessary for the onset of a new world built through relationships of mutuality and sustained through autonomous self-organization. Through an anti-political lens, this state of disorder — what Blackness as ‘necessary disorder’ struggles toward — is liberation from the political world, through the ending of the political world.

Understanding all of this, we can put forward this — as a, loose and working, anti-political conception of Blackness: Blackness is a force of ‘necessary disorder’ in the political world which emerges from the necessary, liberatory, struggle of Black people for humanization; Blackness tends toward anti-politicality in its expression, lending to dissident modes of being and anarchic ways of organizing in Black communities; Blackness moves to escape order itself through the rupture of imposed order (i.e. the dissolution of ‘the political’), and is thus a force aimed toward the liberation of all from the political world.

[DIS]ORDER OF BLACK EMPOWERMENT

With the conception we have put forward come numerous implications regarding praxis. Here, we do not intend to explore and engage all those implications; but we do intend to explicitly name some of the implications around rupture (both as a reality and praxis) embedded in our (again, loose and working) anti-political conception of Blackness. We will, as there may still be room for confusion, clarify what we mean by “[Blackness expressing itself through] dissident modes of being and anarchic ways of organizing in Black communities” and connect that to our identification of Blackness being “aimed toward the liberation of all from the political world”. In doing this, “[DIS]ORDER” will take shape as a vehicle of Black empowerment.

To what End? By what Means?

“What we are fighting for, (and to what end) is not to make this world we inherited better, improve upon it, or even change it in a radical sense. Our end goal is to end it, that is to say, its end is our beginning.”^[13] Consider what Blackness, as we are conceptualizing it here, is aimed toward - “the liberation of all from the political world”. We have said, “Blackness moves to escape order itself through the rupture of imposed order”, and we should examine this closely, because here, the end that is “the liberation of all from the political world” is defined in/by the movement of Blackness.

Blackness moves to “escape order itself”, not through an evasion from, not through attained recognition from and negotiation with, not through the transformation of, but “through the rupture of imposed order”. This manifests in two ways - which, as we will see, interrelate: one, Blackness moves to escape order through the sudden destruction of the imposed order (expressed as insurrectionary revolt against ‘the political’ and its institutions); and two, Blackness moves to escape order through sustained/perpetual construction against the imposed order (expressed as revolutionary prefiguration against the bounds of ‘the political’).

The former (i.e. destruction expressed as insurrectionary revolt) is put plainly in Black Armed Joy, when the authors spoke toward “The Coming Insurrection”, saying, “We [that is, Black insurrectionists] seek unmediated and uncompromising conflict with the State and Capital… Living by principle means we dismantle systems (as best we can) in this world at this moment.”^[14]

When we say that Blackness moves to escape order through the destruction of imposed order, we mean Blackness functions — in Black people / Black communities — as an impulse toward pointed, unyielding, direct conflict with white supremacist capitalism and the state (i.e. ‘the political’ made material). This may be most widely visible during moments of Black rebellion, in the burning of police cars, the destruction/defacement of corporate and government infrastructures, and so on; but smaller / more common acts of refusal and rebellion by Black people and in Black communities reflect this impulse as well.

The latter (i.e. construction expressed as revolutionary prefiguration) is elaborated by George Jackson in Blood in My Eye when he says, “We must fill the vacuums left by the established order. We must push the settlers off our land when they won’t cooperate with the new communal life of our system. We must learn from [our] people… the discipline[s] they are so highly skilled in. In return, we must teach them the benefits of our revolutionary ideals.”^[15]

When we say that Blackness moves to escape order through construction against the imposed order, we mean Blackness functions — in Black people / Black communities — as a tendency toward autonomous, mutualistic, ways of surviving and building which prove effective and persist without recognition, approval, or support from political institutions. This tendency is easily recognizable when looking at the Black Panther Party’s survival programs (e.g. the Free Breakfast Program for Children), but this has always been at the core of Black life. We just call it, “looking out for each other”.

As we’ve said, these two manifestations of the rupture through which Blackness attempts to escape order, interrelate with each other. They feed into, echo and distort each other, materializing in the “dissident modes of being and anarchic ways of organizing” Blackness expresses itself through. And where Blackness — as ‘necessary disorder’ — is embraced and embodied, where it is harnessed in Black people’s struggles toward “the liberation of all from the political world”, these two manifestations become, and produce, both an end and a means: a [DIS]ORDER of Black empowerment.1

Share

References

Adi, D. (2020, February 12). Black is Crime: Notes on Blaqillegalism. Hood Communist. https://hoodcommunist.org/2020/02/13/black-is-crime-notes-on-blaqillegalism/

Afrofuturist Abolitionists of the Americas. (2019, October 12). Anarkata: A Statement. afanarchists. https://afanarchists.wordpress.com/2019/10/12/anarkata-a-statement/

Anonymous. (2022, January 18). Black Armed Joy: Some Notes Toward a Black Theory of Insurrectionary Anarchy. haterscafe. https://haters.noblogs.org/post/2022/01/18/black-armed-joy-some-notes-towards-a-black-theory-of-insurrectionary-anarchy/

Baryon, D. (2020, August 10). The State is Counter-Revolutionary. theanarchistlibrary. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anark-the-state-is-counter-revolutionary#toc3

Baryon, D. (2020, December 1). Power. theanarchistlibrary. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anark-power#toc3

Baryon, D. (2023, March 16). A Modern Anarchism (Part 1): Anarchist Analysis. libcom. https://libcom.org/article/modern-anarchism-part-1-anarchist-analysis

Bey, M. (2020). Anarcho-Blackness: Notes Toward a Black Anarchism. AK Press.

Jackson, G. (1990). Blood in My Eye. Black Classic Press.

Lenin, V.I. (1918). The State and Revolution. Lenin Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/ebooks/lenin/state-and-revolution.pdf

Nappalos, S. N. (2019). Emergence and Anarchism: A Philosophy of Power, Action, and Liberation. I Street Press.

Quan, H. L. T. (2024). Become Ungovernable: An Abolition Feminist Ethic for Democratic Living. Pluto Press.

Robinson, C. J. (2016). The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership. University of North Carolina Press.

Warren, C. (2018). Chapter 2: Outlawing. In Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation. Duke University Press.

Footnotes

^[1] (Afrofuturist Abolitionists of the Americas, 2019)

^[2] (Baryon, 2020)

^[3] (Baryon, 2023)

^[4] (Baryon, 2023)

^[5] (Robinson, 2016, p. 7-8)

^[6] (Lenin, 1918, p. 8)

^[7] (Baryon, 2020)

^[8] (Quan, 2024, p. 38-48)

^[9] (Bey, 2020, p. 30-31)

^[10] (Warren, 2018, p. 12)

^[11] (Adi, 2020)

^[12] It’s important for us to emphasize this here: Blackness - as an element - was constructed by white supremacist capitalism, which in the defined order signifies the non-humanness (i.e. criminal, chattel slave, beingness) of its holder(s) (i.e. Black people) to ‘the political’ (this is elaborated in the previous section, and going forward in this section); Blackness - as a force - is the emergent product of the natural/necessary struggle Black people for humanization (this is elaborated throughout this section). Blackness as an element, in the political world, cannot be abandoned by Black people; ‘the political’ marks us with it, and regardless of how “orderly” we act, it will treat us as such. But Blackness as a force can be abandoned - whether through a Black person’s submission to subjugation, pursuit of subjugating power, alignment with ‘the political’ (by repressing Blackness, recuperating order, assimilating/whitening oneself, etc.). So when we say “insofar as [Black people] embrace and embody Blackness” we only mean, and can only mean, embrace and embody Blackness as a force (i.e. as ‘necessary disorder’).

^[13] (Afrofuturist Abolitionists of the Americas, 2019)

^[14] (Anonymous, 2022)

^[15] (Jackson, 1990, p. 176)