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Title: Dreams of Black Revolt Author: Anonymous Date: 2022/08/19 Language: en Source: https://haters.noblogs.org/post/2022/08/19/dreams-of-black-revolt-a-reflection-on-the-2-year-anniversary-of-the-george-floyd-rebellion-and-its-meaning-from-a-black-anarchist/ Notes: This essay was sent to us our way by a friend of a collective member, we hope you enjoy the reflection and that it helps sharpen your analysis. As always a zine version is available https://haters.noblogs.org/zines/.
Note: A lot of people seem to be writing about the rebellion. However,
there aren’t enough black anarchist voices (or black revolutionaries in
general) publicly reflecting on it. Our input matters the most right now
in my opinion. Shoutout to the Anarkatas, Lorenzo, Saint from Haters,
the comrades who wrote BAJ, and all my homies who I talk to about this
stuff. I hope this gives yall a taste about what’s been on my mind the
past two years. I’ve been involved in a variety of writing projects but
this one is really just a mostly personal reflection on how I’ve been
feeling. One day I’ll be back on twitter but I hope this one essay helps
shape the discourse a bit more, haha. It isn’t meant to be a full
critique of anything. It’s just a few ideas that been bouncing around in
my head.
---
It has been a little over two years since my brother and I watched the
livestream where the Black rebellion burned the 3^(rd) precinct in
Minneapolis. We had discussed going to Minneapolis in the days prior
because we understood how important it was. Luckily, the rebellion came
to our city next despite our incredulity. The gravity of the moment was
clear to us, but fundamentally we was were still so unprepared for the
moment. This lack of preparation brings me deep shame and regret. It’s
been two years and I still feel that the moment for many of us was
missed.
In all honesty, I didn’t believe widespread rebellion, let alone
revolution in the United States was possible prior to 2020. I had
resigned myself to the fact that the peripheries of the American Empire
were the only places where revolution was possible, believing our only
goal as revolutionaries here was to build to support oppressed people in
the Third World. The Black revolution had been defeated in the 1970s.
Our warriors were killed or locked away from our communities. The black
neo-colonial class was ascendant. The white proletarian
counter-revolutionary impulses were too strong to overcome. There was no
future for the Black movement in the United States. And then, the
rebellion of 2020 happened. This was a revelation for me. It shifted
everything in terms of my belief in social transformation. Revolutionary
moments should be revelations for us all. I fundamentally believe now
that we have a chance to see revolution in our lifetime.
Over the past two years, I have realized that my commitment to struggle
could not be contained to activism as a hobby. I have always tried to
not be contained within anarchist or activist subcultures, socially. I
feel these anarchist subcultural scenes are often toxic and strange
(also white), so I do not spend time in them. Thus, many of my friends
and lovers do not share my beliefs. Long time relationships were filled
with tension leading to their end as a result of the rebellion and its
fallout. Many people in my life did not grasp the importance of the
uprising, and, to me, those are the moments that test who we are as
human beings. We must allow these moments to change us and adjust who we
are and how we exist in the world. We must not resist it and act as if
the revolt was a blip in history. For many of us who have lived shorter
lives, it was the closest thing to freedom, liberation, a revolution or
anything along those lines that we have experienced. Even if you did not
participate directly, those of us who seek liberation must grapple with
the importance of the rebellion in our own lives and the broader world.
I have been a self described pro-Black activist since I was young before
eventually calling myself an anarchist. I have always understood myself
as linked to the Black liberation struggle. I read Malcolm, listened to
Dead Prez, and watched the Baltimore Riots live in high school. I was
inspired by the Black teenagers fighting back on their own terms against
the police. I remember post-Trump, I saw some people in black bloc fuck
up a car that tried to ram a Black Lives Matter march, and I decided
those were the type of politics I wanted to have. However, I found
myself brought into a bunch of socialist and communist milieus that
doubted the viability of Black self-activity as the central force for
revolution. I found myself lost in a dual-power
infrastructure/base-building milieu who resigned me to the fact that we
were not ready to fight back and we just all needed to build community
gardens and worker’s cooperatives. I was really into learning about
Cooperation Jackson, Black cooperative farming practices and Black
histories of mutual aid. I think some mutual aid and cooperative
economic projects are cool but most didn’t seem to be relevant to the
rebellion at all when it happened. They seemed to be mostly passion
projects of middle class people masquerading as “revolutionary”. While I
think those things are well intentioned, they were largely disconnected
from the fighting on the streets. I just think we gotta keep it real.
Other articles like those written by the homies who wrote Black Armed
Joy have explained the limitations of “mutual aid” a bit better than
myself. Conversations with my Anarkata comrades have also shaped my
opinions about care and militancy in meaningful important ways. I’m not
against mutual aid, I just think we gotta explore the care and revolt
dialectic a bit more but I can’t do it justice here.
I got caught up in the idea that I needed to follow or defer to a
certain type of Black leadership if their ideas were not correct. I no
longer believe that revolutionaries should reduce their own politics for
the sake of deferring to people on the basis of identity when these
politics are not revolutionary, despite how uncomfortable it may make us
feel. I do feel that I had a sort of vanguardist attitude towards the
Black masses with my emphasis on the need for revolutionary
“infrastructure.” To be clear, I was never a self-identified
authoritarian; I always considered my politics anarchist. Despite this,
when the rebellion came, I initially lagged behind the masses in terms
of ferocity, strategy, and power. I do not want that to happen again.
Prior to the rebellion, I spent my time connecting with other Black
anarchists and trying to develop an analysis around the Progressive
Plantation and the lack of a Black liberation tendency within the
anarchist movement. I felt myself drawn to abolitionism in the tradition
of the Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement which learned from Nat Turner
and the BLA or the Militant care of the Anarkatas who learned from
Marsha P. Johnson and Kuwasi Balagoon. I read DuBois, Cedric Robinson
and the Combahee River Collective. I watched documentaries about the
Black Panther Party. All of these ideas shape this essay and I’m
grateful for all of those revolutionary contributions as they shape my
outlook in this moment.
I never understood my abolition rooted in reform. However, we did not
live in a revolutionary era as I understood it. So, prior to the
rebellion, I felt that there were many ways forwards for abolition
whether it was “non-reformist” reforms or through the insurrectional
attacks. If you had asked me prior to the rebellion if I supported
“Defund,” I would have said yes. I did not see the actions in the
rebellion as opposed to “non-reformist reforms,” but the rebellion
revealed to me that they were. In reality, those reforms were not
achieved. Defund became nothing. It was easily co-opted.
insurrection.
The activists and organizers and academics (abolitionist industrial
complex as I call them) co-opted the George Floyd rebellion. Every day,
there is a new abolitionist book published which repeats the same tired
lines about how cops don’t keep us safe and all that. Despite claiming
to be revolutionaries, these academics do not defend the actions of the
black rebels; instead they focus upon the actions of activists. Robin
Kelley’s new intro to Black Marxism is a good reference for what I mean.
He focuses upon the #DefundThePolice activists as the continuation of
the Black Radical Tradition in his intro instead of the black rebels who
fought police and engaged in looting. It is tiring. The Black
proletariat stands alone. The audiences for these abolitionist books are
the mostly non-Black petit bourgeois activist class who consumes them
with vigor. Most of these books want us to “imagine a world beyond
prisons or police” and to push for socialist democracy or whatever in
the United States. While I’m not against imagining a new world, real
solidarity means supporting the masses in their revolutionary action
against the State. For years, the Left has mostly sat on the sidelines
when the Black masses have decided to fight. In some cases, the Black
Left has co-opted the Black struggle to build their activist clout, get
book deals, and nonprofit money while the Black masses are killed and
incarcerated for fighting in the rebellion. The reality is that as a
revolutionary, I have more to learn from the Black youth who fought the
police in my city or from prisoner who fought the COs in prison than I
do from Black or non-Black leftists with PhDs. The reality is the real
struggle against the police and racial capitalism emerges from the
margins. The people with the least to lose are the ones most willing to
fight. Unfortunately, most of the Black “abolitionists” and leftists do
not care at all to build or interact with these young rebels. Despite
this, The Dragon will be awakened, and that’s word to George Jackson. We
all saw the precinct burn. Most Black academics and nonprofit types are
incapable of comprehending what it meant. Most Black academics wrote it
off or ignored it. The Black writers who guided my understanding in the
moments right after the rebellion and engaged directly with the politics
of the revolt were Marcus Sundjata Brown, Idris Robinson, the We Still
Outside Collective, and Yannick Giovanni Marshall. I thank them for
keeping my head on straight with their analysis.
It is the duty of Black anarchists and Black revolutionaries to build
our own networks that train and prepare ourselves mentally for uprisings
as it clear that the Black left (both the activist and academic forms)
is uninterested in creating networks that could actually fight alongside
the Black masses. I want to be clear that I do not believe Black
anarchists should be doing a sort of Leftist soldier cosplay like we’ve
seen with some of the black bloc anarchists, especially in Portland and
elsewhere. I think that the specialization that some anarchists have
engaged in is alienating, and it often doesn’t contribute anything
tactically. Plus, I saw people in black bloc protect police stations,
wave American flags, and act in roles for “descalation.” Black youth
with t-shirts over their faces seemed more capable and willing to
fighting than many of the seemingly geared-up or well-prepared militants
(who were mostly white) in my view. It is a tricky position that Black
anarchists find themselves in, as we should be training to be ready for
an uprising, but we also shouldn’t engage in some strange anarchist
military shit that parts of Left seem into.
Even so, most of the Black left is just as opposed to the revolt of the
Black masses as the Black liberals are. Most Black abolitionist or Black
socialist groups just want to march around making “demands” about
community control of the police, which has little appeal to the masses
of Black people and therefore is not much better than the faux black
bloc militants. I know Pan-Africanists who will call the police while
quoting Kwame Ture in their facebook posts. The Black left has little to
no presence in the Black community and instead they spend most of their
time in academia or around their white or nonblack leftist “allies.”
Worse than that, Black leftist groups like Black Alliance for Peace,
Hood Communist and AAPRP promoted/gave platforms to cult leaders like
Gazi and Black Hammer who abused and hurt black youth. (Go Read
Redvoice’s articles The Devil Wears Dashikis on this if you want to know
more about the type of cults that the Black left has unfortunately spent
so much time supporting and boosting) For this reason, I am uninterested
generally in black leftist politics as they exist in the United States.
However, the true Black radical politics I am invested in is the
politics of the Black revolt that were on full display during the George
Floyd Rebellion. The never-ceasing, constant ability of our people to
fight back against our oppressors under any circumstance. As CLR James
says, “The only place where Negroes did not revolt is in the pages of
capitalist historians.”
Many Black liberals propagated the idea that our people are timid and
helpless. The idea that Black people could not simply act on our own in
violent and meaningly ways against our oppressors is the most evil and
racist lie that has emerged in the past two years. It is unfortunate yet
unsurprising that Black leaders now choose to relegate our people to the
dustbins of histories instead blaming the revolt on cops or whites who
lead our people into “danger.” The United States has always been
dangerous for Black people but suddenly these Black liberals become
concerned about safety when the Black masses fight the State. Through
these lies of Black victimhood, we have been reduced back to electoral
politics, the never-ending marches, and continual terror of this
anti-Black world with no possibility of a future. I have no hope in the
Black left, Black activists, or Black leaders anymore, but I do have
hope in the exploited, oppressed and marginalized Black masses.
I come from a Black nationalist understanding of self help, so I do not
think we can really rely on white radicals either for us to be trained
and well equipped to fight. I think it’s sort of boring to critique the
white left, though I understand the necessity of those criticisms. I
just don’t really feel like that’s where my energy is focused anymore.
There may be a few whites who have relationships with Black people but
fundamentally most whites do not feel that they should be in struggle
with Black people. They have their own reasons for revolt. Despite this,
I saw poor white kids fight alongside poor Black kids against the
police. I don’t have romantic notions about what that means, but I do
think it is a development that Black revolutionaries in the United
States must take into account. We can’t ignore it. However, we must
build on our own and take from the white left when it seems necessary.
The only thing I remain committed to after years of struggle is the
spontaneous self-organized revolt of the Black masses. The uprising in
the streets or in the prison remains the most advanced form of struggle.
I hope that one day workplace struggles will take on a similar
rebellious character that comes into conflict with the State, but that
has not happened. Until then, I have left my dreams of Black
community-run farms, a post-capitalist economy, cooperative housing, and
all of that behind. I return to the dreams I had when I was teenager:
dreams of Black revolt. I dream of Black uprisings all over the country
in every town and every city. Modern day Maroons in Milwaukee. A
resurrected BLA in Brooklyn. The forms will vary. But it will be a
constellation of organized Black resistance, coordinating alongside one
another but never leading the masses. I hope that I have enough
strength, skill, and courage to fight alongside the Black masses with
even more ferocity than last time. I hope that I find comrades who are
ready to fight alongside me, even and especially when it becomes
dangerous.
The fascist counter-revolution is on the rise with the attacks on our
trans siblings, bodily autonomy, and “Critical race theory” in schools.
It feels harder and harder to keep the memory of our Black revolt alive.
I talk to my brother about it sometimes. He seems like he is preparing
for the next moment of revolt as well. I talk to my friends, comrades,
and lovers about all of this. Sometimes that summer feels like it was a
dream. I’m not spiritual, but during those few days in May, I felt
ancestors laughing at the revenge that Black people were getting on our
oppressors, our jailers, and our exploiters. I only wish for that moment
again.