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Title: Anarcho-Blackness
Author: Marquis Bey
Date: 2020
Language: en
Topics: black anarchism
Source: Published by https://www.akpress.org/][AK Press]] in 2020 (please support the publisher!).  Retrieved on 10th December 2020 from [[http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=E191A7D074A319206EE2540FB66E36EA

Marquis Bey

Anarcho-Blackness

Introduction: Black Anarchic Notes

I myself am an anarchist, but of another type.

—Mahatma Gandhi, Benares University Speech, February 4, 1916

This endeavor into what might be understood as Black anarchism, a Black

anarchism that is indebted to and circulates endemically within Black

queer and trans feminisms, is a brief attempt to crystallize but also

depart from tenets found in established Black anarchism,

anarcha-feminism, and “classical anarchism”—the likes of Pyotr

Kropotkin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, and the like. While

my aim will be to articulate a theoretical praxis for Black anarchism

through what I will deem an anarcho-Blackness springing from but also

supplementing (and even disagreeing with) self-described Black

anarchists, in this meditation—a pamphlet, of sorts—I do not take as my

sole purpose to demonstrate a fidelity to Black people who are

anarchists. Nor, I must state, is my goal to recover Black people who

demonstrated anarchic tendencies and induct them into the fold of

anarchism. I want to in fact resist the penchant to absorb various

thinkers into the fold of anarchism; I do not want to “claim” them

necessarily as anarchists when they do not avow themselves anarchists.

Rather, my intent is a reconfigurative project, to express what

anarchism might be, what it might look like, when encountering a

sustained engagement with Blackness in general, and Black queer and

trans feminisms more specifically.

In this sense, I take as a propelling force that, “Anarchism, like

anything else,” as Hannibal Abdul Shakur notes, “finds a radical new

meaning when it meets blackness.”[1] The anarchism of, say, Bakunin is

no longer anarchism proper when it meets Blackness. To clarify, there

are certainly threads that connect different iterations of anarchism,

making them all, in some sense, “anarchist” (e.g., emphasis on mutual

aid, direct participation, anti-authoritarianism, etc.). But to meet

with Blackness entails that anarchism undergoes a shift in focus and

tenor. Classical anarchism, for example, rested on an axiomatic

commitment to the dismantling of the State and capitalism as a defining

factor for anarchist sentiments, but this foundation often does not

consider the racialization and gendering of either of them, nor how

hierarchization bears a racialized and gendered texture. To be sure,

this project will advance beyond mere finger-pointing of the racist and

sexist habits of anarchists past—an argument that many Black anarchists

and anarcha-feminists have made to a valid but, to be frank, boring and

expected effect. As I will discuss momentarily, the dramatic shift

entailed in this iteration of Black anarchism is, perhaps more

accurately, an anarcho-Blackness in that it is not Black people

practicing an anarchism that goes unchanged; it is anarchism as

expressed through and necessarily corrupted by the radicality, the

lawlessness, the mutinous primordiality of Blackness.

If indeed, as remarked upon by Dana M. Williams, “The term Black

anarchism implies an interaction between ‘Black’ and ‘anarchism,’”

Anarcho-Blackness: Notes Toward a Black Anarchism dwells in the texture

of that interaction.[2] This text is an effort to mine what that

interaction entails: What happens to Blackness when circulating with and

through anarchism? What happens to anarchism when being acted on by and

in Blackness? What is yielded in this interaction—an additive sum, a

multiplicative product, an exponential result? Neither anarchism nor

Blackness can be what it once was (which is itself an unsettled open

question) after colliding in a critical, generative intimacy with one

another, so I attempt here in this text to illustrate a facet of that

intimacy. That intimacy is anarcho-Blackness; it is a Black queer

feminist anarchism that disorders the various mechanisms that

hierarchize, circumscribe, and do violence to the moments that do life

on the outskirts of order (those moments of, as it were, unfettered and

ungoverned sociality), an anticolonial sensibility. Anarcho-Blackness,

and Black anarchism more broadly, is an anarchism of another type, to

purloin Gandhi. It is another type that recognizes its intimacy with

anarchism as conventionally understood, but it revises anarchism,

anarchizes anarchism, remixes and samples anarchism to produce something

distinct but very much indebted.

Anarchism is to be rightly understood as a more radical theoretical

praxis than Maoism, socialism, or nationalist revolution because, from

the Black radical perspective of Kuwasi Balagoon, “the goals of anarchy

don’t include replacing one ruling class with another, neither in the

guise of a fairer boss or as a party.” Indeed, it is the name for the

radical world-making project that, unlike the aforementioned political

ideologies, refuses the “socialization process that makes exploitation

and oppression possible and prevalent in the first place,” Balagoon

continues. Black anarchic notes, as the chapters herein, deemphasize

representational politics, as if having Black people as one’s oppressors

makes oppression more bearable—we know that “oppressors never have a

problem finding Black leaders to condemn their blatant disregard for

life.”[3]

When researching anarchism and Black people’s relationship to it for

this book, there was a notable dearth of self-described Black

anarchists. Perhaps the reason for this, I pondered, even though the

history of Black radicality is a history of anarchic thought, is because

Blackness necessarily alters anarchism’s capacity. Perhaps what I am

designating as anarcho-Blackness, as the operative modality for Black

anarchism, is no mere incorporation of Black people into the folds of

anarchism—i.e. add and stir. I am thus designating Black anarchism’s

anarcho-Blackness as a Black feminist critique and taking up of

anarchism, asserting that 1) the “Black” in front of anarchism is to be

understood not as a “mere” marker of identity but as a political and

capaciously politicized affixation. It designates more of a mode and

posture of reading, engaging, and undermining the tenets upon which

hegemonic sociality rest. 2) Inherent to (Black) feminist mobilizations

is ground-disturbing, and thus to disturb grounds—even its own

grounds—is a necessary component of the project at hand.

Anarcho-Blackness thus designates the disturbing of anarchism’s ground,

which capacitates what anarchism can be and who it can liberate. And 3)

processes of racialization and gendering must be at the forefront of any

and all radical politics. More specifically, the radical work that

queerness and gender nonnormativity do, as expressed in Black queer and

trans feminisms, is anarchic par excellence in that the dismantling of

racial and gender hierarchies too often overlooked or merely glossed in

classical anarchism is a fundamental rebuking of authoritarian rule,

hierarchies, determination from without, and injustice.

The titular anarcho-Blackness of this volume moves toward an anarchic

social life in that it is delinked from oppressive forms of governance

and rule. This is why each of the chapters in this book are prefixed

“un”—this volume’s commitment to anarchism stretches to subjective,

intersubjective, discursive, systemic, and historical realms via a

fundamental commitment to being and becoming unraced, ungendered,

unclassed, unruled, and unbound. These notes toward a Black anarchism

argue that, oddly enough, it is not necessary to find all the Black

people who are anarchists and the anarchists who are Black people and

roll out their writings and thoughts as the definitive statement on what

constitutes Black Anarchism proper. Rather, the reason why this volume

is titled “Anarcho-Blackness” and not simply “Black Anarchism” (aside

from the fact that the Black Rose Federation’s reader, Black Anarchism,

already exists) is because affixation of Blackness is itself an anarchic

extension and disruption of political ideologies like anarchism and

Marxism and socialism. We may not “need” a clearly defined Black

Anarchism because to anarchically push anarchism, as it were, is to

introduce to it a Blackness—or more specifically, an

anarcho-Blackness—that radicalizes any and every political ideology that

moves toward liberation and freedom. Whereas historians like Carl Levy

have focused on the -ism of anarchism, anarchism as a defined social

movement that arose in the late-nineteenth century with clear

originators, I focus instead on the anarcho-, the prefixal thrust and

spirit, as it were, of anarchic tendencies and modalities.[4] Focus on

the anarcho- is to focus on a world-making sensibility that I am

interested in, not a particular political cadre of writing and

movements. Anarcho-Blackness in apposition to (not “rather than”) Black

anarchism does not dwell in delineating criteria for a discernible Black

anarchism as a movement but concerns the variegated modalities,

methodologies, habits, trends, thoughts, and imaginaries that might be

given to anarchic—which is to say unruled, non-coercive,

coalitional—affinities and textures for being with others.

Anarcho-Blackness expresses what might be understood as a Black

anarchism insofar as it designates a gratuitous disorder that engenders

the possibility of living unbounded by law, which is to say unbounded by

violence and circumscription. Black anarchist histories attest to how,

in imagining what comes after the collapse of the State, one should not

“design” this future beforehand as if we know what we will need. Black

anarchism is critical in the destructive sense that it unclothes

fallacies and injustices; too, though, it is aspirational, searching and

hoping for other modes of life and living that depart from “this.”

Contrary to the Marxian castigation of anarchists as vitiating the world

only to imagine one that cannot exist, anarchists writ large, but more

importantly Anarcho-Blackness’s conceptualization of Black anarchism

specifically, demands the impossible (á la Peter Marshall’s encyclopedic

history of anarchism). The impossible is the name for the world outside

of, or after, or differently within, an anarchic destruction of the

racial and sexual capitalist State. This world-outside is Black, or

lawless; this world-outside is anarchic, or stateless, radically

liberated.

I take my cue in this from an etymological source. One of the first

recorded uses of “anarchy” comes in 1539 from Richard Taverner, who

writes, “This unleful lyberty or lycence of the multytude is called an

Anarchie.” Anarchy becomes more than what classical anarchists note: the

negation of a head or chief; without a ruler or leader; stateless.

Though Taverner surely connoted his usage of anarchy negatively, one can

read this iteration in a way that precisely captures how the anarchism

of Black anarchism seeks to operate. That is, an “unleful lyberty” is a

freedom or liberation that arises not as a product of a bestowal by the

State. Unlawful liberty is an illegal liberty, a liberation achieved by

other means not beholden to the juridical sphere or a general

lawfulness. Perhaps this is liberty as such, liberty that is taken

without making recourse or appeal to governmental agencies. We grant our

own “lycence” to be free, and it is multitudinous, a mass, a heady

swarm, that takes this liberty and license. A promotion of disorder

inasmuch as it is an anarchy that refuses to cater to order as

instantiated by regimes of governance.[5] The prefix anarcho-, an index

of all of this, embraces a political disorder begotten by an encounter

with Blackness’s troubling ethos, its radicalization of radicality. The

history of Blackness, in short, is a history of disruption toward

freedom. How anarchic.

…

The idea to write about Black anarchism came from a question I received

during a Q&A session following a reading of my first book, Them Goon

Rules: Fugitive Essays on Radical Black Feminism. The student, a white

woman who studies anarchism, asked about the dearth of self-identified

Black anarchists even though so much of what she’s read about the Black

Radical Tradition and Black feminism expresses anarchic sentiments. I

received her question genuinely; she was curious, yearning for a way to

bring strands of Leftist thought and politics together in a way she had

not yet encountered. I could not provide her with a substantive answer.

What I mustered was, in short, an elaborated and extended “I don’t

know.” Subsequent to the reading, a colleague of mine—a Black man,

scholar of twentieth-century African American literature—apprised me of

some of the work being done by the admittedly few Black anarchists out

there. He named the Black Rose Federation and Zoé Samudzi, the latter

being quite foundational for my meditation in this text. We came,

ultimately, to the question: Does there need to be a “Black anarchism”?

That is, if Black radicals are doing work that is anarchic without

calling themselves anarchists, does there need to be a proliferation of

a discernible Black anarchism? It is a valid position that one must not

be overly concerned with whether someone calls themselves an anarchist

or what have you. Such a concern mimics an experience I had in college,

being obsessed with calling myself, and making sure others called

themselves, feminists, to the detriment of a concern with whether one

did feminist work. Make yourself legible to me and others on terms not

your own, this sentiment implies. But it may be precisely the point of

the anarcho- to blur such legibilities, finding freedom in escaping

political ontologies. One does not, in short, need to call oneself a

Black anarchist to be doing Black and anarchic work. And the work is

where our interests should lie.

Nevertheless, though one does not need to deem themselves such does not

mean that one cannot or should not. Too, part of the work might be in

the declaration, an unwavering commitment to be identified as and

through a denigrated political subjectivity, and a steadfast rejoice

over occupying at least a titular subversive relation to the State.

Furthermore, there might be some utility in articulating not so much a

Black genealogy of anarchism but a differently inflected mode of

relating to being amongst others that finds radical expression at the

nexus of Black and anarchist. To make Blackness and anarchism meet is

doing a particular kind of work, and that work—when acknowledging the

inherent Black queer feminist resonances of theorizations of

Blackness—is much less likely to be done when simply following the

classical strain of anarchism. To follow, and deviate from, the beaten

and unbeaten path of the history of Blackness, a history that is always

already queer, always already Black feminist, and, most fundamentally,

always and already trans and nonnormative, is to bring an archive of

radicality that breaches all major confines of sociality and

subjectivity. (If Blackness does the work of disturbing assumed grounds

that make things legible in a hegemonic way, this shares an affinity

with the queer and feminist projects of undoing and dislodging gender

and sexual normativity. There is thus an overlapping circulation

happening with Blackness, queerness, and feminism.) It is for these

reasons that it might be necessary to move toward a Black anarchism.

So while I was unable to answer the student’s question adequately during

the Q&A, I’ve committed to giving her something of a response in the

form of this text. I am still unsure why there are few who describe

themselves as Black anarchists despite the strong resonances of

anarchism within Black feminism and the Black Radical Tradition, but

this is the beginning of an answer.

…

I am unsure if I would call myself an anarchist, nor am I certain that I

care about whether others do so. Perhaps I am, the consequences of which

I “own.” But my concern is in doing anarchic work. I am concerned with

how to bring about an anarchic world and commit to an emancipatory,

liberatory vision that somehow, somewhere, gets entwined with one’s

subjectivity; I am concerned with treading “anarchic ground,” unsettling

the world as-is and bringing about something radically different—an

immersive rebuking of capitalism, white and cis male supremacy,

imperialism. Such a world, if we are to tread the whispered roads of

Kropotkin and Cedric Robinson, Emma Goldman and Zoé Samudzi, is anarchic

in a robust sense. I want to live and do and become that, irrespective

of whether those who bring about that world have declared themselves

anarchists. That subjectivity, the performative product of committing to

anarchic work, is what concerns me. If subjectivity implies an anarchist

identity, lovely. If not, so be it. But subjectivity is the terrain on

which anarchic aims are struggled over, so that must be my concern.

Unblack

Anarchism portends the promise of the absence of authority/order…[it] is

intent on creating mayhem against those epistemological and metaphorical

foundations that have so violently scripted Black people and communities

as a people without history, without knowledge, and without dream.

—H.L.T. Quan, “Emancipatory Social Inquiry: Democratic Anarchism and the

Robinsonian Method”

William Godwin, Max Stirner, Mikhail Bakunin, Pyotr Kropotkin,

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Emma Goldman, and Errico Malatesta didn’t really

talk about Blackness, were not really concerned with Blackness, didn’t

bring Blackness to bear on their thinking, and didn’t think that

Blackness’s specificity demanded attention. Not to mention that, save,

really, for Goldman, anarchists didn’t really think about the

specificities of gender, let alone how gender circulates necessarily

within capitalist and white supremacist formations (how race and class,

that is, are constituted through and by gender). It was capitalism this,

government that, authority, individualism, rulers, the State, and on and

on.

But I am actually quite uninterested in the expected rhetorical move

that implicitly garners one a kind of validity: that of pointing out

racial and gendered elisions as the totality of one’s argument. I will,

however, do just that, but only for a moment, before more importantly

speaking of Blackness and its constitutive factors in this meditation

(namely, queerness and [Black] feminism) on their own terms.

But, ahh, the classics… The anarchist canon, as it were, has had its

central tenets—if such an anti-authoritarian, non-doctrinal intellectual

praxis like anarchism can be said to have tenets—expressed by many of

the aforementioned figures. To summarize, anarchism is the general

critique of centralized, hierarchical, and thus oppressively coercive

systems of power and authority. State power and capitalism are the

culprits responsible for the horrors that surround us, being deemed by

anarchists as monopolistic and coercive, and hence illegitimate. The

State, for instance, is inextricable from domination, Bakunin arguing

that, “If there is a State, there must be domination of one class by

another.”[6] In theory, anarchism is touted to oppose all kinds of

oppression, be it racism, sexism, transanatagonism, classism,

colonialism, ageism, etc. While there has been much less explicit

meditation on the anarchist stance toward transanatagonism than, say,

capitalism, the overarching claim of anarchist ideology is that any kind

of coercive, dominative oppression is to be quashed. To be established

instead is a society based on direct democratic collaboration, mutual

aid, diversity, and equity. “From each according to his [sic] ability,

to each according to his [sic] need.”

Though there are those who are more strict about incorporating those who

preceded the nineteenth-century heyday of people beginning to explicitly

call themselves, and rally around a political movement called anarchism,

I will not partake in such gatekeeping, for better (where a longer

lineage of anarchist thought can be mobilized) or worse (where any form

of dissent might be unjustifiably subsumed under anarchism, diluting its

specificity and historical situatedness). Like Kropotkin, one might

understand the Epicureans and Cynics as anarchists, since they avoided

participation in the political sphere, retreated from governmental life,

and advocated allegiance to no state or party. They lacked the “desire

to belong either to the governing or the governed class.” Kropotkin

understands this as a proto-anarchic anti-State and anti-authoritarian

disposition.

Far from meaning that everyone is left alone and unorganized, anarchism

in the classical sense privileges democratic and communal relationality,

obviating external rule and control. This is a positive conception of

anarchism as voluntary participation predicated on each individual’s

autonomy and agreement with communal values. It bears noting, though,

that an anarchist society may take different forms: socialist anarchism,

which emphasizes developing communal groups that are intended to thrive

in the absence of hierarchies and a centralized governmental structure;

or individualist anarchism, some of which reject any and all group

identities, communal mores of the good, and venerate individual

autonomy. Max Stirner represented perhaps the furthest pole of this

tendency, with his refusal to obey any law or any state, even if it was

collectively arrived at. The self is the only arbiter of one’s life. As

well, there is anarcho-syndicalism, which supports workers in a

capitalist society gaining control over parts of the economy, and

emphasizes solidarity, direct participation, and the self-management of

workers. Additionally, anarcho-syndicalism has the aim of abolishing the

wage system, seeing it as inextricable from wage slavery.

Life under non-anarchist rule conceives of the political arena as a good

that exists to protect and serve the people; or better, a system chosen

by the people. So much of ancient Greek philosophies, modern liberal

philosophies, and political philosophies assert, in various ways, that

obedience to the law is a prima facie duty and inarguable good.

Anarchism has called this very foundation into question. What arises in

the hopeful disintegration of rule by an authoritarian nation-state is a

society that cares for one another communally and democratically without

the need for a tyrannical force of coercion and sovereignty. Anarchists

like Godwin and Proudhon and Bakunin based this anarchist society on

beliefs in reason, universal moral law, education, and conscience.

With this very brief overview, the task set forth here is slightly

different. It parallels yet departs from, as well as stands in contrast

to, this anarchist history—an anarchic “shadow history,” if you will, a

para-anarchism that anarchizes anarchism. What is not being done here is

an attempt to find heads or figures of Black anarchism to give clout to

it as a wing of anarchism as a whole. While I will surely cite

throughout this chapter, as well as subsequent chapters, the thought of

people like Lucy Parsons, the Black Rose Anarchist Federation, Lorenzo

Kom’boa Ervin, and Zoé Samudzi, this project is in fact not concerned

with simply trotting out a list of anarchist Black people as the meaning

of Black anarchism. I am articulating an anarcho-Blackness, first and

foremost, as an inhabitable modality of anarchic subjectivity and

engagement. This may lead to a discernible Black anarchism. Fine. But

the aim is not to arrive at Black anarchism; it is, rather, to engage an

anarcho-Blackness that moves toward what might be called a Black

anarchism.

…

There are a number of racialized, gendered, and racialized gendered

elisions present in classical anarchist theorizations that demand being

pointed out. Bakunin: “If there is a State, there must be domination of

one class by another and, as a result, slavery; the State without

slavery is unthinkable—and this is why we are the enemies of the

State.”[7] Overlooked here is how the history of the enslavement of

peoples of Color, specifically Black people in the Western world, is the

haunting specter of his claim. The condition of the slave, which is on

one plane the condition of Blackness, is the relationship between a

people to the State. Thus, anarchism, in its anti-Statism, must reckon

full force with Blackness as Blackness serves as the distinct angle of

vision for encountering the effects of State-sanctioned enslavement and

oppression. To abolish slavery necessitates the liberation of Blackness,

making anarchism an emancipatory project, a project that has as its

foundation a grappling with Blackness.

On the topic of the State, there has also been the tendency to collapse

the relative effects of violence. That is, if it is indeed true that the

State bears a hostile relationship to those it controls, there are some

who are controlled in different ways and who feel the force of the State

in more acute ways. To rest at the nexus of Black and trans, for

example, is to feel the brunt of the State in scrutinizing, gender

binaristic, and racializing ways, which give one over to the likelihood

of poor housing conditions, lack of job access, increased rates of

incarceration (which then subjects one to the gendered carcerality of

prisons and its pervasive mis-gendering violence), and the like. Examine

the lives of Miss Major, Marsha P. Johnson, CeCe McDonald. Anarchic

meditation on the terrors of the State begin in the right direction, but

they fall short of taking the critique as deeply as it demands.

A critique of the State is in order too, though. A traditional focus on

the State as the end-all be-all of oppression must be thought of as more

than simply a governmental agency or bastion up on high doling out

sentences and decrees. The State is, too, a relation, a way of dictating

how people are to be interacted with. We encounter one another on the

logics of intelligibility that the State demands, and that structures

how one can appear to others, circumscribing subjective parts and

desires that fall outside of this framework. And this is a violence. We

must also note how this relation is not only in the public sphere but

characterizes any sphere in which interaction is had. And furthermore,

these relations are textured by racial and gender hierarchies. One

relates to others on their presumed gender, their presumed race, and

disallows them to be otherwise than this fundamentally externally

imposed subjectivity. The other has had no opportunity to announce

themselves to us on non-State grounds. Any anarchism, then, must

recognize this and commit to dismantling their hierarchies within

relationality and move toward the disorderly, disruptive refusal to

continue living by State laws.

So if anarchism truly does represent “to the unthinking what the

proverbial bad man does to the child—a black monster bent on swallowing

everything,” then we must recognize that the blackness of the “black

monster” is no accident.[8] It is in fact constitutive.

To infuse anarchism with anarcho-Blackness is to push anarchism’s logics

further. Many anarchists did not organize on the grounds of difference

and differentiation, even as they sought ways to prevent their

silencing. Hence, anarcho-Blackness supplements these oversights via an

insistence on perhaps assemblage or swarm or ensemble, whereby there is

a consensus, or consent, not to be individuated—which is another way to

say an affirmation to emanate from difference toward the insistence on

collectivity and agential singularity. It is not unanimous we seek to

be; it is ensemblic, assemblic, a distinction that manifests in the

proliferation of life for those who might queerly emerge when conditions

are saturated with the elimination of institutions that curtail such

life.

Saidiya Hartman writes in “The Terrible Beauty of the Slum”: “Better the

fields and the shotgun houses and the dusty towns and the interminable

cycle of credit and debt, better this than black anarchy.” These “zones

of nonbeing” Hartman says, purloining Frantz Fanon, are the regulated

domains of Black peoples, or more precisely of those who inhabit the

rebellious posture of anarcho-Blackness. They are attempts to corral

what Hartman calls “black anarchy,” or what William C. Anderson and Zoé

Samudzi call “the anarchism of blackness.”[9] This is anarcho-Blackness:

the primordial mutiny to which regulation responds. It concerns what

Michael Hardt, reading Foucault’s reading of Marx, calls a priority of

the resistance to power. If Marx understood dominative disciplining in

the workplace as a response to worker insurgency, and if we understand

the era of U.S. enslavement as a response to the anticaptivity expressed

through Blackness (and further, if we understand capitalism’s

constitutive racial differentiation and reproduction of [re]productive

and disposable humanity rooted in the commodification of Blackened

subjects), then anarcho-Blackness comes in to describe the anarchic

insurgency that defines the abolition of the State and

hierarchization.[10]

This is about what Blackness does to and through anarchism, not against

it. We need anarchism’s musings and movement strategies, so it would be

antithetical to radical world transformation to jettison anarchism’s

gifts. Too, though, anarchism cannot simply do what it has always done

(which is itself a multifarious enterprise) as such has been predicated

on, in part, an elision of the weight of white (and cis male) supremacy.

That is, we cannot just add in racial and gendered perspectives to an

already-functioning anarchism; we cannot, also, simply throw out

anarchism on the grounds of these elisions. The task is to mobilize the

effects of Black feminism and anarchism colliding in harmoniously

complex chaos. This mobilization is what I’ve deemed anarcho-Blackness,

an “anarchaos,” to borrow a beautifully apt lexicon from Christopher R.

Williams and Bruce A. Arrigo.[11]

…

It should be clear that the racial and gendered elisions of classical

anarchism demand critique. “The deceptive absence of Black anarchist

politics in the existing literature,” writes the Black Rose Anarchist

Federation, “can be attributed to an inherent contradiction found within

the Eurocentric canon of classical anarchism which, in its allegiance to

a Western conception of universalism, overlooks and actively mutes the

contributions by colonized peoples,” namely Black peoples.[12] But Black

anarchism does not begin and end at that critique. What might a Black

anarchism look like to itself, not simply a reactionary posture toward

the implicit whiteness in classical anarchism?

Blackness enters anarchism, and anarchism enters Blackness, as an

enabling ethics of precedence. That is, it is and was important that,

“it is not just European people who can function in an

anti-authoritarian way, but that we all can.”[13] But what is more

apropos to anarcho-Blackness’s concerns is how Blackness and those in

proximity to its work and histories operate anarchically. On one

communities: they don’t “involve the state, the police, or the

politicians. We look out for each other, we care for each other’s kids,

we go to the store for each other, we find ways to protect our

communities.”[14] More expressive of the anarcho-, however, is

dissolving the homogeneity often imposed onto Blackness. Ashanti Alston

articulates his Black anarchism in a way that allows for Blackness to

not be reduced to a monolith. Alston remarks, “I think of being Black

not so much as an ethnic category but as an oppositional force or

touchstone for looking at situations differently,” concluding, “So, when

I speak of a Black anarchism, it is not so tied to the color of my skin

but to who I am as a person, as someone who can resist, who can see

differently when I am stuck, and thus live differently.”[15]

The Blackness here marks a non-homogeneous descriptor of subjectivity.

Said subjectivity, however, is not so much skin color, as Alston notes.

Blackness does not merely consolidate all those who meet a racial

quantum. Such a measure would collapse and monolithize those under its

rubric. What Alston advances is not Blackness as people who are Black;

he advances an anarcho-Blackness: a conceptualization of Blackness as

tied to a politicality and radical penchant for sociality and social

arrangement. The implications of this make the Blackness of

anarcho-Blackness open to whoever is committed to expressing the

liberatory politics it calls for.

Of course, the “Anarchist movement…is overwhelmingly white,” as Lorenzo

Kom’boa Ervin notes in Anarchism and the Black Revolution. What else is

new? I am grateful to Ervin for making this plain, but it is not a

substantive argument around which to build a political thought and

movement. What does Black anarchism do in excess of reacting to white

people? That is my concern, and I maintain that Black anarchism troubles

the ground on which we stand, taps into a mutinous force that behaves in

subversion of regulation, and attends to how people may be differently

positioned (or differently position themselves). Developing spaces for

“new revolutionaries” is one of the various iterations of anarchism, as

is establishing a “political home” that, in my reading, the Black Rose

Anarchist Federation sees as a different society in which everyone can

live. It is not a parochial endeavor, as if focus on Blackness ever was;

it is not particular to a specific demographic (though it is

unapologetic in its focus on a particular demographic). Blackness as

anarchy provides a glimpse into another kind of world by heeding the

abundant trove of epistemological richness that can be found in that

synecdoche for Blackness: the Negro. To C.W.E. Bigsby, the Negro is “a

convenient image of the dark, spontaneous and anarchic dimension of

human life” who has “anarchic impulses.” And this has “metaphysical as

well as pragmatic implications.”[16] The implications are vast.

Blackness possesses a grounding anarchic impulse, an impulse to move

without permission and live without rule. Human life flourishes in this;

it thrives in this terrain. So, to speak of anarchism, one must speak of

these dark impulses. One must speak of Blackness.

Ungovernable

The internal difference of blackness is a violent and cruel re-routing,

by way and outside of critique, that is predicated on the notion…that

there’s nothing wrong with us (precisely insofar as there is something

wrong, something off, something ungovernably, fugitively living in us

that is constantly taken for the pathogen it instantiates).

—Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, “Blackness and Governance”

It is misguided to presume that an anarchic world, a world in which, for

classical anarchists, the State is eliminated—or a world in which, for

Black queer feminist anarchists, racial capitalism and

cisheteronormative patriarchy is overturned—is the “end” of anarchist

pursuits. Anarcho-Blackness, with its disruptive disorderly conduct—its

mode of conducting itself as, in other words, disorderly—advances a

critical praxis that answers the fundamental political question, “What

is to be done?” Kind of. The question “What is to be done?” demands an

answer, not that the texture, tenor, or terms of that answer can be

readily discerned. Nor does admitting this exculpate us from needing to,

nevertheless, provide an answer. So again: what is to be done?

Indeed, accosted by right-wing populism, virulent white supremacy,

transantagonism, heteronormative patriarchy, and the litany of other

violent regimes in our midst, we so earnestly want them to cease. We

demand that it all end, now, and for justifiable reasons. I, though,

animated by anarchism’s critical praxis—its practice of a criticality—do

not place my crosshairs on a moment beyond now, when things might come

to a close. This is not motivated by a nihilistic pessimism about the

fate of the current political moment, where I cannot fathom cessation or

even mitigation of various violences; this is not motivated by a

perverse infatuation with the bounding persistence of hegemonic terrors.

It is motivated by a kind of zeal, in fact, one where refusing an end

allows for a perpetual openness that enables, always, the possibility of

another beginning.

Black anarchism’s emphasis on the constitutivity of the concepts of

critical and praxis is fundamental here, as it itself is constituted

through an indebtedness to Black queer and trans feminisms. This project

is deeply theoretical, but also practical and material, because there is

nothing more theoretically practical than trying to figure out how to

fundamentally change the very system by which we live; indeed, to quote

Zoé Samudzi, “What does it mean to create community that is safe for

Black women, for Black trans women? That’s an incredibly theoretical

exercise because that requires that we have all of these conversations

and start to create material politics around misogynoir and trans

misogynoir.”[17] So the critical praxis and its theoretical heft is a

ruthless interrogation of the established and institutionalized—in the

vein of Marx’s 1843 call for die rücksichtlose Kritik alles Bestehenden

(the ruthless criticism of all that exists); and if praxis is a doing,

an agential enactment that bears on sociality, then a critical praxis

marks an interrogative social enactment. What kind of politics might

this lead to? What kind of world might this engender, and who might show

up to this promiscuous gathering?

The space cultivated by this critical praxis is where a Black anarchic

politics and those subjectivated by an anarcho-Blackness, its attendant

Black queer feminist electrical circuitry, show up. Those maroons,

subversive intellectuals, fugitives, queers, feminists, anarchists, and

rebellious workers meet to conspire together in the undercommons: a

non-place where everyone is Black, queer, anarchic, because they are

changed by the undercommons, which is not a place you enter but a groove

that enters you. Critical praxis becomes a radical invitation to not

only do but to be done by the undercommon insurgency that makes its own

demands. And such an interrogation must suspend the presumption of an

end goal. We know from Moten and Harney, and Jack Halberstam, that what

we think we want before the crisis that precipitates our insurgency will

necessarily shift after we’ve attained the limits of what our

coalitional knowledge could compile. It is not because we are

insufficient, as if insufficiency is a deficiency rather than a

willingness to risk getting at the outer limits of what we dared to

think; it is because we cannot, and must not, assume that the logics and

rubrics we have when moving within the maelstrom of the

hegemonic—radically altered as they may be—can operate to our benefit

when we’ve unseated the hegemon. We will need new rubrics and metrics,

unrubrics and unmetrics, because a radically other-world requires

radically other means to love it, to caress it, to be all the way in it.

So why is there no “end”? To assert this might seem to sidestep what

Foucault claims in the Preface of Anti-Oedipus: to be “less concerned

with why this or that than with how to proceed.” Refusing to bank on the

“end” is, at least in part, how to proceed. “An abdication of political

responsibility?” Moten and Harney write, anticipating the accusation.

“OK. Whatever. We’re just anti-politically romantic about actually

existing social life.”[18] I submit that one’s concern must be an

ethical one that—to supplement an oversight in Moten and Harney—not only

sets its sights on social life that “actually” (I shiver at the hubris

of this word) exists but, more substantively, fertilizes the conditions

of possibility for otherwise and unsung and unknown emergence. There is

no “end” because to know the end is to think one knows the totality of

the landscape, a line of thinking that cannot account for that which

falls outside the dictates of legibility. There might always be

something else just outside, and we cannot close the discussion when we

think it is over. Fugitive planning plans for what it cannot plan for by

refusing to plan for it. So there is no end in sight because sight is

not the only sense available to us. (But there is also no end in touch,

smell, feel, or taste—or any other “sense.”) There is no end in sight

because our end may only be someone else’s beginning or middle. Thus,

our critical praxis, our interrogative social enactment, does something

precisely when it commits to a political endeavor proliferating life

where no life is said to be found.

And the “where” of “life where no life is said to be found” is the place

brought about by abolition. Abolition is fundamentally anarchic, as will

be discussed at greater length in the final chapter. It is the

eradication “of a society that could have prisons, that could have

slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the

elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new

society.”[19] This entails, to put it simply, the eradication of society

inasmuch as “Society” is predicated on, constituted by, the existence of

these things. Anarchism is the ground on which we assert the destitution

of the terrain, a destitution that marks, according to the Invisible

Committee, “a rupture in the fatality that condemns revolutions to

reproduce what they have driven out, shattering the iron cage of

counter-revolution.”[20] Following this line of thinking, we might also

say that destitution is another name for the position of Blackness, that

“irreparable disturbance.”[21] Destituting the world-as-is, the

Blackening of the world, shifts what counts as the “real” terrain of

politics. To be ungoverned is a quotidian practice (a way of life), and

the space in which that practice is lived is a space of anarchy—not

nihilism or chaos but life by other means. Anarcho-life.

What Black anarchists seek to do is to found a new society, not

necessarily by bringing about the destruction of myriad edifices of

terror, violence, circumscription, and normativity but by cultivating

the spaces and places that, by dint of their existence, instantiate the

impossibility of the normative bastions that now surround us. We might

call this justice, might call this a non-utopic utopia, a sanctuary. We

might call it the undercommons.

How, then, to do this? Upon a re-reading of The Undercommons, I was

drawn, obsessively, to one phrase, one that struck me at first as

dangerously wrongheaded. But, then, the revolutionary will always be

dangerous. The revolutionary call that Moten and Harney require and that

I’ve been obsessed with is this: they insist that our radical politics,

our anarchic world-building must be “unconditional—the door swings open

for refuge even though it may let in police agents and destruction.”[22]

As my grandmother might quip, what kind of foolishness is this? But it

is not foolishness precisely because the only ethical call that could

bring about the radical revolutionary overturning we seek is one that

does not discriminate or develop criteria for inclusion and,

consequently, exclusion.

If the door swings open without a bouncer checking names, it means that

whoever shows up will be let in, unconditionally, without conditions.

The ethical demand here is to be monstrously inclusive, a lesson learned

in the Black Radical Tradition, Black feminisms, and trans activism.

Yes, the Law might send agents to infiltrate our conspiratorial

sessions. Or, even worse, as has happened, our enemy might show up and

sit with us in prayer before gunning us down. But, at the same time, a

salvational figure might show up or, better yet, a fugitive might show

up, asking us to provide her refuge and a safe harbor. And we must let

her in—this is what is to be done—we must feed and shelter her, because

this fugitive, any fugitive, might be the one we didn’t know we were

doing all this insurgent conspiratorial work for.

Answering “What is to be done?” carries a deeply ethical valence. The

manner by which things get done and the result of the doing inflects to

whom we owe allegiances, who is or is not on our minds, and most

fundamentally for whom we wish to see the world changed. The doing we

seek is committed to making a world for people we don’t yet know, people

who might need a drastically different world, while understanding that

even our idea of “worldness” might be predicated on the logics of

normative regimes that limit our horizons. It is imperative, then, to

commit to the work without presuming to know who the work is for, only

committing to the work because it might allow for those we did not know

existed to finally live. When we volunteer at the soup kitchen we must

turn no one away, even and especially when they look like they just ate

a hearty bowl of soup; when we are faced with imminent violence we must

refuse to proliferate violence, because we’ve come into being via a

violation and this bestows upon us the ethical commitment to mitigate

that violence; when we hear a knock at the door and someone asking for

help because they are being chased we must let them in. Again, “the door

swings open…” Each entity that crosses the threshold is another possible

signatory on our missives for “the antipolitics of dissent.”[23]

To take praxis seriously, a praxis that has as its never-ending end the

proliferation of nonnormative life and the livelihood of the unemerged,

is to risk what we ultimately come to. We cannot be afraid of what we

find in our critical praxis precisely because, if it commits to the

aforementioned, it will indeed be scary and impossible to prepare for.

That is the work of the monstrous—a liberatory, unanticipated salvation,

that troubling interrogation of gender Susan Stryker finds in the trans;

that divine portent that Derrida would argue is unannounceable, which is

to say untamable, unable to be absorbed into existing logics; that

claimable thingliness that Hortense Spillers says might “rewrite after

all a radically different text.”[24] Critical praxis in the

undercommons—insurgent work being done by folks who were let in without

paperwork and without vouchers because they, despite where they came

from, got down to work for the revolution—is work for monsters,

monstrous work.

In the end, what I am asking for is assemblic work for those who are

impoverished in spirit, who come together, an intimate proximity reached

because we are doing the work not because of an ontologized accident.

What I am asking for is a willingness to move toward becoming

subjectivated by an analytical queerness, a radical transitivity, an

anoriginal Blackness, where Blackness names a sociopoetic force of

subversive irregularity and, as Moten expressed to me in an email

exchange, “must be claimed by any and every body” who seeks to do

anarchic work. What is being asked for, what is to be done, is a

Blackening that inducts all those who live and be in the undercommons,

stealing life so it can steal more life, pilfering resources and asking

no permission, taking no responsibility, because the ones who need this

stuff might not know they need it, and neither do we. But if we must

hack into government security systems and disseminate the firewalled

information, that is what is to be done; if we must lie about the

destination of funding we are given, allocating it to unauthorized and

unadvised and undisclosed locations, that is what is to be done; if we

must sully ourselves by hanging around a bad crowd that is bad only

because the good’s violent optics and ethics deem it so, then that is

what is to be done.

So because the queer is a figurative specter haunting normativity, and

because the trans is a generative disruption that opens into an

otherwise realm of possibility, and because the Black is a lawlessness

that marks a terrain of ethics because Law ain’t never been ethical,

only disciplinary, then what is to be done is a becoming in the

illustrious muck of the queerness, the transness, the Blackness of the

undercommons. If fugitive planning and Black study is an invitation to

be and remain broken, to refuse fixedness and fixity and being fixed,

then, to conclude this meditative strain, what is to be done is

precisely the kind of study practiced in consciousness-raising

coalitions by Black feminists and anarcha-feminists. “Instead of getting

discouraged and isolated now, we should be in our small

groups—discussing, planning, creating, and making trouble…we should

always be actively engaging in and creating feminist activity, because

we all thrive on it.”[25] Fugitive planning and Black study; planning

with and for fugitives, studying the effects of Blackness.

…

To be ungoverned is, yes, disorderly. Many castigate this yearning,

assert the utility and, indeed, value of order. But the order they speak

of, and the order the ungoverned reject, is the order of the present

society, a society ordered by virtue of its violent quelling of all

those deemed disorderly. But ours is an order that arises by way of

ungoverned disorder, an order that is more accurately a harmony, a

beautiful ensemblic swarm that supplants the order of the State. That is

what ungovernance strives for. It is an ungovernability that

characterizes life and livability. Motivating this urge to “not [be]

governed quite so much,” but pushing this famous Foucauldian dictum

beyond his reluctance to embrace (a negatively connoted) anarchism, is

an insistence on the livability of ungovernance.[26] Propelled in this

pursuit by an “anoriginary drive” that, by its negating “an-,” rejects

the hierarchization that “originary” would imply, an anarcho-Blackness

promotes what Moten and Harney deem “the runaway anarchic ground of

unpayable debt and untold wealth.”[27] And this, they conclude, “is

blackness which must be understood in its ontological difference from

black people who are, nevertheless, (under)privileged insofar as they

are given (to) an understanding of it.”[28] We return obliquely to the

opening definitional claim of anarcho-Blackness. This understanding of

Blackness, and what the prefix anarcho- signifies, is a Blackness that

implies not (only or “merely”) an epidermal saturation but a driving

force that provides a certain kind of subversive disposition,

“ungoverned” by physical or biological logics. It is the general

sensoria we might call Blackness that arises from a radical aesthetic

tradition, one that cares less about the assertion of an identity as its

heft and more about the breakdown of impositions of racialization.

Racialization understood as the child and not the parent of racism,

gleaning this Blackness from the Black Radical Tradition is an anarchic,

ungoverned disorder, an “anarchy of a radicalism that must oppose the

form as well as the content of racial hate.”[29] This is

anarcho-Blackness. It emerges through a political subjectivity that lays

the groundwork for the runaways and renegades, the apostates and

defectors, who refuse to pay debts and, in that anarchic refusal,

possess an untold wealth because metrics for quantifying this wealth are

not beholden to the logics of the financial sector.

There is a dovetailing here with traditional anarchist claims, to

“reject all forms of external government and the State,” but also a

rejection of governance—a distinction that tears the texture of

sociality and encompasses affective, emotional, interpersonal

relationships on the intersubjective level that are not quite captured

in the larger institutions of government and the State.[30] Advancing an

anticapitalist mode of thinking and interaction, not simply one that is

“anticlassist,” requires a radical break from capitalist relations: a

world system dependent on racial slavery, violence, colonialism,

genocide, and gendered labor; a system that is propelled by exploitative

racialized and gendered labor practices, which have always been part and

parcel of white/European economies; a system whose ethic is one of

non-ethics, rebuking sentient life’s needs and desires and wellbeing in

favor of a lethal combination of economic policies and cultural

practices that collectively benefit hoarders of wealth to the detriment

of poor people and poor folks of Color; a system of privatizing public

services and functions, marketization, and commodification of social

life—in short, as DJ Quik once put it, “If it don’t make dollars, it

don’t make sense.” Learn, then, from Diogenes the Cynic, whom Kropotkin

touts as an anarchist of the ancient world, and deface the currency.

One might also note, though, that those “anarchists”—(scare quotes

because it would be a dubious claim to anarchism, and doubly bracketed

here in an em dash as well as parentheses because I resent having to

give airtime to such ideologies)—who take their crypto-currency and rush

to South America to “not be governed” and instead instantiate regimes of

stake-claiming and unencumbered accumulation of capital, are in fact

merely capitalists; they are Ron Swanson-esque libertarians who reject

all forms of being told what to do with their lives and their property

and venerate unbridled capitalism and the free market because of a

disdain for regulation. Such conditions are always highly regulated,

however. Locks and chains are on the doors and the doorperson looks you

up and down before turning you away because you called out the

management on their privatizing, commodifying, tyrannical bullshit.

An anarchist disdain for governance, if I may be permitted to slip into

a conflation with government for a moment, is predicated on an

understanding of it as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon described it:

To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed,

legislated, regimented, closed in, indoctrinated, preached at,

controlled, assessed, evaluated, censored, commanded; all by creatures

that have neither the right, nor wisdom, nor virtue…To be governed means

that at every move, operation, or transaction one is noted, registered,

entered in a census, taxed, stamped, priced, assessed, patented,

licensed, authorized, recommended, admonished, prevented, reformed, set

right, corrected….Then, at the first sign of resistance or word of

complaint, one is repressed, fined, despised, vexed, pursued, hustled,

beaten up, garroted, imprisoned, shot, machine-gunned, judged,

sentenced, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed, and to cap it all,

ridiculed, mocked, outraged, and dishonored. That is government, that is

its justice and its morality![31]

Those who are surveilled with the most scrutiny (“watched over,

inspected, spied on…”) are Black, nonnormatively gendered, and femme,

and thus to seek the liberation of those who live through these nexuses

requires the promotion of a Black anarchic ungovernance. The insurgent

history of slave uprisings, wayward movements, racial and gender

“passing,” and illicit sexualities is a swerve away from being regulated

and registered. They are the people who did not have papers, but

traversed colonized territories in search of land they could live with.

They are the people who did not change their licenses and birth

certificates, not caring about judicial and legal mandates to “align”

with perinatal impositions, driving and traveling and getting stolen

resources anyway. They are the people who did not care for biological

dictates of kinship sold to them for tax purposes, and instead insisted

on the closeness of “cousins,” “aunts,” “uncles,” “bruthas,” “sistahs,”

and “sibs” despite having no “real” ties to them. They resisted these

regimes because they knew that when they did they would be “despised,

vexed, pursued, hustled, beaten up, garroted, imprisoned…” but

understood that to be positioned this way, in proximity to criminality,

meant that they were doing something, because indeed, “collective

resistance and revolution [occurs] at the scene of crime itself.”[32] To

be ungoverned is not to oppose governance; to be ungoverned is to

operate beyond governance, to become disaffected by it, not even

acknowledging its legitimacy, being, in other words, ungoverned by

governance.

Unpropertied

Property, the dominion of human needs…represent[s] the stronghold of

man’s [sic] enslavement and all the horrors it entails.

—Emma Goldman, “Anarchism: What It Really Stands For”

In W.E.B. Du Bois’s impressively encyclopedic Black Reconstruction: An

Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the

Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880, he cites Hermann

Kriege, a German American revolutionary and proto-socialist who,

incidentally, opposed the abolition of slavery. In 1846 he advocated

land reform and free soil, yet also that same year made clear his

opposition to abolishing slavery on the grounds of property rights. He

is quoted thusly:

That we see in the slavery question a property question which cannot be

settled by itself alone. That we should declare ourselves in favor of

the abolitionist movement if it were our intention to throw the Republic

into a state of anarchy, to extend the competition of “free workingmen”

beyond all measure, and to depress labor itself to the last extremity.

That we could not improve the lot of our “black brothers” by abolition

under the conditions prevailing in modern society, but make infinitely

worse the lot of our “white brothers.” That we believe in the peaceable

development of society in the United States and do not, therefore, here

at least see our only hope in condition of the extremest degradation.

That we feel constrained, therefore, to oppose Abolition with all our

might, despite all the importunities of sentimental philistines and

despite all the poetical effusions of liberty-intoxicated ladies.[33]

The passage is dense with assumptions, implications, and slights. Kriege

suggests, rightly, that “the slavery question” is one, in part, of

property. Enslaved people were themselves property, disallowed

personhood. Such a history is imperative to bring to anarchist

theorizations, as one cannot assert the ills of private property without

noting that not only is the factory or storefront over there “property”

but there are people who have historically been property, and the

descendants of those people—or those who might optically or politically

be placed in proximity to those people—are living with the effects of,

as it were, property’s afterlife. Kriege is right, in a slanted way: the

question of property at the base of slavery cannot “be settled by itself

alone,” but because, in the context of anarchist argumentation, it must

account for racialized populations—and, as I must also argue, gendered

domestic and interpersonal labor.

Kriege continues. Abolition for him has the inevitable end result of

anarchy, which is then equated with the negative and unnecessary

competition with the “free workingmen” [sic] (read “free working white

men”) and to devalue their hard-working labor. To abolish slavery would

be to effectively, at least in part, abolish a substantive sector of

property ownership—an anarchist move, one might say—so it is opposed in

order to sustain the labor value of white men. It is the “white

brothers” who will suffer acutely if slavery were abolished; it is the

“white brothers” who do not want to see abolition, anarchy, succeed.

Implicit in anarchism’s inverse is the maintenance of property and the

State (with its attendant vertical relationality), which maintain white

labor. Anarchism’s abolitionist spirit, then, has at its foundation in

the U.S., the emancipatory result of getting closer to freeing Black

people. Put differently, I read anarchism’s abolitionist spirit here as

an anarcho-Blackness.

Interestingly, Kriege is purportedly motivated by a sense of keeping the

peace, which serves as the opposite of anarchy. White rule = peace;

Black freedom = chaos—or, the word he goes on to use, “degradation.” To

degrade something is to cheapen, and this bears a link to another term

that we might meditate on usefully, as we briefly did in a previous

chapter: destitute. To destitute something is to impoverish it, to

extract its value. The degradation that would ensue post-abolition, the

destitution that would take hold, is necessary “in order to free the

revolutionary imaginary of all the old constituent fantasies that weigh

it down, of the whole deceptive legacy” of the hegemonic logic of the

white and cis male supremacy woven into the West’s capitalist state.[34]

What Kriege is afraid of is precisely the aim of (Black) anarchism: the

extreme degradation, the thoroughgoing destitution of the world and that

which sustains it. Classical anarchist sentiment is clear on the point

that depriving the world of the things that sustain the accumulation of

capital is one of the chief goals for anarchist world-making. A further

point, however, is how fundamental (anarcho-)Blackness is to this, for

the things that have had a significant impact on capitalism’s expansion

have been racial enslavement’s accumulation of free Black labor. This is

to see as necessary the constant affixation of racial to capitalism.

Abolition is always both abolition of racism/white supremacy and

capitalism.

And finally, Kriege’s offhanded, seemingly hand-waving concluding

comment. Abolition is to be opposed, certainly for the aforementioned

reason of leaving intact the current conditions of labor as the province

of white men. But further, it is to be opposed despite—and because it is

supported by—both sentimental philistines and, interestingly,

“liberty-intoxicated ladies.” Is Kriege embarrassed about supporting

abolition in any way because, were he to do so, he’d be not only

sentimental but likened to a “lady”? Both of these might in fact have a

common thread, that of femininity. Underlying Kriege’s opposition to

abolition, his opposition to anarchy, is its support by things that

connote femininity, which is to say anarchy’s latent and spectral

femininity. More, a femininity that is “liberty-intoxicated.” This

movement away from the feminine is no coincidence, as there might be

said to be a “feminine character” to resistance, as Cedric Robinson

claims. That there is, or might be, a feminine character to

resistance—that “All resistance, in effect, manifests in gender,

manifests as gender”; that “resistance itself is gendered”—is also

concatenated with the Black Radical Tradition not simply in that we are

discussing abolition of slavery in the U.S. but also because that

tradition utilizes gender for liberatory aims (see, for example, Harriet

Tubman’s flouting and revising of gender to engender others’ freedom),

that tradition, like this resistant aspect of gender, quests for

freedom, which is the aim of resistance.[35] And to be intoxicated with

liberty, to refuse enslavement, one must seek the abolition, too, of

property.

…

What is property? There is of course the definition of property as a

state-protected monopoly over resources or privileges that are then

deployed to others’ exploitation (e.g. to own land and then rent that

land to others for one’s own profit). But there is also the sense of

property as an essential or peculiar characteristic of a thing.

Anarchism seeks, then, to remove the private ownership of property that

sustains capital accumulation. Black anarchism must consider both senses

by way of acknowledging and forming a politicized movement around the

fact that the history of Blackness is testament to the fact that there

are some whose property (essential characteristic) was property (an

ownable thing).

To approach the matter of property—things divorcing the owner from the

user—from the perspective of Black anarchism, from an anarcho-Blackness,

is to begin from the assumption that to let go is a kind of salvific

grace. To clarify: letting go points to a willingness to leap, in that

Kierkegaardian sense, to immerse oneself in what might be. I offer these

notes toward a Black anarchism with precisely this yearning for what

might be possible, a world unfettered by ontological and epistemological

straitjackets or by structural and dominative oppressions. Uncertainty

is endemic to this anarchism: wanting that without knowing what it will

be, but understanding it as an anarchic salvation precisely because it

is not this. Property has at its base the thorough holding on and

possessive spirit of its owner, an encompassing knowingness of the

property possessed. To rebuke privatized ownership and property is to

then let go and allow the possibility of something and some way else to

be to, oddly enough, take hold.

…

But what of this term “anarchism”? Some in recent years have deployed it

in ways that in fact deify possession and property. I want briefly to

address how there have been attempts to use anarchist language for

non-anarchist ends. While it is thorny territory to attempt to parse

“good” anarchism and “bad” anarchism, it is perhaps necessary in order

to best stave off co-optation. This becomes all the more important on

the topic of property, as it can sometimes be language fraught with

conflations and misinterpretations. For instance, certain right-wing

capitalists and corporate fat cats seek deregulated access to unhindered

capital accumulation, claiming to be “disrupting” the ethos of taxation

and “liberating” us from impediments to massive wealth. Ownership of

private property is seen as a way to stick it to an authoritarian

government, and anarchists have a founding tenet of

anti-authoritarianism, so look at us being “anarchists” with our

multimillion-dollar vacation homes. They claim the label “anarchist” (as

do the oxymoronic, so-called “anarcho-capitalists”). How should one

respond? We must do more than simply note that there is an eclectic

array of anarchic strands: communist, syndicalist, libertarian

socialist, anarcha-feminist, primitivist, individualist,

insurrectionary, vegan. Such an anything-goes strategy potentially

dilutes the ability to root out the dangerous political relations

supported by something like “anarcho-capitalism.” The goal here is not

to create an ironclad, unbreachable, unbending definition of anarchism

that disallows fluidity, flexibility, and different textures. That would

employ a spirit of governance hostile to what might lie outside of

anarchism’s tenets, making it unable to think the unthought.

So how to proceed? There are strands of individualist anarchism, for

example, that amount ultimately to “Get your hands off my property!”

There are also capitalist ideologies that have borrowed (stolen) the

label “anarchist” to describe deregulated access to financial wealth.

Both, however, operate on an incredibly regulated internality. The space

the latter wishes to occupy may seem ungovernable and thoroughly

deregulated, but it is predicated on highly regulated and

exclusionary—and hierarchical, with its racial, gendered, and classed

valences—criteria. The purported deregulated space is enabled by extreme

regulation of who might access that space. Too, when not constituted by

the literal wage of capitalism’s master–(wage)slave dialectic, they are

defined by the implicit wages of whiteness, which garner a kind of

capital on the grounds that they have provided access to the territory,

economies, and uninhibited assumptions that allow for such an

“anarcho-capitalism” (better understood as a minarchist position, or

wanting minimal government that retains cops and armies but eradicates,

say, social welfare); that of cis masculinity, which not only grants a

sense of entitlement to any and all spaces/territories (the history of

the white cis masculinity of colonialism looms large here) but also is

the subjectivity that underwrites access to the very subjective tenets

upon which self-possession rest; and that of heteropatriarchal conquest,

accumulating and consuming bodies for reproductive means, whether that

of cis white women to create generations of conquerors and ensure the

purity of whiteness, or that of cis Black women to claim ownership and

violation of a sentient reproductive object to further wealth in

fungible human labor.

Fundamental to this “bad” anarchism is an obsession with security and

possession. Anarcho-Blackness or Black anarchism provide a rejoinder to

this. To inhabit a world on anarchic grounds is to inhabit, necessarily,

an “unsafe neighborhood” because safety and security are characterized

by an implicit, constitutive whiteness that allows for safety and in

fact serves as the obverse of abolitionist liberation (recall Kriege,

who opposed abolition and Black emancipation to protect white laboring

men).[36] Security necessitates biometric regulations that work to the

detriment of gender nonnormativity, femme and feminized bodies, and

bodies of Color which may or may not be adorned with racialized and thus

suspect accouterments (see, for example, the turban or the afro). What

the advancement of anarcho-Blackness puts forth is recognition of how

histories of gender and racialization underpin capitalist notions of

security and possession.

…

I want to argue for what J. Kameron Carter and Sarah Jane Cervenak call

“parapossession” as anarcho-Blackness’s relationship to property. In

“Black Ether,” Carter and Cervenak tie Blackness to an ethereality that,

following Nathaniel Mackey, “announces a kind of ‘holding without

having.’”[37] How to hold but not have? Such an outlook is all the more

pressing when shifting from an understanding of possessive relationships

with things to possessive relationships with people (though again, it

cannot be elided that historically there have been people understood as

things). This interstitial space between property and grasplessness,

this parapossession, is an attempt to maintain mutuality in which one

can care for and share affinity with others without needing to possess

them, without needing to own them as one’s own. Similar to anarchist

distinctions between property as organized around a “sovereign lord” who

uses propertized objects to exploit others, and possession as rooted in

use rights or “usufruct” rather than exploiting others, parapossession

builds on this history. Parapossession allows for “I am relating to this

now in a particular, perhaps singular, way” in the rubble of “This is

mine”; it is a being and becoming with and through as opposed to an I am

garnered by the refusal of the other. Black anarchists who move toward

inhabiting an anarchic world become through a subjectivity that

constitutes them via this holding without having, their subjectivity

becoming that of being “held in noncoalescence against worldly

misholding”; this anarchism is to practice “‘unprepossessive

(nonprepossessive) aplomb’ in the spirit.”[38] And this caressing and

holding that subverts the propertied possessiveness of having “is black

life’s experimentalism, a fence-breaking, boundary-crossing,

paratheological, paraontological, insovereign, paralegal, and

parapossessive ambulation.”[39]

Black life—which Carter and Cervenak understand not only as the material

conditions that apportion life’s vagaries amongst Black people but as a

general liveliness, a pervasive and infectious ether that is

Blackness—is the givenness of parapossession and holding in a way that

does not commit to having, to ownership. Reading anarcho- as a getting

outside and away from sovereignty, and Blackness in the aforementioned

way, Black anarchism is constituted by an anarcho-Blackness that resides

in, builds life within, a parapossessive, insovereign, fence-breaking

space. This is the world anarcho-Blackness yearns for. It emphasizes

mutual aid and care and joy by a collective, assemblic relationality

predicated on something more flexible than privatized ownership. Indeed,

fence-breaking leads to a society that is much more open and mutually

caring.

The anarcho- of Blackness, and Black anarchism in general, demands a

more philosophical unholding from property as well. What I am asserting

here is a Black anarchism that inducts the denizens of an anarchic

society into unpropertied relationship with one another, because

property moves through relationality just like the State. So if

Blackness’s anarchic character defines this, the demand placed upon

those who seek an anarchic society is a becoming-Black where Blackness

is what happens to you when anarchism takes hold of you. Carter and

Cervenak again: “This is all to say that this ethereal movement

otherwise—black movement unheld by its ambulations into music, alongside

unavailable dreams—disaggregates blackness from its entrenchment with

state interest, with property, and with this world’s holdings.”[40] The

racialized Blackness one usually understands as Blackness as such is

embedded in the logics of the State and property. Thus to be and become

unpropertied, to be moved by the anarchic, is to disaggregate Blackness

from this relationship and, if we wish for an anarchic society, which is

to say an unpropertied and un-Stated world, Blackness becomes the

adhesive for those who refuse the State’s holdings over us.

We demand the impossible, yes, and that impossible is a way to live

without being owned and without owning; a way to be done with properties

and the private without giving up sensibilities of holding and relating

in specific, idiosyncratic ways is what we want. In contrast to the

colonial and imperialist drive to capture and claim as one’s own,

characterized by an expansive masculine whiteness that subjugates bodies

of Color and uses the rape of feminized people as a propelling force for

colonization, the anarchism of Blackness, as Williams and Samudzi would

say, demands a new beginning that has as its precipitating force the end

of this. The anarchism of Blackness indexes an unpropertied relationship

to the world and others inasmuch as it discloses the impropriety of

freedom, freedom’s unboundedness, which is to say its inability and

unwillingness to demarcate the limits of sanctioned relationality—or, to

propertize. The imperialist, settler-colonizer drive is manifested in

white self-possession—whiteness as property par excellence—so Blackness

comes to un-possess itself in order to become unbounded by the

propertied, the heteropatriarchal.[41]

Racial and gendered capitalism rest at the heart of the will to possess

and privatize the ownership of possessable things. Thus, anarchism

demands its abolition, not a conciliatory reform, for “it is impossible

to reform the system of racial capitalism.”[42] The capitalist demand

for property and its ownership by those in power recognizes only

gluttony, and the necessity for exploitation to maximize that gluttony’s

expansion. This theft is of the first order, and to move toward anarchic

life is to steal on the second order, to steal back and let free what is

unownable. Indeed, property and capitalism have deemed this stealing

back a negatively connoted theft without recognition of its own theft.

But we are on to that ol’ tired smokescreen. We know what’s really up.

We’ve known for a while. We’ve known, in the final instance, that as the

seventeenth-century folk poem goes,

The law locks up the man or woman

Who steals the goose off the common

But leaves the greater villain loose

Who steals the common from the goose.

……………………………………

The poor and wretched don’t escape

If they conspire the law to break;

This must be so but they endure

Those who conspire to make the law.

Uncouth

A serious anarchism must also be feminist, otherwise it is a question of

patriarchal half-anarchism, and not real anarchism.

—Anarchist Federation of Norway[43]

I can only begin this chapter with the Combahee River Collective (CRC).

The CRC’s “Black Feminist Statement” is touted as a foundational Black

feminist document, having spawned terms like “identity politics” and

given rise to intersectionality as a concept by their meditation on

interlocking oppressions. What is less remarked upon, though, is their

fierce commitment to socialism. Indeed, they state very explicitly that

they are socialists, but while they affirm their socialism and

“essential agreement with Marx’s theory,” they disagree with a

class-reductionist analysis.[44] Their socialism is not class first; it

is expansive and encompasses the capacity of Black feminist subjective

world-making. That is to say, their socialist analysis comes from the

particularity—which is no particularity but a capacious and broad

insight into structuring mechanisms in the social milieu—of the nexus of

Black and woman. That vantage, that nexus, is indeed about people who

are Black women but also, I want to argue, about an indexation of a

Black feminism that expansively “welcome[s] anyone with an investment in

black women’s humanity, intellectual labor, and political visionary

work, anyone with an investment in theorizing black genders and

sexualities in complex and nuanced ways”; it is a Black feminism that

references the nexus of Black and woman but that “always transcend[s]

attempts to limit the tradition by rooting it in embodied

performances.”[45] It is, in short, a Black feminism that is, first and

foremost, “an anticaptivity project.”[46]

The CRC’s notion of interlocking oppressions understands that all the

systems and discourses that contain and curtail us—what anarchists would

loosely understand as the State and authority—are connected. The

“synthesis of these oppressions” is what they understand as the State.

Thus their political aim of “the destruction of the political-economic

systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy” is an

anarchic politic.[47] Destruction of the State, which is understood

robustly as being attended by racial, gendered, and imperialist baggage,

is an attempt at moving toward an anarchist society. The State and the

governmental/material ills of the world are the product of “white male

rule” that they feel viscerally. There is no saving it; through and

through, it is toxic. No reforming white male rule. So it becomes

appropriate, on a certain reading, to see “white male rule” as not

merely about people who are white and cis men at the top (though this is

certainly very much the case), but as a name for the oppressiveness of

the State and authority. State and authority are metonymized by

reference to white male rule, which the CRC, as Black and woman—as

operating through Black feminism—feels acutely and wants no part of.

They are uninterested in seizing the State or capital; they are

uninterested in flipping the racialized and gendered script and becoming

the master class. “We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces

behind,” they write in their Statement. “To be recognized as human,

levelly human, is enough.”[48] A horizontal, mutually aiding, radically

non-hierarchical world is what they seek. An anarchic world.

I know, I know, they don’t call themselves anarchists. But as stated at

the outset of this volume, I care little about only claiming Black

people, and in this case Black women, who deem themselves anarchists. I

care little, too, about bringing people into the institutional fold of

anarchism. What strikes me about the CRC is how their socialism, which

critiques socialism, expands socialism, moves by way of anarchic

principles and forces. They radicalize their socialism by anarchizing

it, in other words. If anarchists hold that “until all are free then no

one is free,” we can note the express anarchism of the CRC when they

argue that “if Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else

would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the

destruction of all the systems of oppression.”[49] This demonstrates, as

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes, “the dialectic connecting the struggle

for Black liberation to the struggle for a liberated United States and,

ultimately, the world.”[50]

This is all to say something quite profound: Black radical feminisms,

with their embedded queer and trans circulatory systems, refuse

subsumption into neoliberal markets or mainstream notions of revolution.

They reject the creation of another nation-state; they reject a

female-headed ruling class—it is a radical feminism for the 99%, which

is “Far from celebrating women CEOs who occupy corner offices”; “we want

to get rid of CEOs and corner offices.”[51] It continually questions,

refusing an end point or knowable future. It is a quotidian praxis that,

in suspending the knowability of the intricacies of an anarchic vision,

allows for an anarchic world to arise inasmuch as the anarchic world

defies intelligible elaborations (elaborations predicated on the world

as such).

…

Though anarchism is a method and praxis of thought that is

non-hierarchical, there has nevertheless been an insistent sexism within

many anarchist circles. Indeed, the first self-proclaimed anarchist,

Proudhon, is noted as having said that, when “one compares sex with sex,

women are inferior.”[52] Proudhon and many of his followers retained the

sense that the father held a legitimate position of power—an

instantiation of a masculine, tough, honorable, and independent

affect—and that women, unfortunately so, were “chained to nature” and

entered society only through (heterosexual) marriage. A kind of

“anarcho-sexism” has been a repeated current in anarchist movements and

theories.[53] But while Proudhon’s belief that women’s role is

essentially to be the subordinated right hand to her husband, others

like French anarcho-communist Joseph Déjacque state firmly that feminism

and anarchism are inextricable. Anarchism and feminism have a fraught

history, because still, while most male anarchist writers, like many

leftist men in general, gave lip service to the “equality of the sexes,”

groups of women within the movement’s ranks had to fight for anything

resembling equality.

I assert unequivocally that anarchism must be feminist. Further, what I

pose in this chapter is an explicitly Black feminist anarchism, an

anarcho-Blackness where the “Blackness” is necessarily and

fundamentally—as it must always be, in whatever realm—feminist.

Following the CRC, the anarchist revolution can only become actualized

if it is a feminist and antiracist revolution, which is to say,

succinctly: anarchism that is not Black feminist is not doing anarchic

work.

The approach toward the world that is classified under the heading of

anarcha-feminism finds early rumblings as an identifiable political

movement during the Spanish Civil War in 1936 by Mujeres Libres (Free

Women), but in various less-defined iterations centuries before this.

(Though as something people called themselves and their collective

organizations, “anarcha-feminism” didn’t really appear until the 1970s.)

Put simply, anarcha-feminism has critiqued the pervasive sexism and

gendered hierarchies within anarchist movements. Historically, it was

difficult for anarcha-feminism to emerge legibly, as there existed a

simplistic political binarism between, on one hand, anti-State feminist

liberalism (which saw the state as a potential source of despotism, but

that embraced free market capitalism) and, on the other hand, pro-State

socialist/feminist radicalism (which, while sharing anarchism’s

predominant economic philosophy, also embraced women’s suffrage and

their entry into the machinery of the State).[54] Anarcha-feminism

needed to emerge as radical and anti-State. In many ways,

anarcha-feminists understand anarchism as a type of feminism due to its

avowed rejection of hierarchies and authority. As noted, a persistent

underlying sexism was present within anarchism, many collectives being

characterized by “quasi-support for male-female equality [that]

coexisted with a deep-rooted, full-blown misogyny,” but also, according

to Sharif Gemie, easily being understood as having only a veneer of

misogyny and a more foundational feminist impulse of equality.[55]

Historically, anarcha-feminists have insisted on the gendered nature of

capitalism and power. They saw that, while (even male) anarchists would

concede that patriarchy is linked to class, there also needed to be a

fundamental understanding that experiences under capitalism are

differentiated and inflected by gender. Traditionally, anarchism

relegated revolutionary, anarchic work to the public sphere as if the

(waged) workplace was the only place work and labor was being done, and

from which people had to be liberated. Anarcha-feminists have insisted

that the family and domestic sphere are also sites of valid anarchist

conflict. Of course, the implicit assumption that all women occupied the

unwaged, domestic workplace fails to consider how Black women in

particular had an estranged relationship to this simplistic

differentiation between workplace and home life, because Black women

often worked in other people’s homes, usually for white women. The task

is to understand anarchism as always and necessarily, for

anarcha-feminists, a feminist endeavor to “bring down the patriarchy.”

This is not, as already alluded to, to reverse power relations.

Misguided “female empowerment”-type feminism has no place in this

political thought. Such feminism merely wishes to replace men at the top

1% with cis women. “[Anarcha-]Feminism doesn’t mean female corporate

power or a woman President; it means no corporate power and no

Presidents.”[56] Discourses of “leaning in,” feminist-friendly

capitalism, and rights-based equality that permit non-men to insinuate

themselves into the still-functioning system as-is will not transform

society in an anarchic way. Dismantling all hierarchies and authority

means an anarcha-feminist revolution.

A solid encapsulation of anarcha-feminism, particularly as it ends where

Black feminism might be said to begin, is articulated in Fionnghuala Nic

Roibeaird’s 2015 “A Basic Introduction to Anarcha Feminism”:

We believe our freedom lies in the abolition of oppression, in its many

forms; economic; racist; homophobic; sectarian; and of course, sexist,

etc. Anarchists strive for a society that is community based, where we

make decisions over our lives and communities directly through a system

of local councils and delegates. Most importantly, we aim for a society

free from coercion and oppression. With anarchism, there is no end

goal—we will always have to keep an eye out for creeping inequalities

and unequal power structures within interpersonal and community

relations. Anarchist-feminism is the gelling together of these anarchist

principles and goals with the black feminist theory of

Intersectionality.[57]

Anarcha-feminism necessitates intersectionality because it, in

Roibeaird’s argument, is the gelling together of anarchism and the

“black feminist theory” of intersectionality. One might ask, then, what

role Black feminist theory as a whole—beyond intersectionality (which is

not to be conflated with Black feminist theory, nor is it the only

contribution of Black feminist theory)—has in anarchism.

So, wherefore art thou Black anarcha-feminism (or would it be

anarcha-Black feminism)? We see a glimpse of anarchic strains of Black

feminism in the CRC’s Statement, but what of those Black women who

affirm their own anarchism?

To this end we must turn to Lucy Parsons. Parsons, a Black woman who was

born enslaved in Montgomery, Alabama, on June 20, 1848, was a vehement

anarchist, criticizing the exercise of dominative power. She “called the

working-class to arms” in an intellectual and social ideology she came

to by combining the tenets of socialism and anarchism—“social

anarchism.” This social anarchism by which Parsons lived “examines the

organization of society from the point of view of an anarchist, but also

views self-determination as ‘conceptually connected with social

equality’ and emphasizes ‘community and mutual aid.’”[58] Parsons’s

anarchism was deeply committed to the poor, though this tended sometimes

to border on a Marxian “class-first” analysis that reduced all

oppressions to class oppression. Nevertheless, her emphasis on

impoverished people allowed her to glimpse the plight of working women,

which ultimately led to an analysis of how capitalism affected women

acutely.

Parsons, in Willie J. Harrell Jr.’s account, was “an ardent

feminist.”[59] She was adamant about alleviating the most

marginalized—poor, working women—from the burdens of capitalism. Her

revolution was one that dissolved the State and capitalism, which

necessarily, for Parsons, was a precondition “for the creation of an

anti-racist” and anti-sexist society.[60] Envisioning a world that was

free of capitalist oppression, Parsons emphasized how important it was

to condemn what she termed “the robbery of our sisters.”[61] What this

amounted to was her belief, much like the Combahee River Collective,

that women were not free until women globally were free.

We get Parsons’s perhaps fiercest gendered denunciation of the

capitalist system in 1905. In her speech to the IWW, she remarks: “We

are the slaves of slaves. We are exploited more ruthlessly than men.

Whenever wages are to be reduced the capitalist class use women to

reduce them.”[62] Here she demonstrates how capitalism utilizes cis male

supremacy to cut costs by way of women’s labor. The devaluation of

women’s labor—not to mention the unwaged gendered labor in the household

that helps sustain capitalism—makes women the “slaves of slaves.” (To be

sure, here Parsons requires castigation for the implicit overlooking of

Black women, who themselves were literally enslaved in the plantocratic

antebellum South, and the conflation of unpaid labor that is part of the

economic market to the condition of racial slavery—Frank B. Wilderson’s

“ruse of analogy.”)[63] This is one of the few times we see Parsons

noting quite explicitly that “we [women] are exploited more ruthlessly

than men,” an acknowledgment that capitalism is fundamentally gendered,

that capitalism survives and thrives by leaning on cis male supremacy.

An emergent anarcha-feminism.

But there was often a notable slippage that Parsons, not to mention many

male Black anarchists, committed. As Ervin has remarked, “Although there

will definitely be an attempt to involve women and white workers; where

they are willing to cooperate, the strike would be under Black

leadership because only Black workers can effectively raise those issues

which most effect them.”[64] The juxtaposition between “women and white

workers” to “Black workers” omits Black women, an erasure so worn at

this point that noticing it seems automatic. Parsons never made any

explicit connections between the capitalist oppressions she railed

against and how they specifically affected Black women or other women of

Color. Not much about racial capitalism or the conditions of working

Black women. She also made problematic statements that erase the import

of racialized identity, including her own, often taking pains to obscure

and deny her African and enslaved past.[65] She noted, for example, it

is not because Black men are Black that they have faced numerous

oppressions; rather, “It is because he is poor. It is because he is

dependent”; it is “Because he is poorer as a class than his white

wage-slave brother of the North.”[66] For Parsons, white supremacy is

not a thing unto itself but simply the manifestation of the ravages of

capitalism, a product of class oppression. It is imperative that

anarchism and “Black anarchism” be interrogated through a Black feminist

lens to avoid these kinds of slippages. Reading anarchic strains in

extant Black feminist texts like the CRC’s Statement; and noting the

similarities in the end goals of anarchism and Black feminism, namely

skepticism toward the benevolence of the State, non-coercion,

dismantling of hierarchies, and the like, may bring us closer to

actualizing the radical world transformation we seek.

…

After all, what good is an insurrection if some of us are left behind?

—J. Rogue and Abbey Volcano, “Insurrection at the Intersections”

Black feminist anarchism borrows indirectly from the spirit of the 1992

International Anarcha-Feminist meeting in Paris organized by the Women’s

Commission of the Fédération Anarchiste Française and commits to the

“anarchization” of feminist theory and praxis by way of a refusal of

“the totalitarianism of sisterhood.”[67] The discourse of a universal

sisterhood has long erased the specificities of Black women, engaging in

a cis, white, heterosexual, middle-class solipsism that assumed the

provincial experiences of certain women as the experience of all women.

Black feminism simultaneously interrupts this endeavor and, on its own,

acts as a perpetual politicization of the gifts of the outside and

unincorporable. Allowing Black feminism and anarchism to converse brings

about the anarchization of anarcha-feminism by highlighting the

shortcomings of much anarcha-feminism, and the anarchic valences of

Black feminism.

Black feminist anarchist Zoé Samudzi asserts rightly “that the analysis

of Black feminism has a particularly deep resonance with anarchist

understandings of mechanisms of power, which similarly foreground a

linking across all systems of domination.”[68] Both Black feminism and

anarchism share a deep skepticism or outright rejection of various

mechanisms of power, which are all predicated not merely on a nebulous

or materialized State or authority but are always embedded in—and

imposed onto us by—white, cis male, and heteronormative frameworks of

organizing the social order. Struggle against authoritarianism, as a

firm pillar in anarchist theory and praxis, is strengthened by Black

feminist theory, which promotes a “shift in orientation away from a more

fragmented conceptualization of struggle, and toward the idea of our

struggles as interdependent.”[69] This is anarchism anarchically pushed,

as it were. Long have Black people been tied to a communist Marxism, but

such an automatic linking and erasure of Black anarchists de-emphasizes

how Black feminist assertions of the interlocking oppressions befalling

Black women is an anarchic framework. Or, at least anarchism

“anarchized.” There are resonances of this in classical anarchist texts

and thinkers. For example, Bakunin writes in his 1867 “Solidarity in

Liberty: The Workers’ Path to Freedom”:

What all other men [sic] are is of the greatest importance to me.

However independent I may imagine myself to be, however far removed I

may appear from mundane considerations by my social status, I am

enslaved to the misery of the meanest member of society. The outcast is

my daily menace. Whether I am Pope, Czar, Emperor, or even Prime

Minister, I am always the creature of their circumstance, the conscious

product of their ignorance, want and clamoring. They are in slavery, and

I, the superior one, am enslaved in consequence.[70]

Bakunin is arguing a radical position. He asserts, in no uncertain

terms, that anyone else’s suffering means that he suffers. Though he had

a physical stake in many struggles, he did not, however, have a physical

stake in every struggle, namely the struggles the likes of the Black or

enslaved peoples of the Western world. Nevertheless, he articulated a

radical commitment to the marginalized, an identification with the

oppressed and marginalized even. Bakunin writes here, essentially, that

until the lowest are free and unfettered by oppression—that is, in the

CRC’s formulation, Black women—neither he, nor the Pope, nor the Czar,

nor the emperor, can be free. His and others’ freedom rests on the

memory-foam pillow of the freedom of the meekest. After linking this

quote to the CRC’s perspective on interrelated and interlocking

struggle, Hillary Lazar notes that foundational anarchist principles of

reciprocity, mutual aid, interdependence, and direct action are the

“other mainstays in both Black feminist and anarchist practice.”[71]

Samudzi is interested in the centuries-long lineage of anarchic

insurrection that can be found on the slave ship, on the plantation, in

maroon communities, up to more contemporary uprisings against law

enforcement (that white masculine arm of the State). She is engaging in

historical theorizing of Black feminist anarchism because imagining a

radically transformed world is a deeply theoretical endeavor; it is an

“incredibly theoretical exercise” that is “creat[ing a] community that

is safe for Black women, for Black trans women…because that requires

that we have all of these conversations and start to create material

politics around misogynoir and trans misogynoir, around disability,

around the relationships that men have with one another and the ways

that they demand and hold one another accountable.”[72] Imagining

something radically other than a sociality reliant on the State and its

authorities requires thinking about a space in which Black women across

a range of gender expressions can be safe—because, lest we forget, the

State operates under the assumption of the non-importance of Black

women’s safety. There is no way anarchism can do anarchism to the

fullest if it does not heed Black feminist theory. If anarchism seeks to

actualize that world, it must focus on the plight of Black women, as

that is a nexus that holds precisely the very systems anarchism needs to

understand and destroy.

Samudzi goes in on capitalism. As a structuring force of contemporary

society, capitalism harbors many of the systems anarchists seek to

combat. But Black feminist anarchism’s response to capitalism, Samudzi

argues, needs to be described in

the way that Cedric Robinson was describing it in terms of being racial

Capitalism, in terms of understanding the contours of capitalism being

shaped by, at least in the United States or globally through

colonialism, through the genocide of indigenous communities and the

expropriation of their land and resources, through slavery and—in the

United States—the afterlife of slavery…If we’re not understanding

specifically the ways in which economic violence is inextricably linked

to racialized violence and commodification of non-white bodies, then we

actually have no understanding of how capitalism works.[73]

Though I would wager to say that this is implicit in Samudzi’s argument,

I need to also make explicit “the indispensable role played by gendered,

unpaid work in capitalist society,” that “capitalist societies are also

by definition wellsprings of gender oppression. Far from being

accidental, sexism is hardwired into [capitalist societies’] very

structure.”[74] Capitalist exploitation is experienced through, and

seeks out the vectors of, race and gender. Bringing Blackness and gender

to the fore in discussions of the centralized regime of capitalism and

governance gives anarchist analysis a more robust texture.

Perhaps few Black people, and even fewer Black women, identify as

anarchists because of how radical Leftism has been mired in racist and

sexist discourses seeking to dissuade marginalized demographics from

finding coalitions that strengthen the possibility of their liberation.

The tone of this dissuasion was set, Samudzi says, by moderate Black

folks and white folks warning Black communities against radical “outside

agitators.” Such warnings today harken back to “the language that these

white, southern lawmakers and politicians would use to prevent Black

communities from doing work with white, communist organizers or

anti-racist organizers.”[75] Her Black feminist anarchism mends this

wedge being driven into these politics to stave off interracial

coalition building. “Black and Brown folks having a more thorough

understanding of these kinds of radical, anti-capitalist class

interests” is the aim of her Black feminist anarchism, and must be the

aim of anyone’s anarchism.[76]

…

“Her way of living was nothing short of anarchy,” writes Saidiya Hartman

in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social

Upheaval.[77] What might anarchism be if we understood the small

movements, the micro-politics—the “collective assemblages of

enunciation” that “flows or flees, that escapes the binary

organizations, the resonance apparatus, and the overcoding machine”;

that which brings politicality into play on different scales and in

different forms—of Black girls as subjective anarchic enunciations of

other modes of life?[78] What could anarchism be if the go-to theorists

were the various incarnations of Hartman’s “her,” a Black girl?

We have a slightly altered definition of anarchy and anarchism in

Hartman. What if we embraced it as our start to anarchist politics? She

writes:

To embrace the anarchy—the complete program of disorder, the abiding

desire to change the world, the tumult, upheaval, open rebellion…is to

attend to other forms of social life, which cannot be reduced to

transgression or to nothing at all, and which emerge in the world marked

by negation, but exceed it.[79]

Anarchy is an open rebellion. It cannot be closed, nor should it be

closed, because its openness is what gives it its anarchic tenor for

accepting the radical, the unknown that might arise when all we’ve known

is dismantled. Tending to other forms of social life makes us attentive

to the “lower frequencies.” That is where something else might happen,

something other than this. Conversing with Bakunin’s assertion that,

within anarchism, “the passion for destruction is a creative passion,

too,” Hartman does not wish to dwell in negation (“the passion for

destruction”) but emphasizes how that negation is exceeded in what we

ultimately hope for—to create something new.

Like the ungoverned space of the undercommons where the doors swing open

for anyone, “The beautiful anarchy of the corner,” where Black life

conspired to make other things imaginable, “refused no one.”[80] In the

anarchic ghettos where Black girls played and lived, they moved to the

rhythm of another groove of life. Everyone could stay here; this was

truly non-hierarchical, non-coercive inasmuch as they stayed here

because they were permitted to “resist the pull of roaming, hustling,

and searching,” those endeavors they felt compelled to partake in

because racial capitalism did not want them to “stay briefly, catch

their breath.”[81] Here, gatherings were promiscuous; there were no

criteria for entrance, only that you lived anarchically, which is to say

you let the space fill you up when you got there. And when you got

there, filled with the space, “strangers became intimates” because they

shared the space and it didn’t matter where you came from, only that you

lived with the anarchy that provided insight into where y’all might

go.[82]

“What did untested militants and smug ideologues know of [Sojourner]

Truth and [Harriet] Tubman? Unlike unruly colored women, they failed to

recognize that experience was capable of opening up new ways, yielding a

thousand new forms and improvisations.”[83] Truth and Tubman, Black

women who knew a thing or two about anarchism. Because they experienced

it in a way that more notable anarchists might not have, perhaps could

not have. Definitely could not have. While they talked about the State

in a way that did not seem to match how the State portrayed itself,

Tubman and Truth made plain how the State got inside you and made you

think anarchic thoughts, do anarchic things because you just couldn’t

take it anymore. Their bodies theorized an anarchic rejection of the

terrors of/that are the State because they did not divide the State from

the intimacy of their corporeality—they couldn’t, because the State was

the estate on which they found themselves captive, the State was the man

who came into their quarters and violated their bodies in the night.

Perhaps they dreamed of but could not know another world, because if it

was indeed another world it would necessitate the troubling, the

obliteration, or maybe a subtler dissolving, of the limbs of hegemony.

These Black women—corporealized manifestations of, but not reducible to,

Black feminism—show that anarchism needs to expand its thinking, see

where its kin lie by seriously “recount[ing] the struggle against

servitude, captivity, property, and enclosure that began in the

barracoon and continued on the ship, where some fought, some jumped,

some refused to eat. Others set the plantation and the fields on fire,

poisoned the master.”[84] Anarchism’s history goes there, where the

“fathers” of the term did not think to go. So Black anarchism,

anarcho-Blackness and its attending, its embedded, Black feminism, is a

misreading of anarchist key texts, because “Only a misreading of the key

texts of anarchism could ever imagine a place for wayward colored

girls.”[85]

Hartman once more, in illustrious, anarchic prose on illustrious,

anarchic life:

An everyday choreography of the possible unfolded in the collective

movement, which was headless and spilling out in all directions,

strollers drifted en masse, like a swarm or the swell of an ocean; it

was a long poem of black hunger and striving. It was the wild rush from

house service on the part of all who [could] scramble or run. It was a

manner of walking that threatened to undo the city, steal back the body,

break all the windows. The people ambling through the block and passing

time on corners and hanging out on front steps were an assembly of the

wretched and the visionary, the indolent and the dangerous. All the

modalities sing a part in this chorus, and the refrains were of infinite

variety. The rhythm and stride announced the possibilities, even if most

were fleeting and too often unrealized. The map of what might be was not

restricted to the literal trail of Esther’s footsteps or anyone else’s,

and this unregulated movement encouraged the belief that something great

could happen despite everything you knew, despite the ruin and the

obstacles. What might be was unforeseen, and improvisation was the art

of reckoning with chance and accident. Hers was an errant path cut

through the heart of Harlem in search of the open city, l’ouverture,

inside the ghetto. Wandering and drifting was how she engaged the world

and how she understood it; this repertoire of practices composed her

knowledge. Her thoughts were indistinguishable from the transient rush

and flight of black folks in this city-within-the-city. The flow of it

carried everyone along, propelled and encouraged all to keep on

moving.[86]

A coalitional, collective quotidian choreography of possibility. That is

not anarchism understood in the traditional sense; that is not anarchism

begotten merely by adherence to what Kropotkin has preached. It is

anarchism that is choreographed through the way we move and think about

our bodies. Anarchic subjectivity in that we come into being through an

anarchy of becoming, a way to exist in the world where our existence is

predicated on how we aid each other mutually, refuse the violence of the

State, dismantle hierarchies, concede to a non-coerced ethic (not right,

with all its judiciary baggage) of opacity.

This choreography is “headless”—rulerless, without ruler, an-archist—and

it spills out. The spilling makes it hard for the State to clamp down

the movement. Such a Black feminist anarchism cannot be contained by

inclusion into any organization; it has to be a modality, a “manner of

walking that threaten[s] to undo the city, steal back the body, break

all the windows” because that is where anarchy happens, in the theft of

that which should never have been property, in the destruction of the

State, in the ultimate undoing of the miniaturized State—the city. The

quotidian is where it’s at, and Black women and Black feminism alert us

to that everyday life. In continuing to “illuminate and inspire the

quotidian struggles that black women must carry on to make a way out of

no way for ourselves and other black women and girls,” the anarchic

arteries of Black feminism emphasize the necessity to “still tend those

discursive gardens, which excite and move us to action and change and

teach us the value of women’s lives and living.”[87] We must ensure the

life and livelihood of those small moments, those moments that sustain

life that is lived on the margins in that “assembly of the wretched and

the visionary.” Those moments populated by the Black and women, the

Black and femme. The moments that glimpse some other way of life, the

“no way” out of which a way is made by Black women.

This unregulated, ambulatory movement flexes with an arrhythmic rhythm

that reverberates on another scale. Another frequency to which we need

to attune ourselves. Despite everything we know and all the horrors that

lay about us, the something else is what we look to cultivate through

our movements and actions, thoughts and desires, gardens and pots of

food. There is something deeply apt about the Dark Star Collective’s

decision to title their anarcha-feminist anthology Quiet Rumours.

Instead of the brash anarchic exclamations of anarchists past, something

quiet invites a whole host of reverberatory tremors to unmoor

instantiated ways of life. We might not hear it at first, but that

doesn’t mean it’s not there, working, giving us an anarchic world to

look forward to. It is unheard and unseen because its sights and sounds

have refused the structuring logic of the State and hierarchy. Hartman’s

“she” roams the world with a knowledge begotten by drifting, without the

rule of roads and paths. There is a different city within this city, a

city that is not recognized as a city—because it isn’t one. It is

something else, another kind of sociality, an anarchic sociality where

we can live free.

Unhinged

Let’s dynamite the sex and gender binomial as a political practice.

—The WhoreDykeBlackTransFeminist Network, “Manifesto for the

Trans-Feminist Insurrection”

Put simply, the gender binary is part and parcel of capitalism’s

division and devaluation of gendered labor, and socio-political gender

transgression marks a distinctly anarchic practice. I have argued up to

this point that capitalism—the Marxist’s analytic baby—is not reducible

to simply patriarchy, much less all society’s ills reducible to it. A

further question remains though, in typical academic one-upsmanship

[sic] fashion: is capitalism reducible to cis patriarchy? That is, where

are the trans people in all of this, the genderqueer and nonbinary, the

agendered and gender neutral?

The fact that this or that particular critique of patriarchy is

unaccompanied by an adequately lengthy meditation on the interstices of

the gender binary does not automatically make its entire socio-political

apparatus suspect. Often, stating that a theoretical mode omits a

marginalized group is seen as sufficiently rigorous scholarship and

argumentation. I find this trite, to be frank. Surely any narrowness in

who gets included among the marginalized has deep implications, hence

the always-necessary acknowledgment of the gender normative assumptions

of many critiques of patriarchy. But the discussion can’t stop there. In

this chapter, I will move beyond the practice of pointing out

insufficiencies latent in critiques of “patriarchy” that are made

without an acknowledgment of its assumed cis genders and, as the

WhoreDykeBlackTransFeminist Network insists, dynamite the gender binary

as my political practice, not an afterthought of political practice. My

aim is to begin there and carry out not only a destructive critique but

a productive supplementation (á la Bakunin’s creative-destructive

passions) that articulates what comes after. If we start with a series

of explosions, what does the terrain look like after the smoke

dissipates?

By exploding the sex and gender binary we reject distinctions between

the naturalness of sex and the cultural-ness of gender. Black and trans

feminist anarchism here does not abide such claims and insists on noting

the externally imposed, coercive construction of sex as well.[88] Sex,

in other words, is gendered. We can’t find solace in presumed biological

naturalness as something outside the coercions of the State. How we are

gendered is a product of how the State and its various apparatuses seek

to discipline and produce, to coerce and hierarchize different desires,

bodies, and comportments. There is a political and ethical interest in

the question of gender, which becomes anarchically pertinent when

viewing it as not an unmediated natural phenomenon but a historical

production that serves the interest of the State. Those anarchistically

concerned with gender—who have been called “anarchist sex

radicals”—argue that gender as binaristically construed rests at the

heart of society’s structuration. Binary gender is regulated by the law,

institutions, religion, medicine, and various other societal

authorities. A radical departure from the State, then, necessitates a

radical departure from compulsory binary genders.

This ultimately requires seeing gender and its transgressions as more

than a mere lifestyle choice without political ramifications.

Transgressions of gender must not be filed only under personal

preference; and transgressions of gender are not, in and of themselves,

the anarchic act we seek. Gender transgression must have a sociogenic

effect, that is, more than doing gender radically for oneself (which is

still a valiant and meaningful act), one must subjectivate the social

landscape via gender transgressivity or ungendering. If the very ground

on which we stand is buttressed by adherence to the gender binary, to

traverse anarchic ground requires a vitiation of the constitutive binary

gender of that ground. The Blackness of anarchic ground is inextricable

from the gender transgression of anarchic ground. Blackness does not

abide upholding binaristic gender—Blackness as “too cute for binaries,”

Blackness as persistent and insistent “gender trouble,” Blackness’s (and

its embedded feminism) “trans inscrutability,” to borrow insightful

language from Che Gossett.[89] The world we traverse must become

saturated with the deregulation of gender, or unsaturated with gender,

which then creates an anarchic world (dis)order. Flipping the script is

not enough; it is not enough to simply insist on the femaleness of the

future or yearn for Black people to rule the world. Wanting a

representational subject that embodies all the marginalized demographics

we can (and can’t) imagine will not—I repeat: will not—actualize a

radical anarchic world. Representation is not our end goal, not only

because representation implies the non-participation of those whom the

representative ultimately represents (that is, the representative holds

power only when those they represent are absent, which is antithetical

to the anarchic drive for direct participation); representation also

assumes a legible subject, which must align with normative logics of

socio-ontological existence—to represent someone or something, that

someone or something has to already be known. But if anarchism wants to

destroy the extant system, and if the extant system dictates what is and

can be known, its destruction means that what arises after cannot be

known or represented. It will be anarchic possibility, unanticipated and

unbeholden to our current tenets of legibility.

So anarchism allows for nothing but what is unallowable. Not even

“women”—that feminist go-to site for the historically oppressed—can be

our political figure. It excludes too much and, as the

WhoreDykeBlackTransFeminist Network note, “leaves out the dykes, trans,

the whores, the one[s] who wear veils, the ones who earn little and

don’t go to the university, the ones who yell, the immigrants without

legal resident papers, the fags.”[90] These are the ones who encircle

the kind of force that drives anarchism, which is to say the anarcho-.

Because, after all, we know that there are capitalists and proverbial

masters who accept transgender folks and folks of Color and gay folks

and women. All of these identifiable identities can be co-opted and

serve power. I posit here the necessity of the Black and trans,

synecdoches for what this chapter describes as “unhinged,” because they

name the anoriginal transitivity that radical gender theorizing has

deemed the revolutionary force that gives racialized Blackness and trans

genders over to what is often understood as radical politics. Black and

trans name the “revolutionary force” uncapturable by racial capitalism

and heteronormative cis patriarchy, and they are pushing us toward

explosions in ways of being, ways of organizing, and ways of living.[91]

…

It is useful to meditate a bit on two anarchist concepts: what have been

dubbed “anarchx-feminism” and “tranarchism.” The former,

anarchx-feminism, first makes a rhetorical move to distinguish women

from femmes, advancing femmes as the category of analysis, as “women”

too often presumes cisgender alignment and cannot hold those who express

themselves femininely yet do not have “women’s” or “female” bodies.

Again, the WhoreDykeBlackTransFeminist Network’s axiom that “women” is

an exclusionary category presents itself. Anarchx-feminists mobilize for

abolishing the hierarchical distinction between femmes and cis men,

leveling the playing field as it were. It is a way to organize socially

in a way that removes gendered hierarchies, a removal that is not

obsessed, as traditional anarcha-feminists have been, merely with “men”

and “women” but adds nuance to gendered expression, identification, and

comportment. As a social organizing principle, it must pervade all forms

of social life, including the private sphere.

Femmes must be granted complete autonomy over their own bodies,

according to anarchx-feminists, and be permitted to make decisions by

themselves and with other femmes if matters concern only femmes, and on

“equal footing” when concerning matters that bear on everyone.

Collective matters concerning everyone might include cohabitation and

communal dwellings, and individual or femme-specific matters might

include, as they say, “contraception and childbirth.” (We see here,

though, a problematic assumption and persistent conflation of femme with

those with the capacity to bear and birth children.) There is an

emphasis on both individual and collective fighting back against (cis)

male domination, ownership—over property and others’, specifically

femmes’, bodies—and repressive juridical impediments, which will all

contribute to achieving “femme’s [sic] economic and social autonomy and

independence.”[92]

Anarchx-feminism also finds it imperative to establish crisis centers

that address issues of gendered violence and livelihood, as well as

centers for child care and elderly care. It has a sustained focus on

study and discussion, reminiscent of feminist consciousness-raising

groups of the 1960s and ’70s, and on cultural activities that focus on

femme life. All of these, anarchx-feminists insist, must be run under

femmes’ own direction. Furthermore, the family unit, historically and

contemporarily patriarchal, “should be replaced by free associations

between people with all kind of genders; based on equal right to decide

for all parts and with respect for the individual person’s autonomy and

integrity.” Like anarchists past, the driving force is not to replace

the leaders of existing systems with women or femmes. Anarchx-feminism,

following in the vein of other radical feminists and anarchists, “does

not stand for femme power or femme prime ministers, it stands for

organization without power and without prime ministers.”[93]

In turn, tranarchism, a term coined by Elis L. Herman, gives nominative

testament to the convergences of transgender, or for this meditation

trans, and anarchism. Tranarchism’s critiques date back to classical

anarchists, but more saliently respond to 1970s (U.S.) progressivism and

sexual radicalism. For all the era’s radicality, there was still the

assumption, even within anarchist circles, of the immutability and

naturalness of the gender binary. The gains of the era for (an

essentialized, biologized notion of) women in the form of rape crisis

centers and women’s health collectives are monumental feats that should

of course be lauded. Anarchism’s “women’s movement,” too, contributed to

these gains and amplified the importance of women’s roles in bringing

about a new society. Within all of this, the broader women’s liberation

movement and anarcha-feminism, there was still a unification on the

basis of a shared womanhood and, more specifically, a genitally-defined

understanding of sex that had “The Patriarchy” as its sole adversary.

To “bring in” transgender issues and epistemologies to anarchism would

be reductive, if it only means that transgender people begin to take up

the theorizations of Kropotkin and Bakunin. Furthermore, though much

closer to what “tranarchism” might aim to be, it is not enough to say

that people of trans experience “[are] radical and anarchistic, if not

insurrectionary, in [their] embodiment.”[94] There is truth to this

insofar as to undergo a change, to whatever extent, in gender is to

transgress the purported immutability of gender. Transgender

embodiment—the limits and scope of which is to remain open and

unencumbered by criteria for sufficient transness—might always be

transgressive in some respect by virtue of its defiance of the binary

restrictions on gender.

But this can only be taken so far. Transgender embodiment is not in and

of itself an anarchic revolution. Herman takes issue with the belief

that “the” transgender body (which is and looks like what exactly?) is

“inherently revolutionary.” Such a belief is problematic on a number of

fronts. In Herman’s own words,

The proclamation that trans embodiment possesses innately anarchic

qualities, however, is problematic. The most obvious issue comes with

the need to define transgender, which is deliberately unspecific and

amorphous, as an expression or embodiment that always serves a single

purpose. Do the non-operative transsexual sex worker and the

post-mastectomy non-binary porn star possess the same potential (or

desire) to dismantle the state? Looking at intersections of identity and

oppression, the answer would probably be negative. Claiming that all

transgender bodies possess inherent insurrectionary potential places the

impetus upon transgender individuals to serve a revolutionary purpose,

without regard for their own safety, survival, or preference. This

perspective places the responsibility for critiquing and challenging

gender norms upon trans people alone; cisgender individuals are, then,

exempt from the expectation to use their genders for revolutionary

purpose. When examining the role of (trans)gender in

anti-authoritarianism, it is critical to remember that “anarchic” is an

adjective, not an equalizer.[95]

The issue here is monolithizing “transgender” as having one sole purpose

and thus one sole kind of body and bodily effect. To say that

“transgender embodiment” is itself transgressive presumes an epistemic

stranglehold on the mutinous, riotous refusal of a proper body that the

trans of transgender means in much of contemporary trans studies. This

presumption disallows transgender to be other than what it has been

defined-from-without as, and disallows different kinds of transnesses.

It also forces upon trans people the burden of transgressing gender and

thus having an interrogative relation to the gendered capitalist State.

To fix gender transgression in transgender embodiment (whatever one

defines this as) lets cisgender people off the hook, implying that they

do not need to transgress the State’s coercive gender impositions. As

such, this critique asserts that the anarchic is not to be rooted in

certain bodies that then bear the weight of taking on the State; rather,

anarchic must be adjectival, modificatory, a descriptor of a way of

relating to power and not an immutable claimed identity.

I will provide a meditation on the convergences of transness, as

prefixal, and Blackness in the next section, so here I want simply to

offer trans’s link to Blackness through the anarcho-. My concern is how

one bears a trans relationship to normativity, and specifically

normative gender, which is not merely the clothes one wears or the

inflection in one’s voice but a relative mobilization of subjective

gendered effect. To express a trans relationship to (gendered)

normativity is to socio-politically deploy one’s own gender as well as

gendered sociality in nonnormative, subversive ways that bring about a

different (un)gendered world. Those who bear a trans relationship to

normative gender absolutely include those who identify as and may be

identified as transgender and thus are subject to airport surveillance

and bodily violation, being fired from jobs without recourse for

redress, physical violence, and the like; it also, though, includes

those who may “be” cisgender yet operate through space in ways that

disrupt normative gendered assumption via interrogating the act of

gendering strangers, de-norming cisgender by making plain one’s pronouns

even when they are “obvious,” or undermining linear gendered assumptions

predicated on an asserted cisgender identity (that is, refusing the

coercive expectations of cisgender behavior and comportment even though

one might identify as cisgender).

In short, anarchism must exude a kind of transness inasmuch as gender’s

binaristic conception rests at the fundament of the State, and trans

epistemologies, lives, and discourses provide a template for anarchic

praxis, for getting outside and across and beyond—etymologically,

trans—the cisgender racial State.

…

When it is operating at its best, anarchism is tearing down the borders

of nation states, smashing the borders of capitalist control, and

transgressing all borders of oppression and authoritarianism. When

queer(ness) is operating at its best it is tearing down the borders of

gender, smashing the confines of compulsory monogamy, and transgressing

the moralism of sex and sexuality.

—Jason Lydon, “Tearing Down the Walls: Queerness, Anarchism and the

Prison Industrial Complex”

I have argued for what C. Riley Snorton calls the referential

overlapping of Blackness and transness in numerous places elsewhere in

my work.[96] That is to say, Blackness’s thrust as a paraontological—or

subjectivity in excess of an imposed ontology, a way of inhabiting

oneself in ways not beholden to State impositions of legible identity—as

well as its racialized history necessarily troubles and unfixes gender.

Those who have been Blackened cannot be contained in the symbolic order

of gender; the order of gender is anarchically obliterated by Blackness.

Gender here is understood as a historical, contingent mode of

socio-political comportment externally imposed upon bodies fixed into a

binary. Blackness both as a miasmic fugitive spirit and as a discernible

physiognomy has not abided this binary. Gender is predicated on

whiteness. We see this in the era of U.S. enslavement, in which “No

uniform or shared category of gender included the mistress and the

enslaved [or, white women and Black ‘women’]” because “black laboring

women troubled gender conventions.”[97] We see this in how, as Black

trans woman Shaadi Devereaux notes, Black women’s womanhood “is

inherently viewed as drag performance” and that the “assumption is

always that Black women are all imitating ‘true women’” and we usually

“overlook this in how we view what it means to be trans and cis…and who

has access to narratives of womanhood”;[98] we see it, in short, in how

“Blackness troubles gender. As non-sovereign and metapolitical,

Blackness makes for gender trouble.”[99] There is then a fundamental

inextricability between Blackness and transness as, too, a

metapolitical, disruptive force of binaristic, static gender.

Anarcho-Blackness indexes this in its refusal of the State and its

accouterments, which includes binary gender and imposed ontologies.

Reading Blackness into and as anarchism must engage the trans of the

matter. No Black anarchist organization or discourse currently available

gives any respectable, sustained meditation on the import of transgender

or nonnormative genders. Surely if one is looking for how to unravel all

hierarchies, race and gender chief among them, and surely if we

recognize how endemic race and gender—or more accurately, white

supremacy and cissexist heteropatriarchy—are to State capitalism, then

it bears acknowledgment that those who transgress and virtually destroy

the presumptions of these things should feature prominently. But no, one

sees almost no mention of those who are not cisgender, and barely a

mention of the very fact of trans existence. But if it is growing more

known that, to quote Saidiya Hartman, “the gender non-conformity of the

black community” is the axiom from which we begin Black liberatory work,

then it becomes imperative to deeply wrestle with how transness bears on

our conversations surrounding Blackness and, well, anything.[100]

Recognition of the interwovenness of Blackness and transness establishes

an anarchic understanding of gender through self-determination,

axiomatic in both transgender/gender nonnormative discourses and

discourses of Black life. In this context, I want to understand

self-determination as less a neoliberal rugged individualism and more as

a coalitional ethics that is attentive to the kind of violence gendering

does. In what sense, in other words, might we understand gender

self-determination as a delinking and extrication from the gender binary

that then gives us over to a more ethical sociality and relationality

toward one another—a mutual aid and ethics of care for one another by

way of a communal understanding of the “self”? In this way, we come to

recognize the denizens of this anarchic commune, the Blackness and

transness of those who live and choose to do life in this sociality, as

not a list of legible identities that grant access or exclusion.

As stated above, Blackness and transness have an intimate relationship.

They characterize more those who align with and inhabit the

philosophical and existential milieu of rebellion, deviance,

nonnormativity, and subversion of power; it is more a

meta-identification that is reluctant to conveniently take on identities

in place of doing the work of living and politicizing one’s subjectivity

via volatile principles and pointed political aims. This engenders a

more tactical combative modality in the face of capitalism. Because

capitalism is “depende[nt] on racial subsidies,” the Blackness of those

who exceed the category “Black,” for example, cultivates room for

alliances that racial capitalism cannot anticipate since “racial

differentiation is intrinsic to capitalist value-creation and financial

speculation.”[101] Indeed, capitalism has long co-opted epidermalized

Blackness into its fold; capitalism, to be frank, has caught on to that

game and continues to beat us at it. What I see as a kind of anarcho-

thread through Blackness and transness must be claimed by anyone seeking

to do the work. We must operate in other spaces, via other modalities of

thought; we must render Blackness and transness as an anarchic sashay

into another way of life.

My understanding of Blackness and transness stems from the way they act

as forces of dispersal and differentiation. Blackness is inflected in

and by transness (not Blackness is transness), a transness understood as

a refusal of circumscription and transparent arrival/destination (or

origin). Black and trans, as linked to movement, unfixation from

normatively legible physiognomy, and a general refusal bear an intimate

relationship and highlight that there can be no seamless partition

between them under a racialized and gendered world. This is Blackness’s

otherwise identification located in the interstices, frictional

relations, and rebellious communing with those we are not supposed to

relate with/to. This is a trans-inflected way of recomposing

subjectivities in the name of liberation from imposed captivity in

identificatory regimes, flight from what they told us we have to always

be. It is a trans Blackness that is an ante-anti-category, a preceding

and subverting predilection for opposing cohesive categorization.

The anarcho- of Black and trans subverts capitalistic ownership, opens

them up to para-possession, an unpropertied deployment and call to

coalitional fugitivity begotten by disaggregating it “from its

entrenchment with state interest, with property.”[102] Capitalist

tentacles are much less equipped to regulate purported strangers who

create an ensemble on the grounds of unanticipated coalitional

criteria—or non-criteria—and threaten to create treason. Changing and

expanding Black radical politics provides for new opportunities,

necessary opportunities, to contradict and undermine hegemonic forces.

All of this might lead to, in the provocative language of Joanna

Zylinska, “The End of the White Man.” In this section I have been

attempting to bring about the obliteration of the purportedly

impenetrable edifices that uphold white supremacy and cissexist

patriarchy. What such an attempt ultimately amounts to is the end of the

white man. This is not “[white] man-bashing.” Few would advocate such a

goal, as if this would eliminate the structures and histories that

pervade all of our lives. Such a goal would wrongly presume that white

supremacy and cissexist patriarchy are merely the product of individual

people committing biased acts. To precipitate the end of white men is an

apocalyptic, or anarchic, discourse that advances “an ethical opening

rather than solely…an existential threat,” an opening out into something

that radically departs from the current state (and State).[103] If we

live amid pervasive racial and gender capitalism, our anarchic yearning

must be for “a world before globalization and before neoliberal

capitalism,” which might be aptly read as and through Susan Stryker’s

“anarchic womb,” a trans and transitive primordiality that gives us over

to something non-categorical.[104] From the Blackness and transness of

an anarchic critique (of Western civilization, á la Cedric Robinson’s

definitional Black Radical Tradition) we are motivated to change that

which touts itself immutable. The devastation wrought by the capitalist

model that our globalized world now depends on requires rethinking from

the ambit of an anarcho-Blackness articulable through radical trans and

feminist critiques of sociality.

There can be no shortage of liberation if we will ourselves toward an

anarchism that demands justice and liberation for the most

marginalized—the Black and the trans. It is the current state of affairs

that disallows their liberation. Any anarchism interested in devastating

the State and its hierarchies must attend acutely to the margins where

the Black and woman and trans reside. It is the life and livability of

all, as anarchists purport, that is our concern, and that “all” will not

be adequately tended to if we remain in a position of objectivity, a

position that takes its cue from the vantage of white masculinity. So

often presumed to be parochial and particular, anarchist opposition to

the State and capitalism, coupled with racial and gender critiques—from

the purview of Blackness and transness, from Black feminism, from

anarcho-Blackness—is the perspective from which we gain the widest

vision of the task at hand.

So we seek the end of white men in order to think more broadly. A

commitment to dismantling all hierarchies and being concerned with all

oppressed people demands the dismantling of the ontological and

epistemological habitus of the White Man. To care for those of different

and variant gender expressions and desires means a disdain for those

discourses, systems, and subjectivities that instantiate the

impossibility (and, if shown to be possible, extermination) of

variations in gender identification. Such is epitomized by the subject

of the White Man, a subjectivity one tries to attain in order to come

into a particular kind of being rather than simply an ontological fact

about a certain demographic. More clearly, Zylinska puts it this way:

So, even though the “end of man” [and, embedded within it, an implicit

whiteness and cisness] may indeed signal the possible withering of a

particular form of white Christian masculine subjectivity as the

dominant orientation of our cultural and political discourses, it is

meant to read as a diagnosis of a political condition and a positing of

a political opportunity rather than as a psychological or biological

diagnosis of the extinction of a particular species. (It also needs to

be acknowledged that, structurally, there is nothing about the imaginary

reign of, say, women that would guarantee a fullness of society and a

happily ever after.)[105]

She is referring to a particular worldly orientation that foregrounds

white (Christian) masculinity, where this orientation is the lay of the

land that defines the State and social hierarchies. Disruption of this

begets a political and existential opportunity to explore alternative

possibilities of life—anarchic possibilities. The current political

schema is the result of the onslaught of white masculinity pervading how

we structure sociality. Thus Blackness and transness, as perversions or

torques of such an orientation spurned by white masculinity, provide a

kind of medicinal cure to the world in which we find ourselves. A focus

on transness as a radical critique of masculinity doesn’t pit particular

bodies against one another (since, as Zylinska notes, the reign of women

would not necessarily lead us in the right direction) but understands

them as ways of inhabiting social and political space. (White)

Masculinity has oriented us toward war, coercion, violence, force, and

the like; transness, as what Kai M. Green calls in the first instance “a

reorientation to orientation,” provides another way of (un)structuring

sociality.[106] It is this radical reorientation to which the prefixal

anarcho- refers, a departure from the normative, a normativity

characterized by the white masculinity of a hierarchical, coercive

State.

Perhaps, then, what we are striving for is another genre of life. What

we have now is one saturated with a stultifying violence. Looking to

other and otherwise ways of life being lived outside the State gives us

different genres of life and sociality. The Sylvia Wynter-esque “genre

of Man” that has structured both our world and how we relate to others

is a racialized and gendered violence that disallows—indeed,

instantiates the violent exclusion of—the validity of modes of life and

embodiment outside its constitutive whiteness and cis masculinity. The

“White Man” is an illusion that, per Wynter, “we no longer need” because

it “inter alia threaten[s] the livability of our species’ planetary

habitat.”[107] The Black and trans of our anarchic pursuits, the

anarcho-, is our guide “to remak[ing], consciously and collectively, the

new society in which our existential referent ‘we in the horizon of

humanity’”—those who mobilize the masterless and rulerless anarcho- of

the Black and trans of our ante- and anti-matter—“will all now

live.”[108]

Uncontrolled

Instead of eye-for-eye punishment, there should be restitution to the

victims, their families or society. No revenge, such as the death

penalty will bring a murder victim back, nor will long-term imprisonment

serve either justice or the protection of society. After all, prisons

are only human trashcans for those that society has discarded as

worthless. No sane and just society would adopt such a course. Society

makes criminals and must be responsible for their treatment. White

capitalist society is itself a crime, and is the greatest teacher of

corruption and violence.

—Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, Anarchism and the Black Revolution

Anarchism has long seen the establishment of an organized movement as a

necessity for bringing about an anarchist society. Direct action and

committed, sustained activism often manifest in organizations in order

to have a critical cadre of bodies willing to put in work for the

movement’s goals. As movement-oriented, or at least oriented toward

understanding the importance of collectives and communes with

substantive numbers to stave off political quashing, anarchism bears

deep affinities to Black queer and trans movements to bring about social

justice. Surely there have been many demographics who have organized in

order to change society, so movement orientation is not unique to Black

people. My point is that the Black Radical Tradition has consistently

rejected the seemingly stark divide between theory and practice,

refusing the false assumption that “one could separate the articulation

of ideas that would govern how we envision the future from actually

enacting that future.”[109] Anarchism, too, “has traditionally drawn

upon ideas of coherence between theory and practice,” which is to say

that doing theory is a critical praxis, that what we seek to engender in

the world on a material level is itself a profound theoretical

apparatus.[110]

Movement-oriented politics often orbit around the concept of domination.

They also, though, orbit around conceptions of world-making and

futurity—that is, not only the plights of the current moment but also

the world in which we envision ourselves after and in excess of the

plight. Radical feminist, queer, and Black liberationist movements from

the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) to Black Lives Matter

(BLM) to Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) all, because

of their resistance to domination and imagining of a radical futurity,

bear affinities with anarchism. In line with the recalibrating work of

the Black anarchism expressed in this text, one might argue that Black

movements like Black Power and the BPP—though at times, from some of

their more Marxist-Leninist perspectives, critical of anarchism

proper—are anarchic despite not having been affiliated with anarchism,

precisely because “Black anarchism did not originate within anarchism,

but external to it.”[111] The Black anarchism of, say, the Black

Panthers is one in which they “blended anarchist positions with their

revolutionary nationalism,” though there is a distinction to be made:

Black anarchists do not hold on to a nationalist conception of an

exclusionary, bordered State, as Marxist-Leninist Black Panthers

do.[112] Nationalism should be understood as anathema to anarchist

sentiments, and the Black anarchism of someone like Kuwasi Balagoon

seeks to get rid of borders: “it seems to me that Anarchy would have to

be anti-imperialist, that there’s no other ideology that refuses to

recognize borders,” he says in his July 28, 1984 letter from

prison.[113] The link between anarchism and Black Power/the Black

Panthers is given more strength by that fact that many of the key

figures in expressed Black anarchism—Ashanti Alston, Kuwasi Balagoon,

Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, Ojore Lutalo—were members of the Panthers.

Although it is crucial to note that these thinkers and activists, and

the organizations they were a part of, do not necessarily possess the

“right” conception of (Black) anarchism, they can be thought of as

instances of the work Blackness does to anarchism.

This concluding chapter takes aim at movement goals, such as abolition

and tending to the material needs of the most marginalized, to round out

what anarcho-Blackness can and has looked like. As I think explicitly

about abolition, I am using as its definition, simply, the political

strategy of eradicating rather than reforming systems, discourses, and

institutions that structure life and livability. These systems (e.g.

prisons, the gender binary, etc.) have at their foundation an ongoing

violence that masquerades as banal or, worse, natural and good.

Abolition, then, promotes a dismantling of these systems in search of

life and livability by other means not predicated on violence. In

meditating on abolition’s relationship to anarchism, STAR, and thinking

like an anarchist, I want to highlight the beautifully sporadic embrace

of free association, direct participation, and radical democracy (what

might also be termed non-hierarchical relationality); the emphasis on

consent rather than coercion, and on self- and communal “governance”

(or, a conception of organization); the advancement of direct action;

the advocacy for the dismantling of all hierarchies and expressed global

solidarity with all who are oppressed and subject to hierarchical

tyranny. In short, movements for Black and queer and trans liberation

are “indeed…radical movement[s] inspired by tenants [sic; tenets] of the

anarchist tradition often demonized by state and corporate power.”[114]

…

Prison, a social protection? What monstrous mind ever conceived such an

idea? Just as well say that health can be promoted by a widespread

contagion.

—Emma Goldman, “Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure”

The undercurrent of many contemporary, and even some not so

contemporary, social justice movements that carry out the Black Radical

Tradition is a marked abolitionism. Kropotkin—the poster-boy of

classical anarchism—himself expressed a clear desire to end

imprisonment, condemning carcerality’s dehumanizing tendencies,

advocating for education programs for the formerly incarcerated, and

firmly supporting the reintroduction of prison populations into general

society: in a nutshell, our boy Pyotr was an abolitionist. Abolitionism,

I want to argue, is fundamentally anarchic, not because avowed

anarchists argue for abolition in name but because abolitionism, with

its complete extrication from the State, from racial and gender

capitalism, and from carcerality, mobilizes the anarcho- I have argued

for throughout this text. The prefixal “anarcho-” describes a

world-making, a creative imaginative praxis reliant upon a pervasive un-

that erects as much, even more, than it destroys. Agreeing that

abolitionism is an anarchic modality brings to the fore an unaddressed

Blackness in anarchism inasmuch as it makes plain the historical

proximity of Blackness to abolitionism and thus anarchism; and it forces

a recognition of capitalism’s exploitative and extractive relationship

to “free” labor that bears a striking resemblance to the extractive and

exploitative relationship of anti-Black sociality to Blackness and Black

subjects.

Abolitionism is a visionary and political praxis and modality that

struggles against the regimes of capitalism, white supremacy,

heteronormative patriarchy, and cissexism. It is a daring rooted in a

Black liberatory history of maroons—Black Proto-anarchists, one might

say—“who dared to imagine their lives without shackles.”[115] The desire

to deshackle from any and all fetters imagines one’s being-in-the-world

as anarchic—no gods, no masters, the old saying goes. To deshackle

oneself marks a radical act of freedom in the broadest sense, a way of

living not in defiance but in refusal and subversion of the State. It is

imperative, as alluded to in previous chapters, to understand the State

not merely as an institutional entity; it is a relation. And more, the

State manifests an underlying logic of carcerality—which is to say, the

bedrock ground for intelligibility and, at a more fundamental level,

reality; logic as the very grammar by which things are expressible and

understandable and, indeed, possible. This forces many social relations

to depend on various mechanisms of confinement, punishment, capture, or

circumscription. Anarchism is a deshackling from capitalism and the

State and its attending conscripts; anarchism is a kind of abolitionism.

Like Dylan Rodriguez, I would argue that abolitionism “is inseparable

from its roots in (feminist, queer) Black liberation.” Black

liberation’s queer and feminist fundament is clarified in abolition’s

departure from the tenets of white and cis male supremacy, as they

uphold capitalism and carcerality. Logics of carcerality, by which I

mean the penchant to proliferate capture and expropriation along racist

and sexist axes, are embedded in racism and sexism via assumed ownership

over racialized and/or non-masculinely-gendered subjects,

circumscription of who is permitted to appear in public space,

regulation of movement and inhabitation of private space, and extraction

of surplus goods and resources (be it labor, sex, sexual labor, time,

etc.). In short, again following Rodriguez, abolition

interven[es] in patriarchal and masculinist constructions of

freedom/self-determination and obliterat[es] liberal-optimistic

paradigms of incrementalist, reformist social justice. Abolition, in its

radical totality, consists of constant, critical assessment of the

economic, ecological, political, cultural, and spiritual conditions for

the security and liberation of subjected peoples’ fullest collective

being and posits that revolutions of material, economic, and political

systems compose the necessary but not definitive or completed conditions

for abolitionist praxis.[116]

Substituting “anarchism” for “abolition” might yield nearly the exact

same outcomes.

Having parsed the connection between anarchism and abolitionism, and

conveyed the links of abolitionism to (queer and feminist) Blackness, it

is plain that there is a justifiable relation between anarchism and

(queer and feminist) Blackness. The utility in teasing, albeit briefly,

this relation is to provide a foundation for this chapter’s emphasis on

social movements and organizations. The people and organizations I will

detail below have as their basis abolition, broadly conceived. They

delineate abolition as more than mere negation; abolition is

characterized as radically imaginative and generative, creative and

world-building (again Bakunin’s anarchism rears here: “the passion for

destruction is a creative passion, too”). Abolitionism is a radical,

anti-State, “socially productive communal (and community-building)

practice.”[117] It is, as Uri Gordon details, politically

prefigurative—its means are consistent with its ends, performing the

kinds of politics and worlds it seeks for its ends.[118] The shared

commitments in abolitionism and anarchism are often cast as unrealistic,

too radical, or pipe-dreamy, but the castigations of realism and reform

and measure are in actuality rhetorical gestures to preserve hegemony.

Indeed, “Abolitionist politics is not about what is possible, but about

making the impossible a reality,” as Abolition writes in their

manifesto.[119] Of course, it is assumed by those proponents of

“realism” that we must have at least some people who are incarcerated.

Of course we must punish people who do egregious things, a world without

punishment as the operative measure being a ridiculous one. Abolitionism

and anarchism reject that “of course.”

…

The ungovernable, anarchic here and now harbors Black futures.

—Kara Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures

We are already doing anarchist politics, now, living in our coalitions

and communes that go by different names. Those ways of relating to one

another on different, anarchic grounds is the way we live, now, the

Black anarchism we shuffle toward—those Black futures Kara Keeling finds

harbored in the ungovernable and anarchic. There are people who have

lived, and are living, this life. I find some of those people in the

Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) precisely because it

foregrounded Black and Brown queer and trans life through anarchic

practices; I find some of those people in the long tradition of Black

organizations doing anarchic work. Hence, in this section I want to home

in on the movement politics of STAR and the longer durée of Black people

doing and thinking anarchic shit as examples of how feminist movements

that center Black queer and trans people display anarchic valences and

tendencies; indeed, how these organizations and people retool what

anarchism can mean and how it might circulate.

The mid-twentieth century is when Left politics really intensified.

Opposition to the Vietnam War, and civil rights, and Black Power, and

gay liberation, and women’s liberation all converged in the 1960s and

’70s to create an ethos of radicalism. They put forth a profound

sentiment that things needed to change. While they all expressed the

need for change differently, emphasizing different aspects of social

life and expressing disdain at times for the emphases of other

movements, they all nonetheless coalesced into a prevailing atmosphere

of Leftist radicalism and a departure from the status quo. A general

sense of anti-authoritarianism characterized this “New Left.” Members of

the Gay Liberation Front collaborated with the Young Lords, who

collaborated with the Black Panthers. There is a certain liberatory

logic that pervades these organizations, and while that logic was muted

and intensified in different ways, manifesting in some sexual liberation

organizations being racist and some racial liberation movements being

sexist for example, they all nonetheless are implementing anarchic

inflections, I contend. The anti-authoritarian spirit, albeit unevenly

realized and by no means universal, demanded full liberation for all

oppressed communities, and these liberation and Leftist politics had as

their aim the toppling of white supremacy’s racist power structure (as

the Black Panthers were fond of terming it) and “abolishing the

oppressive institutions that reinforced traditional sex roles

and…freeing individuals from the constraints of a sex/gender system that

locked them into mutually exclusive roles of homosexual/heterosexual and

feminine/masculine.”[120]

This coalitional drive navigates through the apogee of the anarcho-, as

its promiscuous and politically driven coming together rested on a

common desire to topple the state. And in this is a radically rewound

and remixed Blackness that concretizes Ashanti Alston’s inquiries:

How can we bring all these different strands together? How can we bring

in the Rastas? How can we bring in the people on the west coast who are

still fighting the government strip-mining of indigenous land? How can

we bring together all of these peoples to begin to create a vision of

America that is for all of us?

Oppositional thinking and oppositional risks are necessary. I think that

is very important right now and one of the reasons why I think anarchism

has so much potential to help us move forward. It is not asking of us to

dogmatically adhere to the founders of the tradition, but to be open to

whatever increases our democratic participation, our creativity, and our

happiness.[121]

And this effort to bring together, to organize and be-with one another

in anarchic assemblages that aim to bring down racial and gender

capitalism is, as the title of the source of the above quote illuminates

brilliantly, Ashanti Alston’s Black anarchism.

The politics of that era, with its increasing radicalism and deviation

from State imperatives, mirrored very closely the kind of politics found

in avowed anarchist organizations prior to the start of the Vietnam War.

In this vein, the mid-twentieth century’s eruptive counterculture of the

New Left might be described “not implausibly, as ‘the new anarchism’”

and as “anarchist in its deepest impulses.”[122]

The Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries was formed by Sylvia

Rivera, a Latinx trans drag queen, and Marsha P. Johnson, a Black trans

drag queen. Rivera and Johnson started STAR after feelings of

estrangement with the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and the Gay Activists

Alliance (GAA). GLF and GAA were not radical enough for Rivera and

Johnson, in part because of their refusal to combat the police, and

their lack of militancy with respect to the needs of those who were then

called poor street queens, or impoverished queer and trans houseless sex

workers in a contemporary lexicon. Following the Stonewall rebellions of

June 1969, Rivera joined gay rights organizations only to be treated

hostilely with transantagonism and racism. These organizations very

often “willingly replicated exclusionary, nationalist notions of good

citizenship,” valorizing the criteria of the State.[123] Importantly,

such a Statist outlook with respect to Rivera took the form of

“deploring her rude anarchism as inimical to order.”[124] Rivera was

uncompromising in her quest to help the most marginalized. She could not

abide order or exclusion; her politics and orientation toward life

always moved to include, not exclude, to increase participation in

decisions that mattered, not decrease it. STAR House became a shelter,

of sorts, for houseless youth, impoverished people of Color, street

queens, and others seeking community with people who have also been

marginalized. Rivera, and Johnson, resisted assimilation into mainstream

gay organizations that mimicked State operations of nation-building,

exclusion, hierarchy, and normativity (not to mention implicit white

supremacy and cisnormativity).

Beyond a basic commitment to survival, STAR could be primarily

characterized by defiance. STAR and its members were defiant as they

opposed numerous systems and discourses that sought to police and

discipline them as poor, as of Color, as queer, as trans, as queens, and

as sex workers. It is the fundamental operation of the State and

racial/gender capitalism to impose rigidity and order onto sociality,

quelling movement that deviates from the tenets they inscribe. The

violent normativity—which is to say, normativity as such—of centralized

and privatized atmospheric control that regulates sociality expunges

non-adherents to purported birth sex or the gender binary. Sex

assignation and demarcation within the gender binary is inherent to, and

compulsory under, the State. Thus STAR’s opposition to the State

manifested deeply in their expressions of transness. Put differently:

sufficient anarchism necessitates a trans relation to the State.

As well, STAR expressly demonstrated the pervasiveness of mutual

caregiving in trans communities among trans and nonbinary people,

sharing not only food but tips for survival, ways to move throughout the

city, and methods to navigate the terrain of their identities. Rivera

and Johnson practiced anarchism in excess of the name; they practiced

the propelling anarcho-, bringing to bear on their caregiving the

importance of racialized and gendered (specifically, trans and

nonbinary) subjectivity. The “STAR House kids,” as Rivera and Johnson’s

mentees were called, were gifted Rivera and Johnson’s love. Their

“primary goal was to help kids on the street find food, clothing, and a

place to live” along with eventually “establishing a school for kids

who’d never learned to read and write because their formal education was

interrupted because of discrimination and bullying.”[125] This is

nothing but anarchic love. This is what anarcho- looks like,

irrespective of a political affiliation.

STAR wanted something akin to anarchism; or, they lived and moved

through the world propelled by the anarcho-. As a concluding testament,

we might turn to the ninth point in the list of demands that STAR

published in 1971. It reads: “We want a revolutionary peoples’

government, where transvestites, street people, women, homosexuals,

Puerto Ricans, Indians, and all oppressed people are free, and not

fucked over by this government who treat us like the scum of the earth

and kill us off like flies, one by one, and throw us into jail to

rot.”[126] What they envisioned from the experiential and social

modality of their transness, their queerness, their Blackness and

Latinxness was a different kind of “government.” Surely, an anarchist

might question the yearning for any government at all, as governments

operate through the means and intentions of the State. It could be

argued, however, that STAR’s vision is not “governmental” in this sense,

that “a revolutionary people’s government” is a radically re-understood

approach to governance that bears few, if any, of the filigree and

organs of a government in the traditional sense. For houseless, trans,

gay, and otherwise oppressed people of Color to be free in fact

necessitates the tearing down of “government,” thus the revolutionary

people’s government is no government at all—it is, in a slant and

perhaps admittedly an insufficient way, anarchist society. Revolutionary

people’s government, with its attention to the most marginalized and

care work for oppressed people, is a proto-nongovernmental government,

one in which the organization of care, aid, participation, and

non-authority is named under the nominative “revolutionary people’s

government.” STAR is making a key distinction between this government,

the one that fucks people over and treats them like scum, and a

different kind of government, which might simply be an organizational

method or characterization of modes of life that arise in the

jettisoning of “this government.” “This government” is the State;

“revolutionary people’s government” is anarchism, it is anarchy.

…

“In an Anarchist society,” writes Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, “prisons would

be done away with, along with courts and police…and be replaced with

community-run programs and centers interested solely with human

regeneration and social training, rather than custodial supervision in

a[n] inhuman lockup.”[127] This eradication of prisons need not be a

one-and-done gesture, that is, the razing of all prisons in one fell

swoop. Abolition, to be sure, is not interested in mere reform and holds

in contempt those who seek modest proposals such as having some prisons

for the really bad apples. Abolition is not about that life. At the same

time, it is acknowledged that there are steps toward abolition; there

are, in other words, things to be done between now and the dismantling

of all prisons, and the things done in the interim may not have the look

of complete abolition but are nonetheless in service of that end. In

other words, I want to shy ever so modestly away from political purity

as a requisite for affiliation; anarchism, I want to maintain, holds the

capacity for “capitulations” without denigrating such efforts as

characteristic of a person’s or organization’s entire enterprise.

In our particular moment, then, Black anarchism can be found—or

sometimes be glimpsed—in movements like that of BLM, or Anarchist People

of Color, or Critical Resistance, or the Audre Lorde Project, and in a

range of other formal and informal groupings. The point I want to make

is twofold: that organizations catering specifically to, and arising

from, people who experience the forces surrounding Blackness are doing

anarchic work without needing to affix the label to their mastheads.

There are organizations that center Blackness that, perhaps by virtue of

centering Blackness, politicize themselves anarchically. If they are

centering Blackness as larger radical movements, they are given the

opportunity to think like anarchists. To think like an anarchist is the

aim rather than to hunker down in an ontologized “being” that one

considers politically sufficient. To think like an anarchist, and thus

to come into performative being by way of such thinking, is the

propulsion of the anarcho-. Second, there is already (implicitly)

anarchist work being done by people and movements that center Blackness,

work that does not concede to a parochial, narrowly identitarian or

ontological understanding of the “Black” in their Black anarchism. For

these groups and individuals, Blackness is a demand, a critical

modality, one in which a racialized situatedness inflects a broader

concern about forces of taxonomy and how to subvert them, for racialized

ontologies imposed from without are a prominent form of taxonomizing

that indexes the more central concern of subverting taxonomizing

gestures writ large—taxonomizing gestures that might be described, in

other words, as authority.

The paths forward are many. To get anywhere, though, I think they will

require that we understand, cultivate, and nurture the inherent,

rhizomatic anarcho- within Blackness and Blackness within the anarcho-.

Intentionally and explicitly. As Blackness has historically sought

political concretization, there have been many false starts and

dead-ends, however beautiful and however much they have taught us: from

hierarchical forms of Marxist-Leninism and Maoism in the 1960s and ’70s,

through various strategies of compromise and co-optation that have led

to today’s failed attempts to squeeze the anarchic vastness of Blackness

into the straitjacket of the Democratic Party (and partisan political

shuffling in general).

But, as with the shortcomings of classical anarchism, let’s not waste

time with condemnation, with detailing the failings of those who came

before. The swinging door of Blackness is accommodating and generous. It

has no bouncer and it looks to the future without wallowing in the past

or present missteps of potential allies, let alone siblings in the

struggle—comrades. To meet that future, I am saying that we must allow

ourselves to be permeated by the anarcho-. What this looks like—well, no

one can say. But, then, what can we say?

Blackness demands abolition. Anarchism is abolition. This reality has

always been hidden right where we can see it, if we look from the right

angle, if we do the work to tease it out. But what might it look like if

we did more than tease? What would it look like to actually build with

the destructive, abolitionist material of anarcho-Blackness? One

hesitates to offer blueprints for something that cannot be restrained,

so let’s consider some impressions, unhinged and uncontrolled flights of

fancy; let’s consider.

An Anarcho-Blackness Manifesto

We must not prescribe, for prescriptions skew too rigidly, too

masterfully. Anarcho-Blackness does not seek rigidity and definitiveness

even in its definitional folds. It prefers instead an openness to

possibilities; it prefers what ifs, perhapses, possibles, and maybes.

Too many to name but, as a start...

What if anarcho-Blackness moved toward radical self-determination

whereby we become, to ourselves and others, precisely what affirms our

subjectivity, allowing us to live in this moment unhindered by given

scripts. This is a self-determination unconcerned with individuated

identity, discrete and singular; it is, rather, the ethical comportment

toward proliferating unrecognized forms of life. That is our aim: we

seek to allow others and non-persons and un-people and impossible people

and no ones—and those of us living by normative subjectivities because

we believed they were all we had—to live. What we are cannot be fixed.

We are becoming.

Or, perhaps the scribbles on the perforated leaflets of Black anarchism

invite not rights, which will continually have us beholden to a State

apparatus, but ethics, modalities of inter- and intrarelation. We must

encourage different ways of being-together, opening our homes to those

who need them without charging rent, opening the park or the rooftops to

those who wish to sleep outdoors under the stars without being

disturbed, opening the abandoned houses down the way where squatters

become instead stewards of the space because it is now their home. All

because what it means to be a society, a commune, a swarm, a

togetherness is to live in the groove of the anarcho-: needing nothing

but wanting to share; answering to no one but responding to all. Our

sociality needs no permission and we express it in defiance of all laws

of property and propriety.

Further still, how might it possibly benefit our world if there was

medical treatment on demand, treatments that span the common cold to

gender confirmation surgeries to therapy. And, we must note, the abrupt

cessation of medical “treatments” that coercively alter intersexed

newborn genitals, and the cessation of psychological evaluations for

gender transition. The cessation, too, of medico-juridical,

State-regulated requirements for identity document changes. The

cessation of public and private regulation of appearance, of social

comportment, of neurotypicality, of sartorial expression. Our

bodies/minds/desires refuse State, or any other, regulation.

And maybe it is imperative for us to demand free education for all, no

educational resources withheld based on zip code, no more disciplinary

pedagogical habits (inclusive of all things from metal detectors to

grades). No child, teen, or adult will go to school hungry. We educate

for freedom, as freedom.

And abolish the police. Abolish prisons. Abolish the gender binary. Full

stop.

We offer dances of thought, possibilities for how you, who hold this

text in your hands, and those who your hands guide and nurture and build

with, might go out into the world you find yourself in and begin, or

continue, to manifest the fact that we are not yet broken. We are not

subdued at the present time and are still here loving others, loving

ourselves, loving those who may not yet be able to appear, and yes,

loving those who have orchestrated this mess. It is a multifaceted love,

caressing some while slapping the shit out of others. We want you, yes

you, are you listening? We want you to demand better by planting a

garden and calling out white supremacist patriarchal

cisheteropatriarchy; demand better by asking comrades and accomplices

“You good?” and punching Nazis; demand better by opening the door for

the many-and-non-gendered kinfolk who you’ve just met for the first time

and literally stealing from universities and jails and corporations. Do

what you can, do all you can, where you’re at right now and wherever

else you might end up.

[1] Black Rose Anarchist Federation, “Introduction,” in Black Anarchism:

A Reader, 2016, 2,

www.blackrosefed.org

[2] Dana M. Williams, “Black Panther Radical Factionalization and the

Development of Black Anarchism,” Journal of Black Studies 46, no. 7

(October 2015): 694,

doi.org

. Emphasis in original.

[3] Kuwasi Balagoon, A Soldier’s Story: Revolutionary Writings by a New

Afrikan Anarchist, ed. Karl Kersplebedeb and Matt Meyer (Oakland: PM

Press, 2019), 158.

[4] See Carl Levy, “Social Histories of Anarchism,” Journal for the

Study of Radicalism 4, no. 2 (2010): 1–44,

doi.org

[5] It bears mentioning that an anarchist like William Godwin, for

example, was, as his 1795 Considerations signature describes him, “a

lover of order.” His order was one that he felt could only be achieved

by anarchy, a society that was free yet ordered. I want to embrace the

disorder, however, as order necessitates a particular adherence to a

preordained structure, itself a normative—and hence violent,

circumscriptive—ideal. I am not faulting Godwin necessarily. After all,

he is writing about a society that is still put together, as it were,

despite the lack of government and authority. I am, though, parting with

the implicit buttressing of an ideal normality that is embedded within a

conception of order.

[6] Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, trans. Marshall

Shatz (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 178.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Emma Goldman, “Anarchism: What It Really Stands For,” in Anarchism

and Other Essays (New York: Dover, 1969), 49.

[9] Saidiya Hartman, “The Terrible Beauty of the Slum,” Brick: A

Literary Journal, July 28, 2017,

brickmag.com

; William C. Anderson and Zoé Samudzi, As Black as Resistance: Finding

the Conditions for Liberation (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018), 60. There is

a notable difference, too, between Anarchy and Anarchism. Anarchy is

often used as a synonym for chaos and disorder, a purely negative

construal, whereas anarchism is defined as a positivized doctrine that

does not do away completely with social order, but recalibrates order

without government and from the bottom up.

[10] Nikhil Pal Singh, “On Race, Violence, and So-Called Primitive

Accumulation,” Social Text 34, no. 3 (September 1, 2016): 27–50,

doi:10.1215/01642472-3607564. Singh reveals how Marx’s analysis of

capitalism as a “veiled slavery” understands it as predicated on an

intrinsic racial differentiation—“a directly violent, and yet also

typically flexible and fungible mode of ascription” (31)—and on the

theft of indigenous land and the “hunting of black-skins” (33).

Forcefully, Singh writes that the division capitalism makes between

productive humans and disposable humans “is mediated by the shifting

productions of race as a logic of depreciation linked to (a)

proletarianization as a condition of ‘wageless life’—the norm of

capitalism insofar as it produces radical market dependency and surplus

labor—and (b) the regular application of force and violence within those

parts of the social that subsequently have no part” (39).

[11] See Christopher R. Williams and Bruce A. Arrigo, “Anarchaos and

Order: On the Emergence of Social Justice,” Theoretical Criminology 5,

no. 2 (May 2001): 223–52,

doi.org

[12] Black Rose Anarchist Federation, Black Anarchism: A Reader, 2.

[13] Ashanti Alston, “Black Anarchism,” Perspectives on Anarchist Theory

(Spring 2004): 7. This is the transcript of a talk given at Hunter

College on October 24, 2003. Also available at

black-ink.info

[14] Ibid, 8.

[15] Ibid, 7–8.

[16] C.W.E. Bigsby, “The Divided Mind of James Baldwin,” Journal of

American Studies 13, no. 3 (December 1979): 327,

doi.org

[17] “Black Feminist Anarchism & Leftist Neglect of the African

Continent with Zoé Samudzi,” Millennials Are Killing Capitalism podcast,

October 24, 2017. Transcript available at

libcom.org

[18] Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning

& Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 20.

[19] Ibid, 42.

[20] Invisible Committee, Now, trans. Robert Hurley (South Pasadena, CA:

Semiotext[e], 2017), 76.

[21] Fred Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh),”

South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 4 (Fall 2013): 739. I must also note

that this line of argumentation is being further fleshed out in Jack

Halberstam’s work on anarchism and wildness.

[22] Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 38.

[23] Julietta Singh, “Errands for the Wild,” South Atlantic Quarterly

117, no. 3 (July 2018): 567–80,

doi.org

[24] Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village

of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian

and Gay Studies 1, no. 3 (June 1, 1994): 237–54,

doi.org

; Jacques Derrida, “Some Statements and Truisms About Neo-Logisms,

Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seismisms,” in The

States of “Theory”: History, Art, and Critical Discourse, ed. David

Carroll (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 80; Hortense J.

Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,”

Diacritics 17, no. 2 (July 1, 1987): 80,

doi.org

[25] Cathy Levine, “The Tyranny of Tyranny,” in Quiet Rumours, ed. Dark

Star Collective (Oakland: AK Press, 2012), 32. Originally published in

Black Rose, Issue 1, 1979.

[26] Michel Foucault, “What is critique?” in The Politics of Truth, ed.

S. Lotringer (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2007), 45.

[27] Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 47.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Jack Halberstam, “Go Gaga: Anarchy, Chaos, and the Wild,” Social

Text 31, no. 3 (116) (September 1, 2013): 130,

doi.org

. Emphasis added.

[30] Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism

(London/New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), xiii. To the anarchists’

complete rejection of the State, Marshall contrasts the “libertarians”

who “take liberty to be a supreme value and would like to limit the

powers of government to a minimum compatible with security.” Black

anarchism is clearly more akin to the former; it is fixated on freedom

or liberation—rather than a liberty that is, to my mind, dependent on a

rights-based juridical bestowal. However, moving beyond classical

anarchist concerns, it is deeply skeptical of the racialized and

gendered tenor of “security” inasmuch as to be secure is often to be

removed from proximity of the Black and queer and trans. One cannot

beatify security when, in seeking the anarchic ground, one necessarily

traverses “an unsafe neighborhood” (Moten and Harney, The Undercommons,

28).

[31] Quoted in Marshall, Demanding the Impossible, 1.

[32] Lisa Guenther, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its

Afterlives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 61. A

similar sentiment is expressed by Emma Goldman when she writes of the

ethicality of purported criminal acts: “it is ethical in the best sense,

since it helps society to get rid of its worst foe, the most detrimental

factor of social life. Sabotage is mainly concerned with obstructing, by

every possible method, the regular process of production, thereby

demonstrating the determination of the workers to give according to what

they receive, and no more”: Emma Goldman, Syndicalism: The Modern Menace

to Capitalism (New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1913), 9.

[33] W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of

the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy

in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1935), 23.

[34] Invisible Committee, Now, 76.

[35] H.L.T. Quan, “Geniuses of Resistance: Feminist Consciousness and

the Black Radical Tradition,” Race & Class 47, no. 2 (October 2005): 47,

39,

doi.org

; see also Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin, eds., Futures of Black

Radicalism (New York: Verso, 2017).

[36] Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 28.

[37]

J. Kameron Carter and Sarah Jane Cervenak, “Black Ether,” CR: The New

Centennial Review 16, no. 2 (2016): 210.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Ibid, 211.

[40] Ibid, 219.

[41] See Sarah Jane Cervenak and J. Kameron Carter, “Untitled and

Outdoors: Thinking with Saidiya Hartman,” Women & Performance: A Journal

of Feminist Theory 27, no. 1 (January 2, 2017): 46,

doi.org

[42] Anderson and Samudzi, As Black As Resistance, 13.

[43] Errata: A serious anarcha-feminism must also be Black, otherwise it

is a question of white, solipsistic half-anarchism, and not real

anarchism. (Addendum: I do not presume to know what “real” means in

“real anarchism.”)

[44] The Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,”

Women’s Studies Quarterly 42, no. 3/4 (2014): 274.

[45] Jennifer C. Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined: After

Intersectionality (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 5. Nash, like

me, does not concede that Black feminism is the sole province of Black

women. In her cogent account, “it is the ongoing conception that black

feminism is the exclusive territory of black women that traps and limits

black feminists and black women academics who continue to be conscripted

into performing and embodying their intellectual investments” (5). We

can also turn to Anderson and Samudzi in this regard, who note in As

Black As Resistance, “There are many politicians and state operatives of

color, Black and otherwise, working for white supremacy. Diversity in

the seats of power will not solve our problems. Simply because someone

shares race, gender, or another aspect of identity does not guarantee

loyalty or that they will act in the best interests of Black

communities” (13).

[46] Nash, Black Feminism, 26.

[47] Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” 274.

[48] Ibid.

[49] Anonymous, Anarchism, A History of Anti-Racism (The Anarchist

Library, n.d.), 3,

theanarchistlibrary.org

; Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” 274.

[50] Keeanga-Yamahta Taylor, How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the

Combahee River Collective (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 11.

[51] Nancy Fraser, Cinzia Arruzza, and Tithi Bhattacharya, Feminism for

the 99% (London: Verso, 2019), 13.

[52] George Woodcock, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: A Biography (Montréal:

Black Rose Books, 1987), 34.

[53] Sharif Gemie put this clearly in his 1996 article “Anarchism and

Feminism: A Historical Survey” in Women’s History Review 5, no. 3

(September 1, 1996), 418: “the anarchists, so proud of their

anti-authoritarianism, of their skeptical analysis of power structures,

of their real ability to challenge the dominant political cultures of

the nineteenth century, were yet so blind to the existence of

gender-based tyrannies.”

[54] See Sharif Gemie, “Anarchism and Feminism” Women’s History Review

5, no. 3 (September 1, 1996).

[55] Ibid, 437.

[56] Peggy Kornegger, “Anarchism: The Feminist Connection,” in Quiet

Rumours: An Anarcha-Feminist Reader, ed. Dark Star Collective (Oakland:

AK Press/Dark Star, 2012), 31.

[57] Fionnghuala Nic Roibeaird, “A Basic Introduction to Anarcha

Feminism,” Workers Solidarity Movement website, March 4, 2015,

www.wsm.ie

[58] Willie J. Harrell Jr, “‘I Am an Anarchist’: The Social Anarchism of

Lucy E. Parsons,” Journal of International Women’s Studies 13, no. 1

(2012): 2.

[59] Ibid., 11.

[60] Ibid.

[61] Quoted in ibid, 13.

[62] Lucy Parsons, “Speech to the IWW in 1905,” in A Lifelong Anarchist!

Selected Words and Writings of Lucy Parsons, ed. T.S. Greer (Colorado

Springs: Ignacio Hills Press, 2010), 17.

[63] Put simply, to say that the economic or wage slavery of white women

is the same kind of slavery that Black peoples in the antebellum South

endured confuses a mutable condition with an immutable ontology,

according to Wilderson’s argument. See Frank Wilderson III, “The Ruse of

Analogy,” in Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S.

Antagonisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

[64] Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, Anarchism and the Black Revolution, PDF, 22.

Originally published in 1993. Available at

theanarchistlibrary.org

[65] Detailed in Jacqueline Jones, Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and

Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical (New York: Basic Books, 2017).

See specifically page 56.

[66] Lucy Parsons, “The Negro: Let Him Leave Politics to the Politician

and Prayers to the Preacher,” in Lucy Parsons: Freedom, Equality and

Solidarity ed. G. Aherns. (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2004), 54.

[67] See Cinzia Arruzza, “Of What Is Anarcha-Feminism the Name?,” in The

Anarchist Turn, eds., Jacob Blumenfeld, Chiara Bottici, and Simon

Critchley (London: Pluto Press, 2013), 111–24.

[68] SoleCast, “Solecast: An Interview with Zoe Samudzi on ‘As Black As

Resistance,’” It’s Going Down blog, August 25, 2018,

itsgoingdown.org

[69] See FoxAlive, Zoé Samudzi—On A Black Feminist Anarchism (OC

Anarchist Bookfair 2017), video, accessed June 21, 2019,

www.youtube.com

[70] Mikhail Bakunin, “Solidarity in Liberty: The Workers’ Path to

Freedom,” in Bakunin’s Writings, ed. Guy A. Aldred (Indore, India:

Modern Publishers, 1947), 20. Available at

dwardmac.pitzer.edu

[71] Hillary Lazar, “Until All Are Free: Black Feminism, Anarchism, and

Interlocking Oppression,” IAS blog, December 16, 2016,

anarchiststudies.org

[72] “Black Feminist Anarchism.”

[73] Ibid.

[74] Fraser, Arruzza, and Bhattacharya, Feminism for the 99%, 8, 20–21.

Emphasis in original.

[75] “Black Feminist Anarchism.”

[76] Ibid.

[77] Saidiya V. Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate

Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019),

230.

[78] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism

and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1987), 7, 199, 216.

[79] Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, 62.

[80] Ibid, 87.

[81] Ibid.

[82] Ibid.

[83] Ibid, 230.

[84] Ibid.

[85] Ibid, 231.

[86] Ibid, 234–35.

[87] Cheryl Clarke, “But Some of Us Are Brave and the Transformation of

the Academy: Transformation?,” Signs 35, no. 4 (2010): 786–87,

doi.org

[88] I am drawing on a number of thinkers, namely C. Riley Snorton,

Denise Riley, Judith Butler, and Stacy/Sally Darity. Snorton, in Black

on Both Sides: a Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 2017), argues that the “question of sex”

is always imbricated with gendering practices and asserts that “gender

socially constructs sex,” a fact highlighted by the position of

Blackness with respect to its troubling of gender (33). Riley and Butler

in turn take the position of noting that, following Riley, sex has a

history, that sex is always a fluctuating state of ontology without a

naturalized bedrock (New Formations no. 1 [Spring 1987]). In terms of

Butler’s theorizing in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of

“Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), sex is a regulatory ideal that is

subject to a process of materialization rather than simply being

materiality. This makes sex “not simply what one has, or a static

description of what one is” (xii). Sex, in short, is consumed by the

various mediating vagaries of socio-historical life, providing no access

to an untouched, “natural” sex. As Butler notes, “If gender is the

social construction of sex, and if there is no access to this ‘sex’

except by means of its construction, then it appears not only that sex

is absorbed by gender, but that ‘sex’ becomes something like a fiction,

perhaps a fantasy, retroactively installed at a prelinguistic site to

which there is no direct access” (xv). Lastly, Stacy/Sally Darity, from

a queer anarcha-feminist perspective, believes that the sex binary is

itself gendered. Stacy/Sally Darity, “Anarcha-Feminism and the Newer

‘Woman Question,’” in Quiet Rumours: An Anarcha-Feminist Reader

(Oakland: AK Press, 2012).

[89] Che Gossett, “Entanglement: Racial Capitalism, Animality and

Abolition,” presentation at “What Time Is It on the Clock of the World:

International Festival on Feminism and Public Space,” Stadtkurator in

Hamburg, May 5^(th), 2016. Video available at

vimeo.com

[90] The WhoreDykeBlackTransFeminist Network, “Manifesto for the

Trans-Feminist Insurrection,” Anarcha Library blog, October 20, 2010,

anarchalibrary.blogspot.com

[91] Dark Star Collective, Quiet Rumours, 14; see also C. Riley Snorton,

Black on Both Sides; and C. Colebrook, “What Is It Like to Be a Human?,”

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 2, no. 2 (January 1, 2015): 227–43,

doi.org

[92] New York City Anarchist Book Fair Collective, “Anarchx-Feminist

Manifesto,” New York City Anarchist Book Fair website,

anarchistbookfair.net

[93] Ibid.

[94] Jerimarie Liesegang, “Tyranny of the State and Trans Liberation,”

Queering Anarchism: Addressing and Undressing Power and Desire (Oakland:

AK Press, 2012), 97.

[95] Elis L. Herman, “Tranarchism: Transgender Embodiment and

Destabilization of the State,” Contemporary Justice Review 18, no. 1

(January 2, 2015): 80,

doi.org

[96] See Snorton, Black on Both Sides; Marquis Bey, “The Trans*-Ness of

Blackness, the Blackness of Trans*-Ness,” TSQ: Transgender Studies

Quarterly 4, no. 2 (May 2017): 275–95,

doi.org

; Marquis Bey, “The Shape of Angels’ Teeth: Toward a Blacktransfeminist

Thought,” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 5, no. 3, Black

Feminist Thought Special Issue (2016): 33–54; Kai M. Green and Marquis

Bey, “Where Black Feminist Thought and Trans* Feminism Meet: A

Conversation,” Souls 19, no. 4 (October 2, 2017): 438–54,

doi.org

; and Marquis Bey, Them Goon Rules: Fugitive Essays on Radical Black

Feminism (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2019).

[97] Saidiya Hartman, “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s

Labors,” Souls 18, no. 1 (March 14, 2016): 169–70,

doi.org

[98] Shaadi Devereaux, “Rollersets & Realness: Black Womanhood Defined

as Drag Performance,” Black Girl Dangerous blog, July 24, 2014,

www.bgdblog.org

[99] Che Gossett, “Žižek’s Trans/Gender Trouble,” Los Angeles Review of

Books, September 13, 2016,

lareviewofbooks.org

!

[100] Hartman, “The Belly of the World,” 169.

[101] Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois

(Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 179. I read Mbembe posing a

critique here in line with mine, namely that fixation on and investment

in “racial subsidies,” or racial categorizations, are the product of

capitalism and subject to its aims of control; Johnson and Lubin,

Futures of Black Radicalism, 44.

[102] Carter and Cervenak, “Black Ether,” 219.

[103] Joanna Zylinska, The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 7.

[104] Ibid, 40; Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above

the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” GLQ: A Journal

of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1, no. 3 (June 1, 1994): 241,

doi.org

[105] Zylinska, The End of Man, 46.

[106] Kai M. Green, “Troubling the Waters: Mobilizing a Trans*

Analytic,” in No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies, ed.

E. Patrick Johnson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 67.

[107] Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Found: Towards the Autopoetic

Turn/Overturn, Its Autonomy of Human Agency and Extraterritoriality of

(Self-)Cognition,” in Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in

Critical Epistemology, eds. Jason R. Ambroise and Sabine Bröck-Sallah

(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 245.

[108] Ibid.

[109] Joshua Myers, “Lecture Notes: Ontologically Total,” Speaktomekhet

blog, September 19, 2017,

speaktomekhet.wordpress.com

[110] Richard J. White, Simon Springer, and Marcelo Lopes de Souza,

eds., The Practice of Freedom: Anarchism, Geography, and the Spirit of

Revolt (New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016), 2.

[111] Dana M. Williams, “Black Panther Radical Factionalization,” 679.

[112] Ibid.

[113] Quoted in ibid, 679.

[114] Joaquin A. Pedroso, “Black Lives Matter or, How to Think Like an

Anarchist,” Class, Race, and Corporate Power 4, no. 2 (2016).

[115] Patrisse Cullors, “Abolition And Reparations: Histories of

Resistance, Transformative Justice, and Accountability,” Harvard Law

Review 132 (2019): 1685.

[116] Dylan Rodriguez, “Abolition As Praxis of Human Being: A Foreword,”

Harvard Law Review 132 (2019): 1578–79.

[117] Ibid, 1576.

[118] See Uri Gordon, “Prefigurative Politics between Ethical Practice

and Absent Promise,” Political Studies 66, no. 2 (2018): 521–37.

[119] “Manifesto for Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics,”

Abolition blog, accessed January 18, 2020,

abolitionjournal.org

. They go on to write: “Ending slavery appeared to be an impossible

challenge for Sojourner Truth, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, John Brown,

Harriet Tubman, and others, and yet they struggled for it anyway. Today

we seek to abolish a number of seemingly immortal institutions, drawing

inspiration from those who have sought the abolition of all systems of

domination, exploitation, and oppression—from Jim Crow laws and prisons

to patriarchy and capitalism.... Recognizing that the institutions we

fight against are both interconnected and unique, we refuse to take an

easy path of reveling in abstract ideals while accepting mere reforms in

practice. Instead, we seek to understand the specific power dynamics

within and between these systems so we can make the impossible possible;

so we can bring the entire monstrosity down.”

[120] Jerimarie Liesengang, “Tyranny of the State and Trans Liberation,”

93–94.

[121] Ashanti Alston, “Black Anarchism,” 8.

[122] Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible, 542–43; Mitchell

Goodman, “Introduction,” in The Movement Towards a New America: The

Beginnings of a Long Revolution (New York: Knopf; 1970), vii (cited in

Marshall). This is not to say, as Marshall cautions, that all Leftists

in the mid-twentieth century could be rightly subsumed under the ambit

of anarchism. C. Wright Mills “merely looked for reforms within a more

enlightened form of capitalism” and many New Left leaders “rarely

challenged the fundamental premises of late capitalist society.” Too,

the Black Panthers adhered largely to the Marxism of Mao and Frantz

Fanon, a Marxism that sought to maintain (though in a reformed way) the

State (542).

[123] Gabriel Mayora, “Her Stonewall Legend: The Fictionalization of

Sylvia Rivera in Nigel Finch’s Stonewall,” Centro Journal 30, no. 2

(2018): 461.

[124] Martin B. Duberman, Stonewall (New York: Dutton, 1993), 236.

[125] Susan Stryker, Transgender History (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2008),

86–87.

[126] Quoted in Stephen L. Cohen, The Gay Liberation Movement in New

York: “An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail,” (New York: Routledge, 2008), 37.

[127] Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, Anarchism and the Black Revolution (The

Anarchist Library, 1993), 37.