Catgirls Book Club ~ lectures pour catgirls anarchistes ~♥

We’re here to speak on the culture of black anarchism being discussed in some previous report backs. Very insightful and meaningful report backs but measuring the locality of Black anarchism seems to be a feat that has been left up to the petty bourgeois and/or biracial anarchists who either belong to and/or have proximity to the very same white sub-cultural anarchic spaces they critique and therefore have a very limited understanding concerning historical consciousness and relevancy of the Black Radical Tradition. They’re deeply entrenched in and intimate with the culture that seeps from the white anarchist scene. And they’re correct; the “baggage of the dominant social order is heavy,” but some black anarchists carry the baggage in a very fashionable way because of the proximity to power and access it provides them or they just genuinely love fucking on white people. Shid. Do you; but stop defining the black anarchist scene through the lens of your own experience and/or sympathy for whiteness and/or white anarchists.

Fuck the authoritarians. They’re enemies at all times. Fuck the Black non-profiteers. They’re enemies at all times. White anarchists are not the enemy “at some times”. Nuance is cute. But not for a group of folks who are (and have been for some time) deeply unwilling to become ungovernable to everything else except their whiteness. Everything else except the dominant social order. Yes to the critique of these whack ass BIPOC space; come up out of those fucking revisionist ass BIPOC spaces but KEEP COMPLAINING ABOUT WHITE PEOPLE. Keep expressing your valid dissatisfaction and annoyance but don’t find comfort in the disappointment. Keep confronting whiteness every time you see it rear its colonizer ass head in these anarchic spaces. Hating whiteness and every idea, every philosophy, every ethic, every morale, every subculture it produces is a meaningful politic; at least for the new afrikan autonomist/anarchist it is.

And cute suggestions, but if your black anarchist meetup is only/majority petty bourgeois and/or biracial anarchists. We ain’t pullin’ up. If your black anarchist meetup doesn’t address class and how that effects ones ability to show up. We ain’t mf pullin up. If your black anarchist meetup is organized and facilitated by black cis men who are the main decision makers and/or the most vocal. We ain’t pullin up.

Or we just might pull up. But y’all wont be happy.

Now pause and breathe for a second.

Relaxed?

Ok come get some schooling real quick.

The concept of Black Radical Tradition as coined by Cedric Robinson is being given more attention these days, for better or for worse. In the process, certain flattenings of its meaning occurs, such as when certain class reductionists and false nationalist/false internationalist types dismiss it as “idealist.” On other occasions, the concept is embraced, but promulgated the notion opportunistically (as with Black Alliance for Peace) to situate it simply as a “list” of their favorite Black revolutionaries who supposedly validate the ideological confines of a Marcyite/cult approach to the late 20th century born “anti-war” counterinsurgency machine.

Flattening of the term has elicited a certain desire for “unity” around Black struggle in the face of white and class reductionist critics, at least so that Black anarchists and Black authoritarians can hash out our differences as an “In-house” matter. Now, for a long time, the anti-authoritarians of the Black Power era had been willing to see themselves as a “wing” in the Black Liberation Movement from last century — a “united front” so to speak. In the much beloved “Authoritarian Leftists: Kill the Cop in Your Head” text by Greg Jackson, alongside stringent criticism of white Marxists and anarchists, the author speaks of having shown up with comrades at the NOI’s original Million Man March in order to represent leftist ideals in the space. Ashanti Alston’s “Beyond Nationalism, Not Without It” echoes a similar attitude towards non-anarchist Black movement, which is not so much about compromises as it is about staking out opportunities for the Black struggle to grow amidst internal contradictions. Black anarchism in the US, especially last century, is notable for having been birthed through the “in-house” concern, which is an orientation that sets Martin Sostre or Lorenzo Ervin or Kuwasi Balagoon apart from say a Lucy Parsons (no disrespect to her).

But a tradition of Black radicalism is not about fealty to how things have been done. Nor is it about assuming that the conditions which necessitated a certain set of maneuvers before persist into perpetuity or haven’t changed. The 21st century development of Black anarchism and Black autonomy has grown these tendencies through fruitful tensions with abolition, (trans)feminism, disability justice, and more — as opposed to simply nationalism, third worldism, and pan-africanism. In turn, the latter three have been re-examined in a new light, and part of that has meant some Black anti-authoritarians seriously departing from any belief in an “in-house” unity. Especially after 2020, when orgs like the AAPRP were known to hold peaceful demonstrations at the US embassy, all while finger wagging at spontaneous revolt against property and the pigs, Black anti-political types are beginning to be more clear that “unity” amidst contradiction is not always about progress: it can be regressive. And so much louder challenges to authcom Black radical presuppositions are popping up on the ground and online. Especially since the authoritarian Black radicals have no qualms about challenging BARs openly: Balagoon is regularly erased in some NAIM historiography even by akinyele umoja’s admission, likely owing to his queerness; Lorenzo was recently being fed-jacketed by a member of the Claudia Jones school. These are just two examples of the ease with which BARs are met with the exact opposite of the attempts at unity we historically have offered, something which warrants a divestment from the concept of an “in-house” debate. Hence, “Join an organization” is no longer taken as a given, if it ever was, especially not after how many organizations have housed abusers, protected abusers, gaslight their victims, silenced them, etc going all the way back to well known formations from last century as we learn from Assata Shakur, Elaine Brown, JoNina Ervin, and others; or from survivors of MOVE, or survivors of Karenga’s violence, etc. The house has to be burned down!

And now to the first anonymous response to the recent bash back gathering. It seems some segments of the Black anarchist presence was militant about cultural appropriation and others were unapologetic about challenging Black authcoms even in spaces that are not Black only. To challenge white anarchism and Black authoritarianism? That is the BAR way! But the heat was also turned inward: the writers of the report back also were calling out the Black anarchists who prioritize white anti-politics, as well as the Black anarchists who jack Black Autonomy but seem to think that it simply means reacting to and complaining about whiteness. But in the authors’ assessment of these tame ass flavors of Black anarchism, one does have to ask if the militants are in conversation with those BARs who have begun abandoning the “in-house” struggle, or some other audience altogether? Like where was the fires happening???? Pigmentocracy is named as an explanation for the anarcoon and “complainer” style anarcle tom phenomenon, but only as a footnote. If the beneficiaries of colorism, featurism, and texturism truly are in the way of necessary growth in the level of BAR militancy, surely this is not a parenthetical or endnotes in any conversation. This would have to be put at the top. Pigmentocracy is very much a class issue and a specifically colonial class conception is involved. That term comes from Chile and looks at how reductions of “phenotype” relate to ethnoracial identity, ancestry and lineage, cultural retention, socio-economic status, and more in Latin America. There are parallels to it within the US, although comparisons are not a 1-to-one because racialized Statecraft on Turtle Island did not unfold in the same way. If we’re being simplistic, though, in the US context, even if lighter complexion is correlated to certain relations to so-called race, ancestry, lineage, cultural retention, status, etc there is not as numerous an array of stratified categories generated around that. Generally speaking, if you pass a paper bag test, you might be the spook who sits at the door, while the “darkies” are the spectre that haunts the minds of bucra even as we never come near that door.

It would be silly to suggest that these differences don’t calibrate the type of Anarchism some mfs is drawn to. That absolutely needs to be talked about more in depth. That is where the conversation needs to go. Let’s have it. There are a great deal of light, even fair-skinned afro-descent anti-authoritarians and some brown and dark skinned ones whose insurrectionism is that of the spook at the master’s door rather than of the ‘spectre’ who is currently wrestling with our authoritarian and liberal counterparts in the senzala (as we try to fly away to our quilombo). Formal “projectuality” and informal “projectuality” means very different things depending on which house is being struggled around. Those of us for whom to be a wild thing is a field negro affair aren’t saying that the house negroes don’t deal with issues, just that the approaches to slave revolt are very likely going to focus on different things. ​​​For us, Black radical tradition is beginning to be understood as a heuristic tool, an approach that allows us to learn or discover something about our historical consciousness, the conditions of its emergence, the processes by which it evolves. Revolt is but one of the many expressions and catalysts for activity by those under the heel of the man, his demiurge, class, caste, party, etc; the magic of the people’s hands does not start and stop at bringing a bat to the glass windows of a bank.

To that point, we must discuss the second bash back response. The notion of an Acephale is so key in this one: because the authcoms and liberals are so invested in a vanguard and leaders who have ‘headship’ over the people. They take the State and hierarchies as a given just as the conservative and fascist does. And this indeed has had disastrous consequences for the Black struggle. Cephalization, the process by which the organs of a body congeal into a ‘head,’ is a very old phenomenon, however, much older than antiblackness. Even in stateless African societies, gerontocephaly (headship by elders) is a thing; or perhaps some form of either patriocephaly or matriocephaly or a dyocephalous pairing. These patterns yielded tendencies towards revolt, such as in the Aba Women’s revolt in colonial Nigeria, but they also have been absorbed and incorporated into colonialism and capitalism in their own ways. Igbo gerontocephaly got re-articulated as chieftains and colonial administrators; patriocephaly in spiritual customs re-articulated as a minor patriarchy; matriocephaly in the distribution of social surplus on the market days as a triple jeopardy. One must be careful of thinking that acephaly in one domain is sufficient, but this takes recognizing that cephalization doesn’t ad hoc occur top-down nor bottom-up. There is a dialectic; there is an interpenetration.

Some of the militants of the New Afrikan tendency have acknowledged this, even non-anarchist ones like Sanyika Shakur. The tendency evolved in the 80s after the BLA was decimated, and derived lessons from the underground to better understand the war on crime, aids and crack epidemics, and other crises of that time. There is much complexity to what this reassessment entailed, but part of it meant making sense of how proto-revolutionary formations like street gangs could become tools for neocolonialism. Sanyika Shakur would contribute to this by critiquing the “macho” configuration of lumpen street life. Even for a nation that lacks “State power,” forms of governmentality could be sourced beyond official channels thereof because of gender exploitation. Of course, this is what imploded the Panthers and other organizations too, as the author of this second bash back response points out. Patriarchy steered Black struggle into the “burning house” that MLK had lamented, the author notes. Does the RNA/NAIM fall into the patriarchal pitfalls of statist nationalism, though? We cannot say that of its autonomous segments. It is ahistorical and disrespectful to erase these comrades, and even to frame RNA as the ‘head’ of neocolonial devolutions in Black struggle. If anything, the New Afrikan tendency has been rearguard of a regressive dialectic in the senzala, not aligning with the CPUSA/PSL and the related cults in its positions on the Black Belt (hence, the other Black authcom orgs actually dislike the tendency even despite claiming a “united front” with its organizations), and actually making inroads with queer liberation and feminism (such as MXGM’s ‘free the body, free the land’ statement in march 2023). Most notable in these inroads, queer Black anarchist Kuwasi Balagoon, whose contributions are alive in the anarkatas. The ones who know these nuances are the ones actually in the street and prison struggles, who are familiar with nationalism and trans liberation, who were in abolitionist movements and wrestled against the NPIC as well as the Academy, and who have seldom gone near white anarchist subcultures, rarely dined in their smelly squats, barely associated with them. And, who also do not be gallivanting with lite brites that got cash on they ass to bail them out for arrests after them and some other lite skinned spooks carded the master’s door and snuck inside to steal a few of his items and “redistribute” among themselves. Nah, we checking for the quilombo! That’s where we gotta try to get the acephaly going, word to Pedro Ribeiro. Viva Fera, a Negra, e a Anarquia!