001 ANARCHY1
Esther Brown did not write a political tract on the refusal to be governed, or draft a plan for mutual aid, or outline a memoir of her sexual adventures. A manifesto of the wayward: Own Nothing. Refuse the Given. Live on What You Need and No More. Get Ready to Be Free—was not found among the items contained in her case file. She didn’t pen any song lines: My mama says I’m reckless, My daddy says I’m wild, I ain’t good looking, but I’m somebody’s angel child. She didn’t commit to paper her ruminations on freedom: With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of potentialities? The cardboard placards for the tumult and upheaval she incited might have said: Don’t mess with me. I am not afraid to smash things up. But hers was a struggle without formal declarations of policy, slogan, or credos. It required no party platform or ten-point program. Walking through the streets of New York City, she and Emma Goldman crossed paths, but failed to recognize one another. When Hubert Harrison encountered her in the lobby of the Renaissance Casino after he delivered his lectures on “Marriage versus Free Love” for the Socialist Club, he noticed only that she had a pretty face and a big ass. Esther Brown never pulled a soapbox onto the corner of 135th Street and Lenox Avenue to make a speech about autonomy, the global reach of the color line, involuntary servitude, free motherhood, or the promise of a future world, but she well understood that the desire to move as she wanted was nothing short of treason. She knew firsthand that the offense most punished by the state was trying to live free. To wander through the streets of Harlem, to want better than what she had, and to be propelled by her whims and desires was to be ungovernable. Her way of living was nothing short of anarchy.
Had anyone ever found the rough notes for reconstruction jotted in the marginalia of her grocery list or correlated the numbers circled most often in her dog-eared dream book with routes of escape not to be found in Rand McNally’s atlas or seen the love letters written to her girlfriend about how they would live at the end of the world, the master philosophers and card-holding radicals, in all likelihood, would have said that her analysis was insufficient, dismissed her for failing to understand those key passages in the Grundrisse about the ex-slave’s refusal to work—they have ceased to be slaves, but not in order to become wage laborers—she nodded in enthusiastic agreement at all the wrong places—content with producing only what is strictly necessary for their own consumption—and embraced indulgence and idleness as the real luxury good; all of which emphasized the limits of black feminist politics. What did they know of Truth and Tubman? Or the contours of black women’s war against the state and capital? Could they ever understand the dreams of another world which didn’t trouble the distinction between man, settler, and master? Or recounted 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. They had never listened to Lucy Parsons; they had never read Ida B. Wells. Or envisioned the riot as a rally cry and refusal of fungible life? Only a misreading of the key texts of anarchism could ever imagine a place for wayward colored girls. No, Kropotkin never described black women’s mutual aid societies or the chorus in Mutual Aid, although he imagined animal sociality in its rich varieties and the forms of cooperation and mutuality found among ants, monkeys, and ruminants. Impossible, recalcitrant domestics weren’t yet in his radar or anyone else’s. (It would be a decade and a half before Marvel Cooke and Ella Baker wrote their essay “The Bronx Slave Market” and two decades before Claudia Jones’s “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!”)
It is not surprising that a negress would be guilty of conflating idleness with resistance or exalt the struggle for mere survival or confuse petty acts for insurrection or imagine a minor figure might be capable of some significant shit or mistake laziness and inefficiency for a general strike or recast theft as a kind of cheap socialism for too-fast girls and questionable women or esteem wild ideas as radical thought. At best, the case of Esther Brown provides another example of the tendency to exaggeration and excess that is common to the race. A revolution in a minor key was hardly noticeable before the spirit of Bolshevism or the nationalist vision of a Black Empire or the glamour of wealthy libertines, fashionable socialists, and self-declared New Negroes. Nobody remembers the evening she and her friends raised hell on 132nd Street or turned out Edmond’s Cellar or made such a beautiful noise during the riot that their screams and shouts were improvised music, so that even the tone-deaf journalists from The New York Times described the black noise of disorderly women as a jazz chorus.
Saidiya Hartman
See: Blacksound, Song/Sing, Double Exposure, Kenbe
002 ANARCHY
Left of Leftism
“Anarchist” is a name adopted by socialists, communists, and radicals of all sorts who sought to catalyze revolution and change social conditions without overthrowing one state to put another in its place. They sought to abolish capitalism and the state completely, not to remodel their modes of representation on behalf of “the people.” These groups have played decisive roles in many historical upheavals, such as the Russian and Mexican revolutions and the Spanish Civil War, though their critical interventions were often overshadowed later, becoming inconvenient history. As unionists they helped secure the eight-hour workday in groups like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and the anarchist executions that followed the Haymarket Affair sparked global movements that would shape International Workers’ Day. Anarchism provoked anticolonial movements and insurrection in the Philippines, Korea, Japan, Brazil, and throughout many other countries internationally throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and beyond. Indeed, anarchism has been so threatening to virtually every segment of the political spectrum that it’s been repressed by other parts of the left and even led to a proto-war on terror and the creation of what would become the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).1 Made of many different segments, anarchism has encompassed some of the world’s deadliest anti-authoritarian assassins, as well as syndicalists to pacifists.2 Nonetheless, it had to be rethought and reconsidered by Black people.
Black Anarchism
In a move away from standard “Western” radicalism, Black anarchism is a transformative departure in politics that began around the civil rights movement and Black Power era. Its founding thinkers were Black Panthers, Black Liberation Army members, New Afrikans, civil rights organizers, political prisoners, and autonomous revolutionaries who shifted left of leftism after certain critical experiences. Prominent figures like Ashanti Alston and Kuwasi Balagoon, for example, complained of the corruption they experienced in revolutionary organizations and of vanguardist formations that manipulated people. Reshaped by encounters with hypocrisy and contradiction in struggle, they embraced anarchism as one of the most misunderstood factions of the historical socialist movement, adding layers to the existing analysis while critiquing what they found it also lacked. Therefore, Black anarchism is not a total escape from the binaries and pitfalls of European leftisms, but a break from the normative practices that reside there.
Black anarchism is not simply a diversification effort within classical anarchism—it’s a critique of anarchism. Forebears like Martin Sostre and Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin had once accepted the conventional wisdom of statist and national socialist orthodoxy. But time, practice, and travel disturbed their doctrine. The state was revealed to be a colonial weapon that could be abused in the hands of government of any sort. These early figures in Black anarchism realized that the collective organization of people had to be emphasized more than the goal of seizing apparatuses that had produced atrocity again and again. This ungovernable clarity is what shaped the arrival of a politic that would initially be claimed by some but embodied by many both past and present.
From Black
From Black, anarchism is an exit sign pointing us towards possibility. It’s seeking the place outside of this bordered capitalist world of empire and captured imaginations, where reform rehabilitates collapse and romanticizes crisis. From Black, anarchism is an acknowledgment that racism, sexism, homophobia, and exploitation do not disappear with new governance. From Black, anarchism is the antithesis of the banality of self-aggrandizing “revolutionary” programs to reform or create new nation-states. It rejects that which has become dogmatic secularized religion through uncritical repetition despite changing times, locations, and conditions. It’s the sum of different Black-thinking people who each realized one cannot overwrite the will of diverse populations to the point of homogeneity or the individual to the point of egocentrism.
The coercive hierarchies of white supremacy, capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and fascism only highlight Black anarchism’s relevance. Other ideas that seek to redeem prisons, borders, and the nation-state under the banner of alternative authorities are never fail-safe. What inevitably goes wrong will punish some worse than others. Black people know this well. Black anarchists and Black autonomous deviation provide an example of how to build a renegade movement, one that shows us we don’t have to remain stuck in cyclical predicaments for the sake of tradition. There is another path, shaped by rank-and-file, rejected, and misrepresented people whose truths carry a critical energy no vanguard, political party, or totalizing plan can hold.
William C. Anderson
See: Anarchy (Hartman), Archive, Fascism Afloat, Double Exposure
003 ANTIBLACKNESS
(noun)
that which engulfs Blackness with inescapable violencea set of relations that mark and position Blackness as the nadir of sub-human or non-human qualitiesStructural. Modern. Gratuitous“Slavery and colonialism ushered antiblackness into modernity by using violence as the means to (re)produce Black captivity as unremarkable.”
a complex interplay of social, political, institutional, and metaphysical forcesthe quality of (in)distinguishing Blacknessglobal, not geographically specificLike air. Pervasive. Forceful“Antiblackness is global.”
constant yet shiftingparticular and nonspecific“not at all … gender-specific”1 yet sexually suturedillogical and anagrammaticalAntiblackness gestures to describe the indescribable. As a concept it seeks to connect and valorize seemingly disparate events as the products of a larger singular structure. As an analytic it refuses the progress narratives of liberalism. Instead, antiblackness surveys the constancy of Blackness as a site of dereliction despite assumed social and political advancements. As a term it refuses the jubilee of formal emancipation, various forms of decolonial revolutions, the acquisition of extended rights for Black people, and the neoliberal placement of Black bodies in positions of power.2 Furthermore, antiblackness clarifies how across subjective differences marked by age, class, gender, sexuality, ability, national origin, and so on Blackness is overexposed to violation. Antiblackness expands beyond understandings of racism, which assume a misalignment between beliefs and/or actions and reality by antagonizing the insistence that there is a truth of Blackness that is uninhibited and defined without violent intrusion.
Copyright © 2026 by Tina Campt and the Practicing Refusal Collective
