Bash Back 2023 was more or less what I expected it to be, a healthy amount of faggotry in-between questionable politics and ultra-violence. Shout out to the wrestling! What was also expected was the all-too-familiar experience of being a black anarchist in the predominately white anarchist subculture. This is why “Black anarchist reflections” felt like the most refreshing thing that’s come out the bb! for me. I feel that it is worth adding a few more things to what those folks said.
Black anarchism, if we can say such a thing exists, has a body that lacks consistency. When I run into other black anarchists, they are either rightfully disillusioned by the scene or consumed by a vulgar intersectionality committed to making blackness a matter of purely performative resentment aimed at white people. To the latter, shut the fuck up. Run off to the DSA chapter you’ll eventually come crawling to because of your dumbass politics, I’m tired of y’all. To the former, I wanna talk.
Black liberation has reached an impasse. In the 1960s black militancy was strong enough to make a foothold in the culture and contest the United States. Unfortunately we saw Black liberation, most notably in the Black panther party, struggle with its pig head. This head was coated in historicist optimism, it asked unruly negroes to repress their desire in service of a gleaming proletariat thought to never lose. The head was responsible for the homophobia and misogyny of the panthers and for weaving its share of that shit into the fabric of the Black radical tradition. Thankfully this head has been cut off, mostly by the drapetomaniacs who saw what was coming down the line: a black state, a black economy, a black leviathan. Today there is no leader of black liberation. The George Floyd Rebellion is our best example of this. In the 60s it was a certain nationalist strain of Black liberation that stressed that Black people needed their own state to be free but fuck the New Afrikan Republic. This strain has succeeded in isolating black radicals and helped populate the landscape of black liberation with pitiful “authoritarian communist” zombie orgs. As if the black counterinsurgency who vampirizes any nigga uttering a cry against this dying world isn’t enough already. We must admit that black liberation, if it still is possible, is frozen in time. The rebellion in 2020 didn’t end the world, or destroy white supremacy or any of that shit. But it could have gone crazier. I think its time to ask ourselves again, with renewed pessimism: how do we go about black liberation right now? Today’s terrain is unpredictable and horrifying. We stare as a new cybernetic mode of governance eclipses the old one, Black queer life is still disposable and the summer of 2020 is a faintly smoldering memory. How are we to make blackest, queerest insurrection?
Death to the head and death to the vanguard. The body of the black revolutionary is an Acephale with a girl-dick in one hand and a machete in the other. We can only look at what works what doesn’t, what takes us to uncharted places and what keeps us docile. Niggas who burn cop cars are miles ahead of niggas who call cops or do corny shit like cut off white dreads. Call that element which pushes the line whatever, as long as we can acknowledge that it exists and begs for elaboration. How does a smashed bank window become an inoperable banking system? How can our orgies ravage public space? How do we evade the sad militancy of the BLA? How do we become tight-knit? How do we get the resources that white anarchists receive in their inheritances?
There’s no queer anarchy without blackness.