Sunwo – On the Forgotten so-called Race Riot.

Posted on 14/12/2024 - 16/12/2024 by muntjac

In 1958, at a pub in St. Ann’s, Nottingham, police were called in response to a disturbance. Eyewitnesses reported that it all kicked off over the refusal of service to an interracial couple, sparking a brawl. Some say over 1,000 people were involved; others put it in the hundreds. Either way, chaos filled the streets. If you look at the newspapers from the time, it’s all about “Black violence” and how many white people were injured. But here’s the thing—the evidence points to much of the violence being led by a white mob.

Let’s be clear: this wasn’t a race riot like they like to call it, this was a fascist attack, a pogrom. Black people who were there say white individuals from outside St. Ann’s showed up, forcing the community to fight back and protect themselves. The participation of potentially hundreds of white individuals was historically downplayed. Only through community accounts and extensive archival research has it become possible to uncover a clearer picture of what really went down. Another overlooked aspect is the prolonged police presence—sticking around for weeks afterward.

A few days later, another uprising happened in Notting Hill, some say that this uprising was spired on by the happening in Nottingham, where black forks had managed to fight off a racist mob. These encounters with white reactionary violence mark a pivotal time in the black experience in Britain.

This happened ten years after the first voyage of the Empire Windrush. The early immigrants of color in the UK tell a story of exclusion. Caribbean immigrants faced serious barriers to housing and employment, despite being invited to Britain to address labor shortages after World War II. They ended up making homes in cramped Victorian terraces, originally built for mill workers. While the country relied on immigrants, they were treated like outsiders, unable to access social spaces freely, unable to participate fully in society.

The Colour Bar in Britain worked like an informal apartheid, denying Black and brown people decent jobs, housing, and public spaces. It lasted in one form or another into the 1980s. Beyond that, they struggled just to have a normal community life.

And then there were the Teddy Boys—a racist gang emerging from white working-class youth culture. They harassed Black and Asian immigrants, making it dangerous to access certain areas. People who lived through it say this kind of intimidation carried on into the ’80s. Let’s face it: that same culture seeped into the punk scene of the 1980s. If you’ve ever seen This Is England, you know what I mean.

Through self-defense and resistance, Black and brown communities carved out their own safe spaces. They stood up against violence and refused to accept their assigned place in a racist hierarchy. It is not a coincidence that the conflict arose from the refusal of service of a interracial couple. It’s obvious that reactionary violence is tied to the insecurities of white working-class social conditions, tools used by those in power to spawn hate against marginalized groups. For black and brown people in the UK, Self-defense and rebellion became liberatory tools—to protect the community, to demand better treatment, and to push back against structural barriers enforced by the state.

So maybe we need to rethink the language we use. Instead of calling it a “race riot,” we should recognize it as a form of uprising, a rebellion, a moment of resistance. “Race riot” plays into the same old narratives that pit both sides against each other. Let’s call it what it was: an act of resistance.

Sources:

blackpast.org/global-african-history/nottingham-riots-1958

bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-45207246

libcom.org/article/1958-nottingham-race-riots

Mutt. – Muntjac Issue 1 Editorial

Posted on 14/12/2024 by muntjac

As ever, since the day we arrived here, it’s been up to us.

The racialized peoples of this hellish archipelago… to defend ourselves.

Let’s take a partial look at our collective histories of struggle…

In 1919, in Cardiff, Liverpool and East London racists targeted Chinese, Somali, West Indian (Caribbean), Malaysian, Egyptian and other racialized residents, many of whom were British colonial troops stationed or demobilized in Britain, the racists also targeted their partners and spouses who were often white women. In response, at various intervals in Cardiff groups of whites that had formed lynch mobs found themselves in shootouts with the racialized people they tried to target.

In 1948, in Liverpool the National Union of Seamen strived to keep Black people out of work, boasting that “we have been successful in changing ships from coloured to white, and in many instances in persuading masters and engineers that white men should be carried in preference to coloured.” During an extended period of attack, Black sailors armed themselves to stave off attempted massacres by mobs of whites either in uniform or in plain clothes intent on destroying them, the lodgings they stayed in and the clubs they frequented. Often when the police ‘“intervened” in racial attacks on Black sailors they’d simply arrest every Black person in the area.

In 1958, the West Indian community of Notting Hill tooled up to fight fascists who’d been targeting them at night, utilizing ambush tactics and skills many had gained in their time in Britain’s colonial armed forces. One ex RAF mechanic, Baker Baron was interviewed years later and said;

“[…] black people were so frightened at that time that they wouldn’t leave their houses, they wouldn’t come out, they wouldn’t walk the streets of Portobello Road. So we decided to form a defence force to fight against that type of behaviour and we did. We organized a force to take home coloured people wherever they were living in the area. We were not leaving our homes and going out attacking anyone, but if you attack our homes you would be met, that was the type of defence force we had. We were warned when they were coming and we had a posse to guard our headquarters.

When they told us that they were coming to attack that night I went around and told all the people that was living in the area to withdraw that night. The women I told them to keep pots, kettles of hot water boiling, get some caustic soda and if anyone tried to break down the door and come in, to just lash out with them. The men, well we were armed. During the day they went out and got milk bottles, got what they could find and got the ingredients of making the Molotov cocktail bombs. Make no mistake, there were iron bars, there were machetes, there were all kinds of arms, weapons, we had guns.

We made preparations at the headquarters for the attack. We had men on the housetop waiting for them, I was standing on the second floor with the lights out as look-out when I saw a massive lot of people out there. I was observing the behaviour of the crowd outside from behind the curtains upstairs and they say, ‘Let’s burn the niggers, let’s lynch the niggers.’ That’s the time I gave the order for the gates to open and throw them back to where they were coming from. I was an ex-serviceman, I knew guerrilla warfare, I knew all about their game and it was very, very effective.

I says, ‘Start bombing them.’ When they saw the Molotov cocktails coming and they start to panic and run. It was a very serious bit of fighting that night, we were determined to use any means, any weapon, anything at our disposal for our freedom. We were not prepared to go down like dying dogs. But it did work, we gave Sir Oswald Mosley and his Teddy boys such a whipping they never come back in Notting Hill. I knew one thing, the following morning we walked the streets free because they knew we were not going to stand for that type of behaviour.”

In 1959 Kelso Colchrane, a Black Antiguan resident of Notting Hill was stabbed to death by whites, in response Rhaune Laslett, Claudia Jones, Amy Ashwood Garvey and other revolutionaries put on an indoor Carnival to empower the besieged Black communities of Britain. With time, these gatherings grew so large they out-grew the halls they were held in and were the groundwork to what is now a cultural institution for the West Indian communities in Britain. The Notting Hill carnival.

In 1968, Trinidadian revolutionary Frank Crichlow opened the Mangrove restaurant which quickly became a hub for Black people to seek shelter from the racist hellscape around them and organise their fight back against the British state. In fear of this, the police raided and shut down the restaurant a dozen times. Attacks like this against Black community centers, cafes, clubs and even daycares were surprisingly common.

In 1970, 150 Black radicals protested against the police’s war on the mangrove and were met with a force of over 600 police officers, who assaulted the marchers leading to the arrest and trial which would later be known as the Mangrove 9. They won in court after a long trial and the police’s assault on the Mangrove carried on until the 80s, in 1988 Frank was framed after riot police raided the restaurant and ‘found’ drugs. After a trial he was acquitted and was awarded damages in 1992.

Throughout the 70s the Bengali Housing Action Group, the Black Panthers & Race Today collective squatted homes to house immigrants in spite of the racist local government & landlords.

Brixton was a borough plagued by policing and constant searches under the racist ‘Sus’ laws, enabling the police to stop and search people whenever the hell they felt like, this tactic was paired with arbitrary raids, beatings and surveillance. This was responded to in a myriad of ways; Black power organisations set up infoshops and educated their peers as part of a broader campaign against police harassment. Some squatted in buildings to drink smoke and listen to reggae in spite of the police. Some would intervene with the police when they began to harass someone.

In 1976, an 18 year old engineering student, Gurdip Singh Chaggar, was stabbed to death. The Indian Workers Association [Southall] organized a meeting on facism, but the youth attending the meeting grew frustrated with the “timid” bureaucratic, lobbyist approach of their elders and the lack of a concrete response to Chaggar’s murder. Opting instead for direct action, they left the meeting to protest against Southall’s police for its inaction, and in the process ended up throwing stones at a Jaguar who’s driver called them “black bastards”. Shortly after, they launched the Southall Youth Movement (SYM). In the days that followed, they organized a number of protests, attacked white motorists who chanted racist slurs at them and when their comrades were arrested, surrounded the police station demanding their release. These new formations would be later described by Race today as “breaking through the solid wall of Asian organisations which maintained the status quo”

August, 1976, police assaulted Black attendees of the Notting Hill Carnival and they defended themselves and injured over 300 police officers, damaged 35 police vehicles and looted shops. The repression that followed led to the arrest of 60. Rasta Billy, a former steel pan player at Carnivals commented that;

“Carnival became the first opportunity that many of the black youths born in Britain had to express their anger on a national basis and to confront the police and let them know the forces of black anger.”

In 1980 Akhtar Ali Baig was brutally murdered on East Ham high street by a gang of white, skinhead youths aged 15 to 17, who first verbally abused him before spitting on him and eventually stabbing him. Paul Mullery, the one who stabbed him exclaimed in front of eyewitnesses “I’ve just gutted a paki!” He was soon arrested, In response 150 Asian and some West Indian youth marched to Forest Gate police station, the police claimed it wasn’t a racially motivated attack. Later 2,500 people marched through Newham in a protest organised by Newham Youth Movement, they planned to march to Forest Gate and West Ham police stations and then return to the murder location, the police tried to re-route them towards West Ham Park but the youth broke through chanting “Here to stay, Here to fight!” and “Self Defense is no offense!” On reaching the site of the murder spot, the march stopped to pay its respect to Akhtar. A mullah chanted some prayers from the Koran There were 29 arrests and in response the youths met with the Steering Committee Of Asian Organisations to drum up support and put on a second march, 5,000 people attended, Black workers from Ford’s downed tools and (in a rare, minor, piece of middle class racial solidarity) shopkeepers shut their shops for the day.

April 10th, 1981, the boiling tension following the racist mass murder of 13 Black teenagers in the firebombing of a house in New Cross into an anti-police insurrection, Michael Bailey, a Black man who had just been stabbed in Brixtons ‘frontline’ was being kneeled on by police for over 20 minutes. People nearby intervened and forced the cops away from him and took him to hospital, they then fought with the police reinforcements that had been sent in. The following day, the police lined the streets every 50 meters with vans, rather than their usual foot patrols. Word got round that Michael had died in hospital, no small part due to the police allowing him to bleed out for so long. At 5pm a plainclothes cop was bricked for trying to search a Black man’s car, police attempted to arrest the bricklayer but eventually battle lines were drawn. By the end of the night there were 279 injured cops, 50+ destroyed police vehicles and several buildings and shops burnt out and looted.

July 3rd, 1981 three coachloads of white skinheads from the East End arrive in Southall for a gig at a bar called the Hambrough Tavern, on the way there they attacked shopfronts run by Asian people and assaulted one Asian woman, in response Asian and West Indian youth struck back, the police came in to defend the skins but by the end of the night the skins were sent packing, several police officers were injured and the Hambrough was burnt to a crisp. The youth said to the media the following day;

“If the police will not protect our community, we have to defend ourselves.”

Throughout July 1981 There were further anti-police and anti-racist uprisings in Toxteth, Moss Side, Chapeltown and again in Brixton. There were so many I’d run out of space if I covered them all properly.

1982, The Sari Squad, a group of radical South Asian women began their campaign in solidarity with Afia Begum who had been deported to Bangladesh after her husband died in a fire. They established a social center in London’s Brick Lane. The following year they would tie themselves to the railings outside the home secretaries home, they were later arrested and sexually assaulted by the police.

In 1983, a collective of diasporic South Asian women founded Mukti magazine, with the intention of creating a publication to address the under-discussed concerns of South Asian women in the (politically) Black movement of the time. Topics such as deportation, citizenship, sexual fulfilment, lesbianism, arranged marrage, incest and child sexual abuse were presented in 6 different languages. They had a wheelchair accessible office and hosted meetings for groups like the Incest Survivors Group, Asian Women Youth Workers Group, and Aurat Shakti exhibition group.

September 1985, armed cops had gone to Cherry Groce’s home, in Normandy Road (Brixton), to find her son, Michael, who was wanted for armed robbery. Mrs Groce said the cops rammed down her door and then ran at her pointing a gun, she moved backwards and they shot her. She was paralysed and confined to a wheelchair by her injuries. In response people mobilized outside Brixtons police station and a group of Black women cussed out the police, it wasn’t until the police wheeled out a ‘community leader’ and a Black priest intended to deescalate the situation that the molotov cocktails began to fly.

December 13th 1995, another Black uprising took place after the murder of Wayne Douglas, in police custody. Black lumpen and their mates fought back against police, ransacked shops and burned cars for five hours.

December 1999, five Chinese restaurant workers, who had had to defend themselves against a white attack in London’s Chinatown, were themselves arrested. (This incident is a repeat of what happened in a similar attack in the same restaurant 13 years prior)

June 5th 2001, in Harehills, Leeds the South Asian community stood up to the police who had beat a South Asian man for having a “faulty tax disk”, they organised an ambush using a hoax 999 call, ironically reporting that a police officer had been struck with a molotov cocktail, the police arrived and the insurgents threw molotov cocktails and stones at them and fought the police into the night for their friend.

In August 2011, a young Black woman initiated the Mark Duggan Rebellion by throwing stones at a crowd of police who were looming around at a vigil for Mark, the police responded by beating her and the crowd rushed fight them off, the crowd, in control of the streets started to loot shops, that summer the whole country burned. Only after a police crackdown of an unimaginable scale combined with meddling leftists & the Black liberal counterinsurgency did the flames die out.

In 2016, London Black Revolutionaries and the Malcolm X Movement released insects into a Byron Burger restaurant in response to the Chain conspiring with border force in a sting operation which led to the deportation of 35 migrant workers from Albania, Brazil, Egypt, and Nepal.

In 2021, a collective of radical Black squatters called House of Shango, inspired by the legacy of Black revolutionary and squatter Olive Morris distributed free food and clothing every Sunday in Windrush square.

In 2022, the government warned of a coming economic crisis of their own creation, in response Autonomous Black Queers distributed free guides on shoplifting, fare evading and electric-meter tweaking.

On top of all of this, we can’t forget the prison rebels who fought against racism on the inside in our past like Biba Sarkaria or the countless more that have carried on the tradition since. There are of course, daily little resistances, fights, scuffles, people slacking off at work, stealing from the businesses robbing us of our money and time.

On the 18th of July this year, in Harehills, Leeds; children were kidnapped from the home of a Romani family by police on the orders of social workers. In response the community came out and fought the police demanding the children be returned, into the dead of night, successfully fighting off riot police. Bonfires were lit to obscure the police’s line of sight, though one was extinguished by Mothin Ali, a green party politician who actually mentioned his uncles getting repressed following the 2001 harehills uprising as the reason why he and his cohort acted as a counterinsurgent force. The following day the parents went on a hunger strike and days later the children were released back into their care.

In November last year, viral misinformation following a stabbing was spread on telegram by fascists in Ireland, raising the temperature just enough that the pre-existing racism, anti-blackness and Islamophobia amongst the white Irish lumpen, working, middle and ruling classes could boil over into an attempt to stalk the city center, jumping anyone darker than a sheet of paper. They failed, with the 2nd night going out with a whimper, rather than another bang.

In England, Cornwall, Wales, Scotland and “Northern Ireland” we weren’t as lucky. Starting in Southport, then spreading to other towns and cities. This wave of white violence resulted in assaults on racialized people, stalking of racialized people, the destruction of buildings used to house refugees, personal and private property belonging to racialized people from homes to shopfronts, cars to community fridges and numerous attacks on mosques.

The British state, under supercop Keir Starmer’s “patriotic” & “left wing” leadership, gave us ever increased police powers, the further criminalization of self defence, mask bans and the familiar high speed court processes Kier was a part of as a prosecutor during the Mark Duggan Rebellion in 2011 leaving antifascists with little time to defend themselves in court and the use of the charge of ‘Affray’ which was created to curtail anti-police street militancy by the Black communities of London has been utilized again to a great extent as a tool of repression.

Labor and Green party politicians and their supporters attended some protests with the sole purpose of preventing anything other than newspaper sales happening. After all, for many of them it was the first time “the left” were in power during a period of unrest and of course, we can’t upset the police when they’re ‘on side’ right?

The extra-parliamentary Left complemented this with the near-immediate Trotskyist-led dampener on resistance, a well-rehearsed program of peace policing, often going as far as standing between the police and militant demonstrators, standing in front of targeted buildings for photo-ops and then bailing when the fascists turned up. Leading people the wrong direction (both literally and figuratively) selling newspapers while projectiles were being lobbed at them, a counterinsurgent politic culminating in a collaboration with a group of washed up social democratic politicians hosting a ‘resistance festival’ of white people patting themselves on the back for spending weeks bussing themselves into London to talk to the police.

Finally and in the most depressing, but not at all suprising display of all, Many “radicals” in the “POC, BAME & ESEA” organising circles joined forces with the assimilationist middle class in advocating ‘staying at home’ and staying “safe” and working with the police to utilize hate crime legislation to encourage even more police into our neighbourhoods.

The antifascist response to the race riots this summer was sluggish in places, most were blindsided by the sheer number of whites willing to march around in broad daylight chanting racist & islamophobic slogans and how many white youth were willing to smash the windows of peoples homes because they believed the residents weren’t white enough. However once the ball got rolling, the fightback that ‘organised’ autonomous anti-fascists and racialized communities across the country put back were awe inspiring.

Crowds of teenagers ignoring the warnings from the peace policing ‘community elders’ donning what is essentially black bloc and confronting fascists in the streets, traveling to support communities in other towns in response to fascists announcing plans to march in towns all over the region. People forming networks of support for vulnerable members of their communities, providing each other with transport and even seemingly trivial things like checking in on each other on the regular.

However, former Black Panther, JoNina Ervin’s comment in an interview a few years ago about how antifascism can’t just be event based if it’s going to become part of the culture has stuck with me. We have to deal with how people are facing daily racism and daily policing. We have to create survival programs to help people live with the crushing living costs here.

Following the dying down of this round of race riots, radicals got to work supporting those arrested for defending themselves, for example; After this year’s Notting Hill Carnival, radicals, in the spirit of the original carnival, put on a fundraiser at an illegal rave, which raised £4000 in donations despite police repression.

Weeks ago Romani and Irish Traveler youth were targeted by Manchester police in a racially motivated operation and forced onto trains out of the city center. Soon after this, the Kurdish community in London were targeted by police repression with a community center being raided and dozens of people being arrested.

Bashar Al-Assad was overthrown days ago and in response the British state & states elsewhere are looking to deport Syrian asylum seekers into an active war zone as the civil war and genocidal campaign against Syria’s ethnic minorities, aided and backed by the Turkish state and its fascist proxies is nowhere near over.

Throughout the history of the struggles of racialized people here, there has been an insurgent tendency who have rejected the pacifistic stewardship of middle class & reformist political groups who constantly have worked with the police and the government to assert themselves as self-declared ‘leadership’ of their respective cultures and nationalities.

Our aim as a group is to amplify the voices of this tendency, with the race riots this summer and the response to it being a catalyst for us to come together. Many of us are either one of the few anarchists in our culture’s diasporic radical community or one of the few people who aren’t white in our local anarchist scene and as such there’s a need to create something without both of these restrictions, without having to water down anarchist texts into the often vague language used by sectors of the Asian and Black radical movements or to have our thoughts filtered through the all white editorial boards in charge of the majority of anarchist publications here. Are you doing cool shit, have something to say, knowledge to share? Let’s work together and burn Babylon once and for all.

Mutt, Muntjac Magazine

13/12/24

“Mutt.” is a pen name of a Bajan Mulatto anarchist, you can find more of his writing and research on his website. Stalk his stuff here; linktr.ee/muttworks

naga – Fear, Safety and Representasians

Posted on 14/12/2024 - 14/12/2024 by muntjac

This essay is featured in Issue 1 Of Muntjac

NOTE: In this piece I use the terms “(British) East & South East Asian” (BESEA) and “Asian American” in a loose, critical way. It names a particular tendency and group of people who engage in such politics, the sort that might self-characterise as being “anti-covid hate” or “Stop Asian / AAPI / ESEA Hate”. My comrades and I remain sceptical that a “(B)ESEA” political identity as recoverable even as we sometimes organise under it to do certain things.

I am writing to sketch out the current reactionary basis for community self-defence in Asian American and BESEA politics. Instead of continuing to beg for crumbs of state validation and protection from cops, we need to continue the proliferation of resistance against state violence.

We’ll begin with a brief description of the situation in the so-called U.S., as BESEA groups appear to view Asian American activity as somehow more advanced and it’s important to show this is not the case.

From 2021 onwards, various news articles in the so-called US reported a rise in Asian Americans taking self-defense classes [1] and purchasing guns. [2] This was in response to an escalation in racist street violence against Asians; the attacks which gained the most media attention created a narrative of white male vigilantes or Black homeless men specifically targeting Asian American women and elders. Anti-Black racism is inherent to these politics. While some Asian American organisations might post instagram slides that celebrate Juneteenth or offer condolences for Black victims of police violence, it’s clear from the rest of their social media messaging, co-operation with similar organisations, state bodies and public figures that their primary goal is assimilating Asian Americans into the colonial violence inherent to the US state through the protection of private property. A previous realisation of such politics includes the so-called Rooftop Koreans, petit bourgeois Asian settlers who sought to defend their businesses during the L.A. uprising in the 90s by attacking Black people.[3] It is therefore no surprise that when community self-defence is grounded in Asian American “Stop Asian Hate” (SAH) politics, its participants fill the role of self-deputised police rather than opposing state violence and neglect.

And yet there is a contradiction: for all their messaging that Asians need to be responsible for protecting “our own”, SAH social media content is largely aimed at applying pressure on police to investigate violent attacks and indeed all racial animus as “hate crimes”, celebrating weighty sentencing that apparently shows the state considers such animus as injurious to its own social body. [4] Journalist Esther Wang reported on such ‘desperate, confused, righteous’ politics of SAH in 2022, focusing on the aftermath of Christina Yuna Lee’s murder by a street homeless man from a nearby encampment. She writes, ‘A bitterness was beginning to take hold — a sense of grievance that was hardening into a politics of self-protection.'[5] Her article describes in detail the reactionary bent of SAH politics: Christina Yuna Lee’s former landlord carrying a taser and pepper spray in order to attack homeless people, community objections to any housing support for their neighbours on the street, and Asian self-defense training clubs that espouse theories of racial self-interest. Wang makes clear that while such paranoid responses have an understandable root cause, they’re not solutions to deep societal problems or everyday trauma.

In all this, it’s made clear the condition of being made vulnerable to homelessness, of gentrification, displacement, criminalisation and incarceration, is not understood as violent within the rubric of SAH politics. The reality of the U.S. as a settler-colonial project and how it constructs and orders race to situate certain populations close to death in literal spatial terms is seen as merely aberrant, rather than consistent with its death-making project. A slightly more canny tendency of SAH politics pays lip service to non-carceral advocacy, which can be seen in recent Stop AAPI Hate statements condemning the killings of Easter Leafa, Victoria Lee, and Sonya Massey[6] by police which consistently call for ‘in-language’ and ‘culturally sensitive’ responses to mental health crises, demanding ‘accountability’ for this ‘misconduct.’ Again, the idea that such violence is entirely consistent with the state is not permitted; it would interrupt their redemptive fantasy of the state as an all-giving caregiver who simply needs to draw its lesser favoured child closer to its breast.

This is what abolitionist Dylan Rodríguez describes as the ‘”Asian Exception”‘; “Black on Asian” violence is but one folkdevil used to kick dirt over the tracks of what Rodríguez calls ‘white nationalist, domestic warfare totality’ for which state-enforced punishment of individualised perpetrators is an insufficient response as said totality is ‘a) cold-blooded as fuck, and b) doesn’t give a shit about individuals in-and-of-themselves.’ [7] Citing critical Asian American organising by sex workers, abolitionist feminists, and prisoner support campaigns, Rodríguez encourages us to join the call for ‘collective practices of revolt, solidarity, creativity, and mutual aid that de-prioritize condemnation of individual perpetrators (Black, Brown, and otherwise) and cultivate infrastructures of accountability to other communities, organizations, and movements struggling for liberation from antiblackness, colonial domination, and asymmetrical domestic war.’ Rodríguez consistently draws attention to his own contradictory position within his own academic dayjob, observing that this position is filled with people whose embrace of liberal pacifism means they have a ‘knee-jerk aversion to guns and firearms.'[8] Because they prioritise individual knowledge extraction rather than being open to collective militancy, these people can be a real security risk to movements who see the necessity of self-defense.

You will never find me condemning armed resistance anywhere in the world. However, as I was researching community self-defense in an Asian American context, various critiques came to mind – mostly that armed struggle in the so-called U.S. has become synonymous with U.S. gun culture.

For example, Yellow Peril Tactical is an Asian American armed leftist pro-gun rights group with the aim of educating and training people in firearm handling, tactical training, and community defense. They also build connections with other armed leftists groups and medics, sharing this knowledge through their podcasts. They situate their project as an intervention in reactionary self-defense. All of this is valuable. However, as I listened to their discussions, I started thinking that perhaps some armed leftist groups position themselves as a subset within US gun culture who wish to explore their militarised hobby, rather than politicised organisations who have strategised the necessity of taking up arms through their own analysis of the state monopoly on violence.

I also noted that while there appears to be a willingness to wield coercive force, this sits alongside rather limited ways of looking at representation. For example, YPT’s inaugural podcast episode in 2021 began from the point of diversifying gun culture, with one speaker complaining about how hard it was to be a queer Asian woman in the gun world, and another speaker chiming in that there were now more diverse gun influencers. But I kept listening, and though I personally felt mildly irritated to hear this couched in terms of “misconceptions”, “representation” and “diversity”, YPT essentially described a serious situation where self-deputised white supremacist forces dominate the distribution of and training in firearms. YPT is also clearly interested in building meaningful solidarity across borders: they collaborate with various groups, raise funds for the village of Jinwar in Rojava as well as insurgents in Myanmar, which further clarifies their politics radically differ from the average liberal.

While YPT still proceed from an embedded position in U.S. gun culture, they are clear that firearms are to be used in specific situations and share information about different interventions, such as de-escalation, and complement tactical knowledge with field medicine. ‘Guns are not a talisman,’ YPT write in a recent infographic. [9] This ironically echoes a line in An Anarchist Anti-Gun Manifesto: ‘I think people acquire guns because of the fantasy of possessing hyper concentrated power.’ [10] This manifesto de-naturalises the role of guns in armed resistance, encouraging the expropriation then destruction of such weapons while keeping in mind there are other ways of wielding force in domestic warfare.

Asian American organising is of course much more varied than the liberal NPIC or armed leftists, but I focused on these aspects as I feel it is currently under-theorised.

We now turn to the situation in the UK, which is similarly captured by counterinsurgency. The same calls for Stop Asian Hate rang out with predictable politics: a so-called Demonstration of Unity rally in spring 2021 collapsed due to brave groups[11] and individuals that refused to work with a speaker who was the subject of the Solidarity not Silence campaign about misogyny and abuse in music.[12] Liberal and conservative BESEAs do not have working analyses of how power structures function – they think capitalism and its concomitant violences are fine, their horizon of radical change being improved access for BESEAs. Add to this bizarre, self-fulfilling, British-poisoned Asian exceptionalism with its foundational anti-Blackness – animated through a frankly deranged focus on joy, food, and hate crime by NPIC careerists for whom small business ownership is their family background and political subjectivity – and you have the current BESEA movement in a nutshell. (Notable exceptions include the abolitionist tendency in some groups within ESEA Sisters; Remember & Resist;[13] and sex worker organising such as Sparrow’s Wings, not to mention individual Asians active across various solidarity movements, including antiraids networks.)

The situation in the UK can still be neatly described in The Monitoring Group’s statement about another rally later in 2021: ‘We asked the police to be present at the rally to ensure there would be no breach of peace. They requested further information and intelligence supporting our concerns. This was provided to them within minutes of their request.’ [14] The current BESEA political landscape is characterised by nonprofits and high-profile charitable individuals in full, unquestioning, eager co-operation with the state. Everybody circulates around the axis of “hate crime prevention”, for which a more comprehensive state surveillance is the solution. This is their goal and they refuse to see any other approach as valid, such as the abolitionist strategy of within and against realistically assesses what happens when the state intervenes in marginalised communities and situations with vulnerablised people.[15] BESEAs do not really have values that derive from the abolitionist tendency–for them, it’s radical to collaborate with hate crime charities to deliver bystander intervention workshops. You won’t find them at copwatch meetings learning about police interventions because that would mean caring about people other than themselves.

BESEAs are self-righteous about this self-interest because their political identity is based on being uniquely downtrodden and ignored. They don’t historicise Asian identity within the larger context of both colonial labour and colonial middlemen; they refuse any critical engagement with these contradictions. Rather, they propagandise narratives of the hardworking migrant rejected by both whites and other racialised groups; they write exhausting books and articles, appear on morning TV segments, curate whole exhibitions, circulate around the Having Conversations Industrial Complex, attend big dos at Buckingham Palace. What is their demand? Visibility–tolerance–and increased hate crime data collection. And afterwards, they’ll grab their newest LinkedIn profile picture.

When the pogroms of 2024 burst forth and communities rallied in the streets against fascists and their pig protectors, these BESEAs sat in their newbuild apartments and cried. They didn’t say, ‘We’re not good in crowds, we can be more useful co-ordinating from home or doing arrestee support afterwards’– no, their relation to these streets is not tactical. They exclusively communicate in a language of fear and unsafety. This was to be expected of the glossy fintech and media types, but a similar response was given by established community services that support migrants on the ground: report all “hate crime” to the police or a reporting service. Community services were in a position to create and share multi-lingual safety plans, to check in with their members and affirm solidarity with targeted groups. Instead, the “hate crime prevention” narrative was in easy reach for everyone, and it will continue that way until a viable alternative program for filling these social needs is created.

Meanwhile, the state’s border securitisation regime continues apace. Undocumented migrants, asylum seekers and refugees experience the sharpest edge of this vulnerablisation. They have also been discarded from the majority of BESEA discourses on public safety. Contextualising the deaths of the Essex 39 and the Morecambe Bay cockle pickers within the Hostile Environment would mean understanding the state as something other than saviour–how these social murders are consistent with its regime.[16] Similarly, focusing on street attacks rather than how fascist organising works in tandem with state violence means that both material conditions and community needs are obscured. While there is a clear need for multilingual culturally-informed support services, tying it to the success of state-funded hate crime data collection practises diverts attention and resources from actually effective solutions.

Indeed, it is not straightforward for the public to understand how hate crime data is actually used by either police forces or reporting services; thus far there’s been no accountability from the “changemakers” who apparently use this data to make policy changes (for and by whom?). There are ways in which community groups could collect and analyse data using an actively caring methodology and robust ethical framework which targets the root causes of social problems, as shown by the Dying Homeless project by Museum of Homelessness.[17] Otherwise, it appears that a whole panoply of ESEA community centres and migrant support services are being funded, wholly or in part, by the state desire to monitor a narrow category of racial animus by non-state actors. As one possible use of state hate crime data reporting is assigning patrols in certain areas, liberal BESEAs have made it clear they are willing to treat increased police interactions and criminalisation of other communities as collateral.

There would be some utility in abolitionist ESEAs encouraging internal conversations within migrant support services, asking them how they benefit from involvement in this hate crime scheme. If it pays an already overloaded caseworker for a few more hours a week, then it’s important to name that this is not a sustainable solution for making our communities safer. Our responsibility, then, is to propose things that do work and build capacity towards realising this. One example is the community mediator program carried out by Asian American organisers in Oakland.[18] This robust, holistic approach fills many gaps, from intergenerational political education, Black-Asian solidarity, de-escalation, prisoner support, and housing.

Learning from their organising, perhaps our foundation in babylon would be clear, simple messaging that combats a narrative of distrust and fear, all while balancing an acknowledgement of people’s feelings of unsafety. Then, we ask people to really consider what safety means. We have to actually listen–even if we anticipate their answers won’t please us–because it builds trust and can sometimes be surprising. Then, we begin linking the specifics of the ESEA experience to shared material conditions and create accountability to other communities. For these ESEA migrant services and community centres, it might look like making meaningful connections with groups outside of the current hate crime consortium, including but not limited to Black-led abolitionist movements, Palestine solidarity groups, community-led homelessness advocacy, trade and renters unions, queer migrant solidarity and prisoner support.

I sketch out the above even though it seems almost reformist as these services are actually trusted by a sizeable proportion of migrant communities, especially elders who aren’t confident using English. Since it’s impracticable to argue against the existence of such services, we can instead challenge their funding, messaging, and coalitional potential. Our situation differs from that of the so-called US, where the liberal hate crime nonprofits provide no social good whatsoever: they purely exist to propagandise for the police. We have to discern the roles that various groups serve in our communities and drive home how their continued participation in “hate crime prevention” fails to fulfil that need. This happens alongside developing our own abolitionist theory and organising, understanding it must be contextualised as building towards a globalised insurrectionary movement.

The representasian narrative remains so popular exactly because the messaging is simple and self-serving, but it isn’t insurmountable. Indeed, their narrative of racial self-interest, bourgeois aspiration, and failed-assimilation-as-abject-victimhood has has stabilised over the past few years. We know their tricks. We know they’re wrong, and we know they’re scared. They don’t have any new ideas. We want the whole world free, and we have to make that knowledge completely irresistible.

[1] Yasmin Tayag, ‘What I Gained From Self-Defense Class in the Wake of Anti-Asian Attacks’. New York Times, 9 June 2021. [https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/09/well/Asian-women-self-defense-training.html]

[2] Wufei Yu, ‘The West’s Asian Americans arm up for self-defense’. High Country News, 20 May 2021. [https://www.hcn.org/issues/53-6/south-guns-the-wests-asian-americans-arm-up-for-self-defense/]

[3] Natasha Ishak, ‘The True Stories Behind The ‘Rooftop Koreans’ Who Took Up Arms During The L.A. Uprising’. All That’s Interesting, 5 November 2020.

[https://allthatsinteresting.com/roof-koreans]

[4]theyellowwhistle, ‘So glad to see justice served […]’, Instagram, 30 November 2022. [https://www.instagram.com/p/ClmDicTps2b/]

[5] Esther Wang. ‘How to Hit Back: the desperate, confused, righteous campaign to stop Asian hate.’ NY Mag, 26 September 2022.

[https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/stop-asian-hate-crimes-politics.html]

[6] https://stopaapihate.org/2024/07/25/statement-stop-aapi-hate-responds-to-the-murder-of-sonya-massey/

[7] Dylan Rodríguez, ‘The “Asian exception” and the Scramble for Legibility: Toward an Abolitionist Approach to Anti-Asian Violence’. Society and Space, 8 April 2021. [https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/the-asian-exception-and-the-scramble-for-legibility-toward-an-abolitionist-approach-to-anti-asian-violence]

[8] ibid., Robert Sirvent, ‘Cops, Colleges, and Counterinsurgency: An Interview with Dylan Rodriguez.’ Black Agenda Report, 13 Sep 2023. [https://www.blackagendareport.com/cops-colleges-and-counterinsurgency-interview-dylan-rodriguez]

[9] yellow_peril_tactical, ‘Today it’s confirmed that the November […]’, Instagram, 13 March 2024 [https://www.instagram.com/p/C4eBWkvO-kG/]

[10] Ignatius, ‘An Anarchist Anti-Gun Manifesto’, Anarchist Library, May 2023. [https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-an-anarchist-anti-gun-manifesto]

[11] Remember & Resist, ‘Content warnings for posts and caption: sexual violence, harassment/bullying, abuse …’, Instagram, 23 June 2021. [https://www.instagram.com/remember.resist/p/CQd43yPFMxq/?img_index=2]

[12] Solidarity Not Silence, CrowdJustice update, 3 August 2021. [https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/solidaritynotsilence/]

[13] Remember & Resist, ‘Hate crime legislation can’t—and won’t—save us’, Shado Mag, 3 April 2021.

[https://shado-mag.com/opinion/hate-crime-legislation-cant-and-wont-save-us/]

[14] The Monitoring Group, ‘A statement from The Monitoring Group (30/11/21)’, 30 November 2021

[15] Abolitionist Futures, ‘Addressing Gender-Based Violence’. [https://abolitionistfutures.com/gender-based-violence]

[16] Jun Pang, ‘Don’t call the Essex 39 a ‘tragedy’’, New Internationalist, 25 October 2019. [https://newint.org/features/2019/10/25/dont-call-essex-39-tragedy]

[17] Museum of Homelessness, ‘New research shows 1474 homeless people died in 2023 – a mounting national crisis revealed.’

[https://museumofhomelessness.org/news/new-research-shows-1474-homeless-people-died-in-2023-a-mounting-national-crisis-revealed]

[18] Rosalyn Romero and Momo Chang, ‘Since Stop AAPI Hate, some Oakland Chinatown residents are rethinking crime prevention’, The Oaklandside, 12 September 2024. [https://oaklandside.org/2024/09/12/oakland-chinatown-stop-aapi-hate-crime-public-safety/]

Muntjac Issue 1 – Community Self-Defense Against Fascism & The State

Posted on 13/12/2024 - 09/01/2025 by muntjac

After much delay, we are happy to announce issue 1 of our magazine is finally avalible!

Due to us being too broke to afford large format printing and there being so much text a singular zine would be too complex to bind we’ve done a pair of zines. The cover for the first is clippings from the 60s, 70s & 80s and the cover for the 2nd are from an uprising of South Asians against the police in Harehills, 2001.

Its avalible to download for free here muntjacmag.noblogs.org/mag/ and we them some for sale on our shop ko-fi.com/muntjacmag there are a few spots who’ve already asked to stock the magazine but if you want a bunch of copies please get in touch, we can’t produce huge quanities of the zine oursleves as we only have cheap non-commerical printers. So you’d like bulk copies (20+) get in touch and we’ll pass your message on to our distributor, Seditionist Distribution.

If you’d like to support us in the long run, consider subscribing;

There are three tiers, the first is just to send us a random amount of money (starting at £1) each month and in return you’ll have our eternal thanks. The second is you send us slightly more money (starting at £2.50) and in return you get each issue of the magazine as it comes out. The third is set at a slightly higher rate if you really adore us and have the cash to spend (starting at £8) then you’ll not only get the magazine but also any posters, flyers or other merch we make! [these rates are the same no matter what country you want things shipped to, with the UK subscribers subsidizing everyone else]

We will try our best to be as transparent as possible with the moneys we are gifted, a long term goal of ours is to eventually pay our authors, but that would require one hell of a lot of subscribers.

Wether or not we get paid, we will strive to keep this project going, even if we have to transfer ownership to another group of people.

Huge thanks to the writers who sent texts in but also to Clash! Collective, In The Belly and the many people who wouldn’t want us to put their names on a thank-you post for helping make this happen. We’ll be back in the spring! Keep in touch.

Muntjac Magazine.

A Quick Summary;

“On the forgotten so called race riot” – Sunwo speaks on the 1958 Nottingham pogroms and the resistance against it.

Micelio speaks on the union and the revolutionary potential that worker-led, independent communal unions hold

Marion Koshy writes about their entry and experience in the Houston Socialist Rifle Association, and what we collectively can learn from the SRA.

Simoun Magsalin charts a postcolonial anarchism that practices decoloniality without appropriating from indigenous peoples in the Philippines.

A Harrow Antifascist recounts Asian and Black community defence during the UK August race pogroms

Zhachev calls for a rejection of any attempt to demonise or ostracise militant radicals

p.n writes about their experience in a creative residency and the importance of artists being principled (and fiercely anti-zionist).

Ektin Ekdo asks an important question; are we fighting to be part of british society or to destroy it?

naga discusses the reactionary strains of politics that undergird community self-defence around the identities of East and South East Asians in Britain

Sunwo writes against black britishness as an identity, rather searching for a borderless revolutionary blackness.

poet of da soil writes a poem political manifesto on fourth worldism in britain.

In The Belly Zine – Free Polo!

Posted on 12/12/2024 by muntjac

We are sharing this post and appeal from our comrades at In The Belly [bellyzine.net] A revolutionary abolitionist publication by and for incarcerated people and their communities.

Comrade Pierre “Polo” Pinson was wrongly convicted and sentenced in 1999 to 50 to 150 years for an armed assault on a Pittsburg Police Station and unrelated robberies and is seeking to vacate his illegal sentence

we are mobilizing to raise $5,000 to help retrain Corrie Woods, Esq. on Polo’s behalf. We appreciatre your support in helping us bring him home.

https://opencollective.com/free-polo

Anarchist Yeondae – 12.03 Our position on the civil war

Posted on 12/12/2024 - 12/12/2024 by muntjac

https://m.blog.naver.com/PostView.naver?blogId=anarchistleague&logNo=223682568029

A post by the Korean Anarchist Organisation 아나키스트 연대 on the shortlived martial law earlier this month and the collaboration between trade unions and liberal politicans which had a dampening effect on the general strike called in response to it.

The night of December 3rd was noisy. I thought that the invocation of martial law was a concept that only appeared in history books and had not been experienced since the 5th Republic. I thought that if the next martial law occurred, it would only occur when something very serious and urgent happened to the system.

But it seems that Mr. President wanted to commit suicide. The only troops mobilized were some defense force troops and a small number of airborne troops, and even that did not prevent the National Assembly from passing a resolution to lift martial law. Neither the representative of the ruling party nor the mayor of Seoul, who was from the ruling party, knew that martial law had been declared. The martial law troops had to return home lonely on police buses.

This could be seen as a great civic victory. But at the same time, it appears to be a defeat for the working class movement.

After martial law was declared, the very small number of mobilized martial law soldiers attempted to make emergency arrests, not Yang Kyung-soo, chairman of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, or the chairman of the Public Transport Workers’ Union, which is going on strike starting tomorrow. They tried to arrest Lee Jae-myeong, Han Dong-hoon, and Woo Won-sik. What does this mean? This may have been because, in the eyes of the President, the labor union would not pose any threat to the system nor would it cause any hindrance in any way. No matter how much a general strike is declared, there is no response on the ground, and the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions’ general strike is It is being relegated to a weekend rally, and the workers who came out for the general strike are incited with slogans that are essentially the same as those of the Democratic Party, and in a way, it seems natural.

Let’s be a little ashamed of this. Let’s go back to the field and organize a new struggle again. Let’s organize the field and politicize the field. So that the workers’ struggle can really shake up the system, so that the coming martial law can be truly severe. So that they can be more afraid of our leadership rather than Lee Jae-myung and Han Dong-hoon.

Harehills 2001

Posted on 11/12/2024 by muntjac

A poster by Mutt.

Free Sidiq!

Posted on 10/12/2024 - 02/04/2025 by muntjac

Free Sidiq!

Sidiq is an anarchist, illegalist and an individualist. On the 12th of July 2024, state authorities had arrested him for cannabis use and possession. He contributes to anarchist publishing and street libraries, involvement in soccer hooligan club, clashes in protests and a passion for writing poetry. Sidiq is looking at a possible 10 year prison term.

His support group are taking donations via paypal at; einzine16@gmail.com

You can write to Sidiq;

Muhammad Ilyas Sidiq
Lapas (prison) Kebonwaru, Kec.
Batununggal, Kota Bandung, Jawa Barat
40272
Indonesia

Sidiq is part of two publishing collectives; Contemplative Editions and Talas Press who publish anarchist books.

Contemplative Editions

contemplative@riseup.net

https://www.instagram.com/___contemplative?igsh=NHdxaXR3cXd6NDJp

Talas Press
https://www.instagram.com/talaspress?igsh=NnRkdmEyd3Ixc3Jh

https://linktr.ee/talaspress

He also writes poetry, one is included below;

PENGAR/Hangover

As long as power stands tall
and threatens the freedom of life.

I will not stop presenting
Rebellion like a robber making chaos
Incarnate pirates along the sea.

Until the rotten colonialists of civilization
will find no more loopholes
Until all is razed to the ground!

Palang Hitam Anarkis (Anarchist Black Cross [Indonesia])

https://www.instagram.com/palang__hitam/

poet of da soil – we turn estate blocks into gardens of eden.

Posted on 09/12/2024 - 09/12/2024 by muntjac

Uploaded with the permision of our comrade and friend, this text is also avalible as a zine via seditionist

Taken from: https://substack.com/home/post/p-146070200

yooooo

eye know that first posts on substacks and blogs and stuff are normally introductory small bites but imma just get straight into it. quick intro name’s poet of da soil. i’m a poet who explores the written word, sound and ~~performance~~ ritual in an attempt 2 load the gun (as ismatu gwendolyn writes about). using substack for my rambles, poems and lamentations about life.

so, autonomy?

in my own personal journey, i’ve come 2 a place where i’ve realised there is no separation between the political and the personal. that every way eye relate 2 others, every way others relate 2 me is built on the systems of domination that the world is also built on. anti-blackness, ableism, classism, (trans)misogynoir among others directly influence and dictate how we interact with one another, which is why eye now believe that autonomy – which the dictionary defines as “the right or condition of self-government,” or as my friend Elizabeth puts it “a refusal to be governed,” is the best way forward to lives that don’t feel like death.

what happens when we refuse to be governed, by a labour or tory party every 5 years, by the state itself, by an international system of capitalism built on the backs of black people for over 400 years(?)

now this can be hard 2 imagine, we’ve been taught that we need the state, with its monopoly over force and violence 2 rule over us or there will be anarchy. chaos.

but what’s chaos if not 1 in 5 people living in absolute poverty in this country, what’s chaos if not 2 million people using food banks in 2023 compared to 60,000 in 2010. what’s chaos if not the constant violence inflicted on black and brown peoples, be it from the police or immigration. the state relegates us (niggas) to economically neglected yet over-policed neighbourhoods, menial jobs and a constant state of barely treading water day by day, pay check to pay check. the time 4 change is now, the time 2 imagine more, of rejecting what they give us and creating our own ways of living.

Subcomandante Marcos, credit: Rage Against The Machine YouTube channel.

tha zapatistas(!)

now a whole lot of this seems lofty and abstract but there are countless examples of societies and communities that live and have lived outside the idea of the nation-state, that instead govern themselves and figure out how to exist collectively.

from pre-colonial societies of the Igbo 2 the autonomous region in Syria known as Rojava, people again and again have learned and struggled against oppression 2 live in non-state frameworks.

one of the most successful communities is that of the Zapatistas. indigenous peoples in Chiapas, Mexico rose up in 1994 in what is known as the Zapatistas revolution against the neoliberal policies of the Mexican government that sought to further marginalise indigenous communities and their ownership of the land they lived on.

30 years later, the Zapatistas have collectively organised 27 autonomous municipalities, collectively own and look after the land, built their own healthcare systems, primary and secondary schools and education programmes firmly rooted in their commitment to a struggle for a world where many worlds exist. the Zapatistas are a living, breathing example of autonomy, which they describe as creating new life.

nu life in babylon(?)

so now, what is there 2 be done(?) we are living in a world where multiple genocides are being perpetrated while we live in the belly of the beast that plays a pivotal part in orchestrating em (the West/imperial core).

black and brown communities here in Babylon are bearing the brunt of the violence that the ruling classes of Babylon inflict on its inhabitants, forming internal colonies that are super-exploited by the state.

this can be seen in the disparities faced by these internal colonies in terms of maternal mortality rates, police brutality, underemployment, displacement via gentrification among other things. life aint been good, and it aint gonna get better, unless we say enough is enough and struggle for something more than this. unless we struggle for autonomy.

if autonomy means 2 create nu life, what does that look like(?)

what does it mean 2 create nu life in a world predicated on death? how do we look despair, neglect and violence in tha face and constantly war against that(?)

by pooling our resources togetha, moving togetha, trusting each other and creating programmes and spaces where life can flow in ways tha world doesn’t want. we look 2 tha past and learn how 2 create –

housing co-ops that protect tha most marginalised among us, we reclaim spaces and zones that have been captured and simply left 2 rot by tha exploitative housing system.

we turn estate blocks into gardens of eden, with community gardens and food co-ops

liberation schools where neglected black kids come and learn english, maths, history, afrikan languages, and whatever they desire all rooted in the knowledge that we all learn from each other , in non-hierarchical modes of educating.
we engage in political education – turn back and remember our ancestors and their lessons, commune with those who fought for nu life be it in South Carolina or Azania (known as the settler state of South Africa)
we don’t forget our ppl stuck inside the prisons, instead we fight for them because 2 fight for them is 2 fight for us – we remember that the line between citizen and criminal is a blurred one when we all seen as nigg(a)er
we provide self-defence classes centred in knowing we live in societies that disable us daily and learn to move with our bodies not against them
we provide food and clothes and care and affection for and by everyone.
we take over wherever we want and we dance and dance and dance, we hold ourselves and our bodies in poetry and music and plays and art that reminds us black flesh is only as dead as we allow it 2 be.

if autonomy is 2 create nu life it is not resurrection, we don’t hope and long for better days where tha NHS works and tony blair is giving us new pathways while sending us 2 pen and warring 4 oil, we understand that voting doesn’t offer salvation only validation for a system that kills us

if autonomy is 2 create nu life it is not praying 4 rapture and looking 2 paradise or space for an escape out of the dunya

it is not wishing for blackface 2 be our butcher be it prime minister, president or king

it is not seeking internship or degree 2 be free because black excellence isn’t black liberation

it is dapping up a loved one and asking “how far”

not letting go when their head drops a lil as they sigh and say we’re trying

and telling them togetha life can be more than what we are given.

and with that, eye leave you with a poem. peace and one love.

we turn estate blocks into gardens of eden
there are gods who don’t want us 2 bite into fruit and discover our own divinity 
yet we can’t rely on marathon prayers 2 fill our bellies

we sign ballot papers as liability waivers
so MPs get off scot free and drink free wine in their parliament bars
is this what we call democracy (?)
tell ourselves rainbow lies 
like green and yellow might be better than red or blue
like tha colour wheel ain’t mouldy

how long will we wait in supermarket-hospital-jobcentre-immigration office-food bank-hostel-chicken shop queues 
must be why so many black yutes look 2 internship for priority passes
they ain’t know rollercoaster runs on tha blood of their cousins

but its time 2 get off tha ride - don’t u hear em scream(?)
tha smog coats our lungs
netflix covers our eyes
and the latest diss track built on black womyn bruise blocks our ears

time 2 get off tha ride
rub your eyes
breathe in
breathe out 
there is no time but now 
cut apathy off and find a friend in your anger and despair
introduce yourself 2 hope

yeah the ends is being gentrified 
but if our ancestors resisted colonial hands so can we
grab your ppldem, bun a zoot and read some fanon
grab a mask, some gloves and a shovel
babylon ain’t got no claim 2 tha land they mistreat
we are living dead so we rebel w nu life
we turn estate blocks into gardens of eden

BARSNYC – What Does Black Anarchism Mean?

Posted on 26/11/2024 - 26/11/2024 by muntjac

BARSNYC – What Does Black Anarchism Mean?

This is lifted from an Instagram post by BARSNYC, we corrected a few typos and added links to the original texts.

[https://www.instagram.com/p/DCzWA0XvtrQ/?img_index=9]

Introduction

Black people throughout the African diaspora have been resisting, rebelling, revolting, and rioting against the systemic anti-black oppression since the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Black anarchism represents a subset of this broader tradition of resistance that continues to carry on the fight for total liberation and honors the struggle of our ancestors.

Zoe Samudzi

“The Funbamentalist”

[https://thefunambulist.net/podcast/a-moment-of-true-decolonization/daily-podcast-09-zoe-samudzi-black-anarchism]

“Black anarchy is chaos, because black life is chaos. Black life is surveilled, and its policed, and it’s destroyed prematurely. And yet, black anarchism is this praxis of understanding what it means to sustain that chaos. And it means mutual aid. and it means, trying to figure out what it means to make a word that is safe for black trans women. For black children. It means trying to figure out how we can think about justice outside of the carceral system, it means transformative justice, even when it doesn’t seem like an answer is ever achievable, and there is no answer.”

William C. Anderson

“State Reform Isn’t Enough”

[https://autonomies.org/2022/05/william-c-anderson-state-reform-isnt-enough-our-times-demand-black-anarchism/]

“Black anarchism rejects coercive authority and oppressive top-down hierarchies as they exist across the entire political spectrum. It doesn’t pretend that anyone who claims (or has claimed) to be a liberator, speaking on behalf of the masses, cannot commit atrocities. And it recognizes that acknowledging this, rather than denying it, is how stronger movements will grow. Black anarchism means moving away from and transcending all leftists inundated with oversimplified other/or sectarian binaries. We are struggling for something much greater.”

Marquis Bey

“Anarcho-Blackness” [https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/marquis-bey-anarcho-blackness]

“Black feminist anarchism cannot be contained by inclusion into any organization. It has to be a modality, a manner of walking that threatens to undo the city, steal back the body, and break all the windows because that is where anarchy happens. Anarchism that is not Black feminist is not doing anarchic work.”

Charlie

@charliebanga [https://linktr.ee/CharlieBang]

“Black anarchism means I don’t have to bow down or bend the knee to kings, queens, presidents, politicians, police officers, gods, or deities. I’m not intrested in being subservient, dominated, or controlled by so called masters, rulers, and authority figures. As a black anarchist, I’m more concerned with becoming a permanent inconvenience to those that pose the greatest threat to humanity, the earth, and all that inhabits it. My true goal and desire is to be autonomous, ungovernable, and unwavering in my pursuit to overthrow the state and all unjust hierarchies by any means necessary.”

Emiko

@freecongonola [https://www.instagram.com/freecongonola]

“Black anarchism to me means taking matters into my own hands. Not only am I an anarchist, but I’m also an educator, and we all know that the US education system is bullshit. My grandfather worked with the panthers to help run the freedom schools in the Bay Area, and that’s what black anarchy looks like to me.”

Semiyah

@bsg.bookclub [https://www.threads.net/@bsg.bookclub?xmt=AQGzLm-RROc-k3n4QM9qLu7fFroQmRQ5hoK3gtirjvk75AA]

“Black anarchism is a practice that compels me to apply autonomy everywhere in my life. As an artist, it challenges me to create music that is not bound by rules or a formula. As a writer, it requires me to constantly ask the other question, even if its’s uncomfortable. As a member of a collective, it implores me to use my gifts and skills in a way that not only can liberate me, but others as well. Black anarchism gives me no choice but to think beyond the confines of the colonizer’s boxes and define for myself not only who I am, but who I will be and who I must become in order to get free. Black anarchism has shown me that my resistance is a thing of beauty that refuses to be crushed by those that seek comfortability in conforming.”

Marcela Onyango

@feelthenews [https://www.instagram.com/feelthenews/?hl=en]

“Black anarchism to me means trying to live as freely as possible in a world that was not intended for me to be free while fighting for collective liberation. It means roasting the pigs while using my comedy to constantly tell people we are not free. It means reminding everyone I know that we live in a racial hierarchy that is built on the oppression and exploitation of Black people. This also means that I’m not invited to a lot of parties because nobody wants someone yelling, ‘schools are prisons’ at their parties. But that’s okay. I don’t want to be at a party that pretends that we don’t live in hell, much like I don’t like to live in hell. I want to live in a world free of oppression. A world where we take care of each other and get high together (if we want). Black anarchism means creating fragments of that world today while actively fighting against a white supremacist state that is preventing the birth of that world.”

Lucy E. Parsons

Lucy Parsons, The Principles of Anarchism (1929) [https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/lucy-e-parsons-the-principles-of-anarchism]

“Anarchists know that a long period of education must precede any great fundamental change in society, hence they do not believe in vote-begging, nor political campaigns, but rather in the development of self-thinking individuals.”

Author: muntjac

Sunwo – On the Forgotten so-called Race Riot.

Mutt. – Muntjac Issue 1 Editorial

naga – Fear, Safety and Representasians

Muntjac Issue 1 – Community Self-Defense Against Fascism & The State

In The Belly Zine – Free Polo!

Anarchist Yeondae – 12.03 Our position on the civil war

Harehills 2001

Free Sidiq!

Free Sidiq!

poet of da soil – we turn estate blocks into gardens of eden.

yooooo

so, autonomy?

tha zapatistas(!)

nu life in babylon(?)

further reading:

BARSNYC – What Does Black Anarchism Mean?

BARSNYC – What Does Black Anarchism Mean?

Introduction

Zoe Samudzi

William C. Anderson

Marquis Bey

Charlie

Emiko

Semiyah

Marcela Onyango

Lucy E. Parsons