Kickin' Black anarchic radicalism pt. 1

black-and-white photo, showing a crew of Black women raise their fists in the Black Power salute, with a tree and its wide head of leaves stretched out behind them. Over the Panther women’s bodies, a huge letter ‘A’ with a circle around it, in Red, Black, Green — the Pan African colors — declares itself boldly, flanked to its right by the simple word ANARKATA

My cousin and I try to work out and pray on the daily and do political education during our exercise/prayer sessions, combining spiritual, physical, and radical pursuits in one

Today we read Call me Akata — Reclaiming our Birthright as indigenous and African people born on American Soil by Chelsea Neason

My cousin's summary of the text was that it was about "what Akata stands for: basic Black nationalism. That's the starter. Divisions in the African community [globally speaking] come from misunderstandings about what we go through [under colonialism]. Akata is a reminder of who we are, our African origins, and the role we play in America, as wildcats."

What jumped out to me with reading the text was Chelsea Neason's emphasis on the fact that Afrikan/Black people in the US and the Diaspora in the Americas are collectively a huge population, and thus a threat to imperialism — which is precisely why white/colonial media narratives try to force an ''ontological'' (fundamentally unchanging) separation between us and our Continental Afrikan siblings. Starting with Malcolm X's encounters with political leaders in Accra, Ghana, we learn from the text outside of the US, there is truly a strong concern for and affinity with Black struggles in Amerikkka, despite what is popularly said.

My cousin and I talked about stories where in the US, African-Americans and Afro-Caribbeans, Afro-Latines, and Continental African immigrants often throw stereotypes about ourselves at one another. I've personally experienced Black immigrants looking down on African Americans as ''failures'' for not living up to the American dream even though we ''live here''; but I also witness how African-Americans look down on our Black siblings elsewhere as somewhat ''backward'' or ''exotic'' or even ''primitive.'' My cousin emphasized how these stereotypes come from ignorance, where we do not understand the events — the histories of oppression — that go into how we end up in the positions we are in. All of these perspectives are therefore ways we measure each other and our cultures by the standards of colonialism and capitalism; these perspectives imply that we are less valuable for not ''succeeding'' or ''patterning'' the economic lifeways of the West, especially the US. As one of my comrades Merricat once brilliantly said: ''all diaspora wars are bourgeoisie wars.'' If we did not internalize bourgeois standards, the values of the rich, ruling, colonizer/capitalist class, then we wouldn't judge ourselves and one another in these ways.

Chelsea Neason's offering to reclaim ''Akata'' (wildcat) was super resonant for the Anarcho-Pantherist organizing spaces (including the Afrofuturist Abolitionists of the Americas collective) out of which the ''Anarkata'' concept, synthesis, and Statement were developed. Today's political education session was about understanding why that is: because our vision of grounding Anarchy in Akata, the pantherist, wildcat, African revolutionary legacy, involves standing in the Black nationalist principle that we are a distinct nation, not Americans, and therefore that we as Anarkatas are to be united as global indigenous African nations/communities. Even for those uninterested in reclaiming the word, or not aligned with ''Anarkata'' or the use of the word, it's still important that the assumption of, as my cousin called it 'basic Black nationalism,' is a principle we adhere to or carry with us in our organizing.