Iansá Magazine

By Heb Braggs

Introduction ¹²

“What makes us African is our remembrance of the land, the waters, the plants, the animals and the lineages, both great and small, known and unknown, whose collective existence is inextricably bound to ours, and whose destruction would be ours as well. What makes us African, is our commitment to honoring this truth in all ways we possibly can.”

— Helen Nde, Creation Myths vs Foundation Legends 

“Skywoman bent and spread the mud with her hands across the shell of the turtle. Moved by the extraordinary gifts of the animals, she sang in thanksgiving and then began to dance, her feet caressing the earth. The land grew and grew as she danced her thanks, from the dab of mud on Turtle’s back until the whole earth was made. Not by Skywoman alone, but from the alchemy of all the animals’ gifts coupled with her deep gratitude. Together they formed what we know today as Turtle Island, our home. Like any good guest, Skywoman had not come empty- handed. The bundle was still clutched in her hand. When she toppled from the hole in the Skyworld she had reached out to grab onto the Tree of Life that grew there. In her grasp were branches— fruits and seeds of all kinds of plants. These she scattered onto the new ground and carefully tended each one until the world turned from brown to green. Sunlight streamed through the hole from the Skyworld, allowing the seeds to flourish. Wild grasses, flowers, trees, and medicines spread everywhere. And now that the animals, too, had plenty to eat, many came to live with her on Turtle Island.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer, adapting the story of Skywoman falling, in Braiding Sweetgrass 

“[S]lavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery which has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry. Consequently, prior to the slave trade, the colonies sent very few products to the Old World, and did not noticeably change the face of the world. Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance. Without slavery, North America, the most progressive nation, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Only wipe North America off the map and you will get anarchy, the complete decay of trade and modern civilisation. But to do away with slavery would be to wipe America off the map. Being an economic category, slavery has existed in all nations since the beginning of the world. All that modern nations have achieved is to disguise slavery at home and import it openly into the New World.”

— Karl Marx, Letters: Letter from Marx to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenko

Please support some Black & Native relatives!: Housing Support for a Black Trans Person!, Community Centered Food Trailer, Help Xena no longer be homeless, Help support a Black maGe with their expenses, Support Dakota’s Journey out of medical debt to Independence 

Black Lives Matter. Duh. Why does this statement hold so much… weight, whether it is through positive affirmation (like what I did by saying “duh”), or negative affirmation (like all lives matter or other nonBlack spinoffs that find themselves aggrieved at the idea of Black self-definition)? The antiBlack construction of the world points people towards many paths (all of which have the potentiality to fold into antiBlackness, regardless of their intent³), but one that commonly pops up is what right-wing folks have been calling Black fatigue, itself an appropriation in the vein of “woke,” “DEI,” and “identity politics.” It’s a continuation of what a Flemish humanist named Clenardus said after visiting Portugal, referring to the prevalence of Black slaves (and non-Black Muslims) in 1535. “Portugal is so crowded with these people that I believe that in Lisbon, there are more men and women slaves than free Portuguese… Truly, when I first arrived in Evora I thought that I had come to some city of evil demons: everywhere there were so many blacks whom I so loathe that they may just be able to drive me away from here,”⁴ he goes. This shit has been a European preoccupation for hundreds of years; it’s not new, so it should not be surprising. Part of what’s important to point out, though, is that they aren’t the only ones with the preoccupation, even if they have contributed the most energy and infrastructure for it. Something that this piece will highlight and try to navigate is the lateral—in the sense of sharing oppressors, rather than quantizing-then-equalizing oppression—harm that can be levied against Black people, given the ways that Blackness is positioned as a receptacle for such violence, even in contexts of other people being harmed. 

I never want to make it seem like we have a monopoly on the experience of violence, though;⁵the Orientalist (or Septentrional or Meridional) process of being Othered makes all who don’t fit the Occidental mold “valid” targets for violence. The very truth of difference⁶ becomes a way by which those with the (outsized) capacity for violence can justify their behaviors, filtering it through talks of nature, civilization, science, and/or humor.⁷

I’m thinking about this in tandem with the “Global War on Terror” (GWOT), which was/is a US-led effort to punish Iraq and Afghanistan (alongside the wider Levantine world) for 9/11 (which makes about as much sense as it sounds). Another function of this war is consolidating the fights against non-and-anti-capitalist resistance that has antecedents in resistance dating back hundreds of years. The GWOT clearly ties to the Gulf War and Vietnam War. However, I contend that there is a decently reasonable thread that ties fears around “terrorism” to wider capitalist fears around losing their bloody spoils; this is made abundantly clear around how the state talks about “opposing” ideologies, from red scares to Black Power to green scares to antifa. This could help illuminate the reasons why Al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Polisario Front, and the Prairieland Defendants are referred to under the same broad umbrella. 

This will be explored further—as it is a big point of the essay—but flipping the “great chain of being” on its head in a sense will be useful. Rather than seeing all of this stuff as separate, I want to highlight the various forms that violence takes, both “fast” and “slow” as gravely serious (with an eye for doing away with the dichotomous aspect of such a binary). 

That’s where the title comes in. Other writers have pointed out how the GWOT really started out in 1492. I contend that we go even further back, to 1441, switching “on” to “of,” realigning the consequence (“terror”) and the cause (colonial-enslaving-patriarchial-capitalism). This reframes the conflict; rather than the US reacting to bad actors so as to protect democracy and freedom or whatever, it’s a fight, rooted in antiBlackness, on who gets to live—and who doesn’t. 

Before we get into the core of this essay, I want to share a bit about where I’m coming from. This should help contextualize why I’ve approached things in the way that I have, alongside why I see that approach as important. To start, I’m a pan-African and New Afrikan anarchist.⁸ For me, that confers a belief in building a decolonial,⁹ egoistic, popular power on one hand and a deep-seated negation on the other. These two approaches are then composed and braided together—prioritizing syncretism over synthesis—through (eco)(trans)feminist communization. 

These and other cultural/philosophical commitments have led me towards the core values of locality/contextuality, communality/interconnectedness, relationality/interdependence, and incompleteness/smallness, in the frame of autonomy/individuality. I’ll flesh these out so they’re clear. 

Locality and contextuality are about how we make understanding. It flows, in rivulets and bands, to being, to knowing, to meaning, and to learning. It is sense-feeling and having/building awareness in the individual and communal bodyminds land, whether we’re talking about the earth beneath our feet, the warmth of the sun at our backs, the breath dancing from our tongues, or the water passing our fingertips in a stream. Land gives us the ability to know, be, think, and learn, even if it’s in spite of a direct and/or otherwise clear connection. Land is not the “background” or the “stage.” It is the very metaphor-made-manifest of “theater.” It is the “thing” or “space” that allows for people to… be. This implies a facilitation of corporeality, which implies spatiality, itself sutured onto temporality. 

Alongside this sense of being situated (if the relationship described could be encapsulated in a word), it is critical to understand how power functions. The coloniality of power narrows the understanding of land as to be nothing more than property; an inert, willess thing to be used, abused, and ultimately destroyed—or “saved”—but never listened to. This feeds into turning life itself into legible commodities (and violently deriding anything that resists this modus operandi). To fight against this means to (build the ability to) (de-/re-)territorialize¹⁰ connections to land, in obvious, “fingers in the dirt” ways, and in: 

1.  knowing the deep history of place and space that informs current situations;
2. having a clear understanding of the present as framed around a core question: how do we know what is going on right now, in a robust way, and how can we connect it to what has happened before (or prove that something new is happening, which is a move that would require a shitton of abductive evidence)? What follows is inquiries around what knowledges are a part of those threads of time, and; 
3. what/whose knowledge has been suppressed and fragmented—if not destroyed—in the context of coloniality.
   

Communality and interconnectedness are about understanding that individualism is a useless fiction, and, as such, should be unwoven from the collective quilt. “In its place,” there might be a contextual and contextualized understanding of “the self.” This comes from carrying a budding and building awareness of land and its implications for labor, life, and living. It looks like individuals coming together while maintaining autonomy, freely sharing, contributing, and gifting power and labor, alongside “authority”/influence/respect, with an eye towards culturally relevant activities like rites/rituals/ceremonies/games/celebrations (or more spontaneous/chaotic cultural expressions like the general concept of play). 

Relationality and interdependence are about, at their core, Obligations and Accountabilities. These come from the fact of being entangled with the world as a consequence and a cause of being a part of it. They are not the same as Bourgeois-Eurocentric Laws that flatten the richness and texture of being in a composition with all that is into the compressed and fetid concepts of Rights and Duties. Obligations and Accountability look more like checking in. It’s about making sure that the actions that people take to build respect for and responsibility to, alongside sharing with and tending to those relations with the not-us, whether they be the land, their people, other beings, or concepts, stories, and philosophies. Implied here is militantly intolerating intolerance, where an understanding of how power functions acts as a tool to ensure any cruelty, meanness, and vitriol—all the way up to “visceral” violence—is used against opposition and oppressors, rather than having the powerful use such things against those without power. 

Incompleteness and smallness are primarily about acknowledging the non-centrality of people who’re biologically human (as opposed to other people, like bears) in the world. Coloniality has put (specific) humans at the center of the world, framing everything around “his” (as it is so often understood) interests. To fight this, humans may see ourselves as, in a sense, fulfilled by the truth of our non-centrality.

Rather than having to “earn” our “right” to be, we “assert” and “affirm” our being, by trying to live well, through the retooling of our relationships so as to be more intentional and self-aware of the fact that they are relational. It is acknowledging the fact that we are of the biological-ecological world as much as we are of the technical-sociocultural world. It also helps us understand that we can simultaneously be singular and multitudinous. 

These ideas come together to form a whole. It is how we (could and maybe should) relate to the world; whole-ness along with part-ness, an ecology and an assemblage. It points towards complementarity, even from/with/in tensions and conflicts. It is framed by a militant horizontality of power, the maximization of autonomy/self-determination, and acephalous social structures. In particular, social reproduction will not be gender bound, and production/maintenance, distribution, and consumption will be ecological and delinked-degrown-communized. 

I hope that, in the dusky haze of the present, these ideas act as fireflies, lighting a way forward, even with their dim and intermittent luminance. They point me towards intentionality with my own community, both in the sense of the physical people I know and love, and the people with whom I share a station, expansively conceived as it relates to what I mean by “people” and what I mean by “station.” It also points me towards the importance of militancy and radicalism, because none of these values can be fully embodied without negating the present state of things. 

This move, in the main, comes from building power that is at least non-political (and is ideally anti-political). If politics is about power, and, in following Cedric Robinson in Terms of Order, is defined as that power being “routinized and institutionalized,”¹¹it can be seen that, from the rest of that book, the type of power discussed is “power-over.” It is the ability to get someone else to do something, regardless of how they feel about it. I often find that it is more useful, when thinking about concrete events, to look at power in multiple ways (including those that can point to more communized ends than the kind of Machiavellian orientation of politics that was just laid out). In this multifaceted view, power is, at its core, about relationships to capacities. That is to say, power is not only what one can do, but it’s what one can do in view of how one can do it. This indicates a possibility of domineering power, but it can also be a non-hierarchical, social power. 

Having this expansive understanding can help move the framing from “power-over” toward “power-to” (individual skills and gifts) and “power-with” (collective skills and gifts). This gives a critical frame for looking at what is done in the present, past, and contextualizing, at least in part, why things suck so bad. 

My final note is that this is Continental “US” (lower 48-states) centric, insofar as the b-sides of this essay will orient around that context in a general sense, as that is where my well of knowledge springs most forcefully from. I’m Midwestern. However—this is not a claim about a hierarchy of importance! Nor is it something that will allow me to focus narrowly on what is now the US. If the essay title is anything to go by, I want to modestly trace the threads that have made “four continents” “intimate.” To this end, the main focus will be on the relations between New Afrikans and Natives, and this “starting point” is more theoretical than literal. The intent is to be thinking about our groups, at least nominally, as it relates to all that’s discussed. I am, at risk of sloppiness, more interested in dependencies and entanglements than strict boundaries¹²,though boundaries there will be. Regardless, I am informed by Black diasporas, Native folks from across this hemisphere, colonized islanders, and other racialized and gender marginalized folks.¹³

It will do our conversation well to say that this essay looks at Native and Black communities as distinct, in a certain sense. This is mainly a matter of truth and convenience, rather than universal fact. There are obviously folks with shared ancestral heritage to a ton of varying degrees, and others with enrollment in Native nations. I want to point to more ways to relate, even beyond those more clear-cut cases. The more general exploration here is a self-motivated starting point, and we should not only strive to learn about specific communities (like nations, reservations, and enclaves), but actual specific people and groups of people (ie, think of it as the difference between knowing a neighborhood’s demographics and knowing the folks on a particular block). Those are the folks we’ll actually be able to make shit shake with. This essay is meant to be one of many launchpads for that work.

Interlude¹⁴

“SVH: One of the fundamental ethical questions/problems/crises for the West [is] the status of difference and the status of the other. It’s as though in order to come to any recognition of common humanity, the other must be assimilated, meaning in this case, utterly displaced and effaced: “Only if I can see myself in that position can I understand the crisis of that position.” That is the logic of the moral and political discourses we see everyday — the need for the innocent black subject to be victimized by a racist state in order to see the racism of the racist state. You have to be exemplary in your goodness,” — Saidiya Hartman & Frank B. Wilderson, The Position of the Unthought 

To start, a core framing device for this discussion, inspired by Engels, can be found in the imbricated concepts of quality and quantity, alongside how they facilitate comparison and analogy. Understanding the quality (a description of what something is in a truthful sense or at least appears to be i.e., a thing and/or its properties¹⁵) and quantity (how long, often, intensely, and/or much a thing happens/is) of an event, system, or process are what is often—if empiricism, qualitative methods, and quantitative methods in social science are anything to go by—focused on as the ultimate nature of understanding social and sociogenic phenomena. Those understandings shouldn’t be discarded, but they are incomplete without an understanding of the experiences¹⁶those phenomena engender and how those experiences are experienced.¹⁷

For example, a qualitative understanding of enslavement-as-labor-bondage, i.e., a (simplified) “labor theory of slavery,”¹⁸ may lead someone to understand indenture, African enslavement, and Indigenous enslavement (or, in the most egregious cases, nonBlack wage labor, given the constant refrain of “wage slavery”) as of similar essences, or, to come from the other direction, similar enough so as to establish similar subjectivities, and, as such, the opportunity for an all-encompassing emancipatory political program. This isn’t completely unfounded. In a certain sense, I am all for a full-spectrum approach to liberation. My ideal situation is for people to be able to work together. However, it should be made clear that finding a low(est)-common-denominator and building politics around that encourages coherence through adherence rather than creativity, productive tensions or chaos, and solidarity. Focusing on negative programs like ending exploitation and positive programs like self-management is good but insufficient if we want to reach the kinds of emancipation that are hard to imagine, let alone those more concrete goals in themselves. Sitting at the level of those “objective interests” can lead to an obfuscation of how actual people actually interact with/in the world, which is against “their” and the “collective” interest¹⁹ (at least) as often as it is for. There are too many communities harboring abusers and misogynists alongside programs of “care” for me to think otherwise.

Alternatively, a bottom-barrel approach can instrumentalize people to struggle, encouraging a delimiting in order to fit into a restrictive revolutionary program. Adding quantity into this specific example might lead to an understanding that, say, African slavery is exceptional due to its sheer numerical force of population compared to other bondages, alongside its ‘stickiness’ through the heritable nature of African enslavement, which could itself be considered at the intersection of quantity (progeny increasing number of enslaved) and a quality of the quantity (the fact of heritability itself). This is also problematic, though, as it (beyond any qualms around the veracity of this claim) can lead to labeling this kind of bondage as “worse” than others in ways that may be “true,” but rhetorically points yet again towards a zero-sum political orientation that works to foreclose the ending of bondage-as-a-phenomena, replacing a lack of care or invisibilization (that comes from not acknowledging) with a hyper-vigilance or hyper-visibility (that comes from “acknowledging” in a specious manner²⁰). Neither orientation endows the tools to address the animating dynamics of domination. Quality and quantity are useful but insufficient facets of understanding things (even recursively) in order to change them. 

We can get closer to avoiding these pitfalls through comparison and analogies. These are common tools to try and address the differences in the qualities and quantities of experiences. One of the most salient examples of this for me is the Subcomandante Marcos poem that goes “Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel…” 

This is a pretty powerful rhetorical tool, as comparisons and analogies are a way to open the door to an understanding that seemingly disparate struggles are connected (though it could just as easily be used as a way to shut struggle down, with a “you ain’t special” kind of tone). Regardless, there needs to be effort put into not creating false equivalencies; for example, antiBlackness is (often) racist but cannot be analogized to racism alone.²¹ To sidestep the issue of false equivalencies, the analysis has to try and understand the animating structures and dynamics of each form of oppression and their intersections, alongside the shared/common/enmeshed oppressions and experiences that allow for analogizing to be made. Said otherwise, what is it that connects a gay person in SF to a Palestinian in “Israel,” and how can that information be used to build tangible lines of solidarity that respects both struggles?

General categories are at best just that; general features of something rather than all-encompassing explanations across all the things that those generalizations touch. That should let folks know that when it comes to having a full enough understanding for the sake of analysis and strategy, they don’t go far enough. Each experience of oppression doesn’t map to each other 1:1, which is especially true in how those experiences are experienced by individuals. This beckons a deeper dive in an understanding of quality and quantity, seeing more intimately the implications of each within a given setting, their imbrications, and how they may come together as more than the sum of their parts, through comparison, analogy, or otherwise. One can’t stop there, though. I’m still developing the tools to understand this, but the general thrust is a lesson alchemized from intersectionality; each place that experience overlaps creates something that is effectively a “new” experience, at once accumulative (like, being a Black disabled maGe shares some general features with all Black folks, all disabled folks, and all maGes) and unique (there are some very unique things that come with being a Black disabled maGe that would not be found with a Black cis man or a Black disabled cis man a or Black abled maGe etc etc…). This analysis work should happen along material, discursive-rhetorical, and power(-structural) lines. 

So, to bring it all together: oppressed, dominated, exploited, and/or dispossessed people (we’ll call them dominated’, said out loud as “dominated prime”) tend to understand their experience through a more specific quality than domination’, like their race, ability, religion, gender, fatness, class, affinity, and/or any other myriad of identity or embodiment markers that have been categorized and (poorly) quantized to various positions in a given caste system (the “rigidity” dependent on a given society at a given historical conjuncture). The dominated’ might try to stake out a claim based on this-or-that quality, multiple, or even their intersections.²² This lends itself to an understanding of quantities related to those qualities, like skin tone as it relates to race or weight as it relates to fatness, and how those relate to other qualities, like the intersection between race and fatness. One might come to be in solidarity with those who sit at the same or similar intersections. Or, by understanding whatever bigotry they are on the receiving end of, they might compare or analogize their specific experiences to others that share the quality of domination’, whatever shape it may take, in a tenor similar to Subcomandante Marcos, pointing, however crudely, crassly, or roughly, at shared systemic issues. 

This perspective, tempered by an analysis of materialism, discourse, rhetoric, and power structures, can create the foundations for decently strong solidarities, shaped by the maxims of “all our struggles are connected” and “none of us are free until all of us are free.” However, there is a danger in operating solely upon the terrain of comparison and analogy for solidarity, even if tempered as described. We have to keep in mind that the actual experience of experiencing a quality (with its implied quantities and any other qualities) is very individual/particular. Not only does the combination of qualities create a unique quality; individuality itself is a unique quality, by way of emergence. One can’t fully comprehend the totality of individual experience, even if one were able to catalog and accurately assess not only each of the qualities & quantities that make someone who they are (or a situation what it is), but their interconnections, and the unique qualities that emerge at those intersections. This means that whatever the praxes are, they should, in a general sense, strategically if not tactically, encompass or address (and not necessarily catalog) as much of the experiences of domination’ that a given source of immiseration generates and is connected to/imbricated with as it can. This is a tall order, but a lot of progress can be made by listening to people when they speak from their experiences,²³ while filtering out bullshit with care.²⁴ Taking those folks seriously is paramount. 

1. This essay has been a long time coming; I appreciate everyone who has waited patiently and supporting-ly. Writing about my folks is always an odd combination of draining, invigorating, exciting, and unnerving. Many feelings swirl around in my belly at
   the thought of folks finally getting their hands on it; I hope it comes off as more libertarian than… libertarian.
   
   This essay started as a kind of short polemic against an experience I was constantly having in my organizing life—people asking me why I cared about Native folks and Indigeneity more broadly since there “aren’t that many of them”—which often betrayed
   deeper realities of falling for colonial propaganda. As it often came from folks who were themselves victims of this same apparatus of falsehoods, even to the extent of being on the receiving end of similar lies being told, it made me want to dive deeper. I’m always working on six-or-seven+ projects at a time, and so I try to balance big projects like Egoism and Cooperation and really big projects like my upcoming fantasy thriller novel(la)s with small ones like what this essay was supposed to be. However, the more I dove into it, the more I had to say. I’ve also learned that I tend to need to say something well (though that’s tp to y’all)—and in a robust format—before I can really start to distill it into the nutritious bites I yearn to cook up. What was supposed to be a month-long project that took maybe 20 hours to complete has ballooned; but I wouldn’t have it any other way. I am a bit sad that Native American Heritage Month came and went, though.
   
   Regardless, I hope that what lies below can be a droplet of water in the sea change toward one of the most critical missions of our time: navigating difference in a way that is generative, rather than harmful. ↩︎
2. I would like to thank folks for reading early drafts of this as well… it was a doozy to make, and y’all have helped ensure that it’s as good as it can be! Any boons are yours to claim, and any faults are mine alone. ↩︎
3. The core conceit here is that since this shit isn’t meritocratic, effort alone is not going to cut it. Many different ideas have to work in tandem with what could be called proBlackness, if it is to achieve its desired aims of empowering Black folks. While
   antiBlackness is obviously harmful, so too is a misinformed proBlackness or ambivalence about Blackness. This implies a lot of thorny questions and ambiguities, especially as approaches towards proBlackness—though this is true for many a response to
   Othering logic—shape themselves (or otherwise could be interpreted as being based) on “inclusion” or “recognition.” Focusing on those are dead ends, since they don’t challenge the system that upholds the Othering in the first place. This is why “Black faces in
   high places” does not improve the lot of Black(ened) folks in any general sense; it actually ends up serving our subjection via facilitation and pacification. So, the answer is not, for example, a statement that indicates a desire to “get more Black folks in
   Hollywood,” it’s about people creating a situation where Hollywood, the antiBlack force that it is, isn’t allowed to be a principal power in shaping collective imaginaries. ↩︎
4. From A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1441-1555, p. 1 ↩︎
5. What I will say is that there can be a hierarchy of violence whereby nonBlack nonwhite people can try to diminish the violence they experience through enacting antiBlackness. ↩︎
6. My tack here is to not lean into “sameness,” as any such resonance is alongside at least as much dissonance. I believe that contending with this is where all of the generative potential for change lies, and that being able to find solidarity in view of differences will be much more durable than the shortchanged versions of unity and solidarity that have historically united people while planting the seeds for oppression to continue. ↩︎
7. Understanding that violence exists in a behavioral ecosystem is critical. Rhetorically, violence is often imagined to be all about the moment of impact, rather than being inclusive of the environment that facilitates it. However, the context is critical. This is not to say that something like making a racist “joke” is “the same” as a physical hate crime. It’s meant to, among other things, highlight the correlation between those activities, pointing out how before someone does the physical harm, they are likely, at the very least, sharing hateful thoughts in some space amenable to such behaviors. Regardless, it is also worth saying that while violence here is invoked in its categorically negative sense, that is not the only form it can take. At risk of overemphasizing the many ways that the same word can be used, it should be kept in mind that while violence will often be referred to in a negative manner, there is the possibility for an unsavory but “positive” violence. That would be the violence of the oppressed defending themselves: i.e., resistance. This is critical to understand, as this violence is often hypervisible and disproportionately punished. It is much easier to get away with being an abuser, than defending oneself from said abuse. ↩︎
8. This anarchist perspective, where I am against domination and hierarchy in all forms, and for free association, free initiative, solidarity, and autonomy, shapes my understandings of the events that we’ll discuss and what I’ll propose as ways to address the malaise that Black folks and Native folks find ourselves in. Some potentially contentious ways that this manifests are a general criticality of (aspects of) previous strategies that our communities have used, especially as it pertains to Statecraft, politics, and the various forms of “uplift” or “civilizing” ideas that accompany integration/assimilation and multiculturalism. This criticality is not to question the commitment or awareness of our ancestors; it is to be able to carry forward our struggles in ways that give us the highest likelihood to get at the same essence they were grasping for: emancipation and autonomy.⁹ Decoloniality and decolonization can’t be understood without some specific analysis done on (anti-)Indigeneity and (anti-)Blackness, both as world systems, and in their specific manifestations/forms throughout the world. ↩︎
9. Decoloniality and decolonization can’t be understood without some specific analysis done on (anti-)Indigeneity and (anti-)Blackness, both as world systems, and in their specific manifestations/forms throughout the world. ↩︎
10.  Deterritorialization here is about the social relations of the land changing, from the primacy of collective structures in pre colonial regimes to settler colonial private regimes. This beckons us to once again de/reterritorialize the land, to change that social relation to modalities of collective care and stewardship by indigenous communities, rooted in traditional ecological knowledge, buttressed with appropriate technology. ↩︎
11. From Page 4 of the aforementioned book.
    ↩︎
12. though boundaries there will be. Regardless, I am informed by Black diasporas, Native folks from across this hemisphere, colonized islanders, and other racialized and gender marginalized folks ↩︎
13.  Folks who I won’t quote directly but have learned a great deal from and whose ideas brined this work (though any faults, oddities, and issues are all mine) are Claudia Jones, Emma Goldman, Gurminder Bhambara, Voltairine de Cleyre, Alice Mah, Frantz Fanon, Jonathan O. Chimakonam, Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, Jasbir Puar, an ex who remains a critical intellectual interlocutor, Kiana Davenport, and Howard Zinn, who first introduced me, however crudely, to the idea that the exploration of “the past” or “history” (as I’m undecided on which better encapsulates that plank of my project) could itself be libertarian.
    ↩︎
14. I will be using the “legal” word for Native folks (starts with an I and also refers to folks from the biggest country in South Asia) only when quoting or referring to something by name that does, where it would be odd or otherwise anachronistic to the point of losing clarity to do otherwise. I’ve had a lot of conversations around using or not using that word; my take is that if it offends anyone, we shouldn’t hold onto it until our knuckles (if we are of the paler varieties) turn white. I’ll avoid using it when I can, opting for Indigenous when speaking in the broadest terms and Native when talking about folks who are specifically Indigenous to the Americas. ↩︎
15. A “thing” in this case can be obvious things like rocks or pipes, living things like plants or people, or social technologies like states or elder councils. ↩︎
16. The word “experiences” here acts as a container to bundle together the constellations of subjectivities that accompany intersectional be(com)ings, like, as an example, “what” it “means” to “be” a Black person living near Wayne State University in Detroit in 2026. ↩︎
17. This phrasing/idea of “how experiences are experienced” gets at the ways that a concrete individual think-feels about their quantities and qualities. There are ways to talk about what it means to “be” of a certain community—whatever that looks like—in ways that are more social-scientific in the sense of having features that are shared due to structural positionality. This, though, is getting at how individuals feel about those things, even to the extent of how they feel about how they feel. This is a useful thing to keep in mind so as to avoid homogenization. ↩︎
18. One of the more generative (i.e. expansive with relation to fitting into my object of critique while still having a lot of good things to learn) examples I can think of is A Racial Theory of Labour. My main issue is that many of these ideas position slavery, as this piece puts it, as “labour and nothing but labour.” This (logically) makes slavery out to be wage labor but really bad, or wage labor as slavery but not nearly as bad. This, in a certain sense, gives the game away, as the rush away from blackness shows that it is not just a limit of capitalism (i.e. the worst that it can do to the people under it), but the limit of being. The particularity of the modern idea(l) of universal humanness/universal subjectivity cannot be neatly unspooled from colonialism, capitalism, slavery, which all operate through Blackness. It’s not just that capitalism can’t be understood without Blackness, it’s that nothing can be understood without relating to embodiment (and the reading of bodies, in their concrete and abstract shapes) as critical to the world system. This gives us at least a good amount of juice in understanding “gaps” that (are often interpreted as deviations [or maladaptive accentuations] from originary principles) communist theory has had for folks who don’t fit into the proletariat as it is often neatly and tidily imagined. Having to ask where Black and Native folks fit in general, along with meta-industrial labor are examples of core analytical shortcomings. Blackness structures concepts of embodiment by being the tool that is used to negotiate the dialectic, while being seen as never being capable of dialectics in itself; think of Hegel’s ideas about History as it relates to Africa. These are not “moral” failings so much as they are structurally reproduced ones that are byproducts of reproducing patriarchy and antiblackness (plus its descendant of racism) alongside regimes of labor. This is all to say: the value of slaves cannot be overstated. But “value” is serving a few functions here, being about material, power, discursive, desiring, and affective benefit. ↩︎
19. Here, I’m thinking through the ways in which “class consciousness,” “critical consciousness,” or “class interests” can be used as a way to avoid the reality that the actually-existing consciousness of certain positionalities are chauvinistic and opportunistic in their interests, in ways that might clash with whatever revolutionary potential they theoretically could have. ↩︎
20. An example of this phenomenon may be what’s explored in The Land Question; trying to flatten the South African Black Liberation movement into one that was against apartheid (and other such regimes that map well onto its imaginary, as apartheid is but a blip in the settler colonial history of Southern Africa) specifically and singularly, leaving the settler colonial context underdiscussed. In this, the fact that apartheid was/is harmful acted/acts as a lightning rod to certain sections of struggle, leaving underexplored the foundations that facilitated apartheid. For bondage as a social relation to be abolished, there has to be work done that attacks fundamental and foundational systems that prop bondage up. It cannot just be about attacking appearances or more surface level systems, so as to make those systems more “livable” for the populations-in-bondage. ↩︎
21. Race can crudely be thought of as a regime of proximity to Blackness, designed so that everyone is incentivized to run away from it. At the “extremes” of the matrix of racialization is white and Black, where Blackness is both the limit and left outside of human-ness, made to be subhuman (think of comparisons to monkeys), superhuman (like assuming that Black women have higher pain tolerance, or that Black men have super strength or are naturally physically adept), and/or (situationally) human (lumping New Afrikans in under the banner of “benefitting” from American imperialism, civilizing missions, or the more general woes of “human nature,” which categorically tend towards the negative; this inclusion is specious, but it is worth it to call out, so as to not frame the treatment of Blackness as categorically subhuman). This “plasticity,” as Zakiyyah Iman Jackson refers to it in Becoming Human, makes Black people both everything and nothing at the same time. Some examples that hint at these structural/systemic dynamics, in the “visible” field of the discursive, come from the constant (un)thought of Black folks, through the worldwide adoption of (apparent) Black cultural signifiers, as symbols of “resistance,” “rebellion,” “subversion,” or “counterculture.” Saying the N-word (or adding adjectives to it to target different groups, where “Blackness” is the “punchline”), getting hairstyles meant for afro-textured hair and are culturally relevant to Black peoples, and the virulent defensiveness when called out are what this looks like. We are ultimately seen as and understood to be the embodiment of the ability for people (especially the “interesting little things” that they make/do) to become fungible and materially alienated, a metaphor made manifest, born of blood, beams, and bile. It makes sense that people would get mad at their appliances fighting back; a mutual on twitter has pointed out the (historical) peculiarity of simultaneously wanting slaves and for them to like you. The main thing that makes Blackness “unique,” though, is not any of these discrete happenings, as many people (inclusive of those who aren’t biologically human) experience versions of these things, even (and sometimes especially) those who do it to us, though we could also say that those experiences are shaped by our treatment, as in the case of the colonial taxa for Pacific Islanders. It’s not even the simple summation (or complexity that leads to unique things emerging) of these experiences. It is, in my estimation, the fact that these questions and discursivities are all descended from a project that made/makes Blackness the “B-side” of modernity and all of the “positive” values associated with it. It’s the intimate Other, an antagonist to modernity’s protagonist, the Human subject (ie, the citizen of civil society). At its simplest, modernity could not exist without (anti-)Blackness, as it needs to always (be able to) reference what it is not. Black folks and the idea of Blackness have been critical to the literal and metaphorical building of this world, given the ways that antiBlackness, being used as it was consolidated, motivated our enslavement, our labor, our desires/personalities/pathologies, our deaths, and everyone’s imaginations/the ways that they think. For that last point, think about how often Blackness is invoked, from ironic jokes to deep seated sociopolitical and philosophical fears (and “aspirations”…), as the absolute worst (or “best”…) thing, moreso than even death. It isn’t just bad, it defines what bad is. This metaphor-ing is paired with a lack of understanding that sees itself as having a full understanding. (Anti-)Blackness (and modern slavery, its coterminant) is at once culturally suffused and ever-present. ↩︎
22. Think of the Black Panthers: a group based around the qualities of Black people, Black liberation, and a Maoist-inspired Marxism-Leninism. ↩︎
23. This can be literal (folks talking about things that happened to them or folks that they know) or more esoteric (folks talking about their own understanding of things that have happened to them or other things in their life that generate an emotional response). ↩︎
24. This is a reminder to not let bigotry slide. For example, if a person accurately asses that the government isn’t supporting them, but they frame it as being because of an influx of “poor immigrants” who are “hoarding all the resources” and “getting free handouts” (this is a thing I have dealt with in meatspace more than once), you better shut that shit down with the quickness. There is an ability to acknowledge hardship without being essentialist or identity reductionist. ↩︎