Anarkata praxis seeks to consolidate a revolutionary proposition around already existing cultures of opposition in Black/Afrikan life. Anarkata praxis strives to combat transmisogynoir, homophobia, and patriarchy through prioritizing the voices and leadership of trans Black women and non-men as crucial to the survival of our communities. Hierarchy anchors the way that Black people can be held captive, making Black trans women and other non-men exposed to

more extreme vulnerabilities and violences. They must be at the center of Anarkata struggle in the total liberation of all Black people. Anarkatas understand Black trans women as being positioned at the very bottom of the gender hierarchy and as a result are subjected to large amounts of violence, while Black cis men are at the top of the gender hierarchy in the Black community and experience the most benefits relative to other members of the Black community.

Because of this, it is crucial and of utmost importance that Black trans women and Black QTGNC people are broadly supported and cultivated as leaders of revolution. By leadership, we mean respected and affirmed in our capacity and skill to readily take initiative in matters concerning Black liberation, including the drive to spread such capacity and skills so as to spread leadership (ex: the ways Black Queer folk organically intervene in houselessness by forming alternate homeplaces).

Anarkata praxis seeks to disrupt and undermine the gender hierarchy where ever possible by decentering Black cis men from the focal point of Black organizing spaces to uncover the violence affecting the most marginalized of the Black community. Anarkatas prioritize organizing work around issues directly affecting trans Black women and Black non-men and inherently link it to all other issues affecting Black people as a whole. Anarkata praxis is intentional about addressing, unpacking, and dismantling (trans)misogynoir, homophobia, and patriarchy as they crop up in our spaces and organizing. We defend the formation of autonomous spaces that are exclusively for Black trans women, and/or Black non-men. Anarkatas support and advance the mutual aid of Black trans women, trans men, and Black gender non-conforming individuals via food, money, skills, and other means. Given the prevalence of sexual violence, assault, and murder visited on Black non-men, Anarkatas believe that the survival of the most vulnerable in our community should be secured at all costs and by any means necessary, including the use of armed self-defense.

Anarkata praxis seeks to disrupt and undermine ableism through removing abled bodies from the center of our analysis, affirming body positivity, mental health awareness, and developing a Black culture of accommodation for all bodies. Through praxis Anarkatas seek to undermine the hierarchical value systems that assign worth based on ability and force Black bodies to live up to the expectations of being strong abled-bodied property. Anarkatas affirm the mutual aid of disabled individuals and especially Black trans women, and Black gender non-conforming disabled individuals. Anarkatas hope to erase the stigma of disability in the Black community that was born of colonialism and bring awareness to how both physical and mental disabilities exist within our communities and affect our kinfolk. We maintain that Black people will never be free until all members of our community are free and can exercise their bodily autonomy, including through access to their corporeal and cognitive needs.

A key component of Anarkata praxis involves organizing for our survival through the use of mutual aid. We understand mutual aid as an African method of collective support for our communities that Black people have practiced since precolonial times. It involves the distribution of money, food, water, services, skills, medical care, shelter, and other necessities to those who require them. In the vein of STAR House or even the Black Panther Party survival programs we

believe that the immediate material needs of our communities must be the foundation of any Black organizing work. Our revolutionary potential and ability to fight oppression is dependent on the health and safety of our communities. We support the mutual aid of all Black people, especially disabled people, trans women, and gender non-conforming Black people. Anarkatas prioritize the mutual aid of poor and working class Black people and of homeless Black people.

Anarkatas see Black mutual aid as directly undermining the state’s social welfare programs which have always severely underserved Black people, kept us in poverty, and fostered material dependence on the very State which exploits us. Anarkata insists that we must support our own communities and provide our own needs independent of the state.

Anarkata praxis affirms the self-defense of our communities by any means necessary, including armed self-defense. Anarkatas see self-defense as an integral part of our survival that involves protection from both external and internal threats. The internal threats to the Black community consist of homophobic and transphobic violence, sexual violence, sexual assault, domestic violence, child abuse, gang violence, and other predatory elements that prey on the most

vulnerable in our communities. These predatory elements are either dismissed as being characteristic of the Black community, or even encouraged and enabled by the State and police departments through purposeful negligence; what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls structural abandonment. Internal threats also include Entreprenegroes, sell-outs, ‘Black capitalists’ and neocolonial puppets and traitors who operate in the interests of white property and white power, and who ultimately put their individual economic success above the safety of everyone else, while claiming that their ruling class aspirations will trickle down to the masses. Anarkatas say all such predatory elements in our communities work in tandem with policing to contain us in destitution and undermine local autonomy. Because we cannot trust the police and the State to serve or protect us in this regard, it is up to us to build out our capacity to deal with internal threats ourselves in order to support the health and safety of our communities. Black self-defense for these internal threats might include “keep the peace” brigades, domestic violence intervention, communal foster care, emergency shelter for abuse victims, localized emergency response crews, martial arts classes, armed QTGNC brigades, freedom schools that protect our kids from the school-to-prison pipeline, modern underground railroads, and communal arms training. It is especially crucial for Black QTGNC folx and other nonmen among us to be armed (if they so choose) because they constitute the group most exposed to internal violence in our communities. We want to emphasize that only defense against these internal threats will enable us to adequately defend against the police and all the other external forces that seek to kill us. Any praxis which leaves these internal contradictions unaddressed will never bring about liberation for the trans, disabled, sex workers, homeless, migrants, and other super exploited members of our community. Anarkatas say we must show up for our people ourselves.

We must be vigilant of law enforcement who occupy our communities as well as the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, neo confederates, state militia, mass shooters, and all other white vigilantes that seek nothing less than our destruction and containment. Black self-defense for these external threats involve a range of methods that might include police watch groups, self-defense brigades, martial arts classes, and community arms trainings. As the neo fascist climate continues to promote the rise of white nationalisms, knowledge of the enemy is very important, and it is imperative that we can identify the particular nuances of these groups, who they are, and how they function. White vigilante groups are not monolithic, and are not as unified as they appear to be. Each has particular ideological differences and disagreements that can be exploited by us to play these groupings against each other. This kind of subterfuge is another aspect of Black self-defense that we support as Anarkatas calling back to the Anansian role of the trickster. Subterfuge could take the form of false flagging, fake news, false propagandizing, misinformation, infiltration and other means. The building out of our self-defense capacities coupled with subterfuge, can forestall and redirect white supremacist violence away from our communities and back towards our enemies.

Anarkata praxis affirms the use of extralegal activity as a means to achieve Black liberation. Because law depends on and codifies the anti-Black functions of property acquisition, Black criminality, and white terror, Anarkata sees all significant revolutionary struggle for Black liberation as inherently criminalized by the State. Where the law functions to adjudicate matters concerning human subjects, we realize that Blackness is always criminalized under the state precisely because we are marked as inhuman and our bodies are always already outside of the law regardless of whether we are being lawful or not. To be Black is to have one’s very being, (one’s joys, hopes, peace, survival) outlawed by the state. This outlawed status not only provided the legal grounding for slavery, but is the legal impetus behind our bodies being targeted for continued mass incarceration, harassment by law enforcement and white citizens. It is the reason why the cops are so readily called on Black people by white citizens, when no real

reason exists. In being the legal exclusion that is rendered lawless under white supremacy, we cannot ever depend on the law to address our own injuries done to us, and this is why the law is unavailable to us as a means to obtain justice or achieve freedom. In the words of Calvin Warren the law “recognizes the black only in its destruction, and this destruction is required for legal intelligibility. Thus, something like black redress is outside of the law’s jurisdiction to the

extent that the aim of redress is restorative, and restoring black being is not only impossible, but antithetical to the law’s aim.” We understand the white court of law as an illegitimate colonizing institution and reject it as having legitimate jurisdiction over Black bodies. The fugitive nature of Blackness, the inherent outlawing of our bodies by the state and our positionality as being already outside of the law, gives rise to a Black illegalism where extralegal activities to further our survival are foregrounded. For Anarkatas, illegalism does not support all Black criminal activity; only the kind that pushes forward revolutionary struggle and promotes the continued survival of our communities.

In this same vein, alongside the emphasis on mutual aid, Anarkatas also recognize theft as a logical response to the conditions of oppression that the people will organically turn toward as a means not only to secure the resources needed for our survival, but undermine the forces of white supremacist capitalism. Since our people and resources have been systematically plundered from the African continent by the West, and since we will never legally gain the reparations that are owed to us because the injury done to Black people is both illegible to the

law and cannot be properly calculated, Anarkatas say that Black people can and should pursue every means to reclaim those reparations from white people for the damages done from slavery and colonialism, including extralegal activities. Anarkatas do not support stealing from our own people, and certainly not from our most vulnerable community members. We also do not support capitalist exploitation of our people by our own people’s hands, which is also stealing from our community. We do however support the looting, petty theft, and expropriation of large-scale corporations, fortune 500 companies, state institutions, gentrifying storefronts, and other colonizing industries. Moreover, Anarkatas defend the need for militancy in our push for accessibility, including in the expropriation of necessary medical supplies to support our Black elderly, Black disabled, Black trans women, and all others in our community who need them by any means necessary. The pursuit of reparations through extralegal means, the expropriation of white institutions and the redistribution of those resources to our communities is strong Anarkata praxis.

Anarkatas see rioting to be an understandable response to the continued racism, oppression, and exploitation Black people are subjected to under the state—which the people will organically turn toward. For centuries, it has been an expression of our discontent with the intolerable conditions of Black life. Within that history, we have also observed rioting as a means to both expropriate and redistribute resources to our communities, and cause widespread damage to white property. We do not support the looting or destruction of poor and working class Black communities and advise against this. However, Anarkatas recognize that rioting has been a technology used by our people in strategic ways to forestall gentrification, destroy white property, dislocate occupying forces in our communities, sabotage capitalist interests, sustain revolutionary movements and redistribute resources to our communities. We recognize that wherever it occurs, rioting is most revolutionary and has the best praxis when used in these

strategic ways. Anarkatas do not condone riot shaming of our people, and instead see rioting as a tradition of collective dissent belonging to the legacy of Black resistance throughout our history.

Sabotage is another aspect of Anarkata praxis that is dynamic and useful in a variety of ways to push forward Black liberation in our communities. Since the days of slavery, Black people have been conducting sabotage to resist the terms of our bondage, intentionally undermine capitalist production, and conduct revolutionary struggle. Sabotage encompasses a wide array of Black transgressive and extralegal activities we might engage in, and can include anything from petty

theft, to massive worker strikes. It is a decentralized activity that anyone can carry out at any time. There are five main categories of sabotage relevant to Black liberation. Cyber sabotage involves the intentional tampering of computer and network systems and hardware, where communication sabotage involves the disruption of the flow of information via correspondence, email, phone, and spreading of misinformation. Industrial sabotage involves activities that disrupt the flow of capitalist production and are conducted by workers and consumers.

Infrastructural sabotage are any activities that disturb the material systems and functions of institutions, structures, roadways, and equipment. Finally, military sabotage is any activity done to disrupt the police and military’s ability to act. The use of these methods of sabotage done either independently or coordinated with other activities are generally good praxis as long as they are conducted responsibly. Anarkatas also understand the use of sabotage to be an inevitable response to our oppression as people struggle to obtain resources, protect our

communities, undermine capitalism, resist law enforcement and other occupying forces, and wage revolutionary struggle against the oppressor.

Anarkatas believe that Black people have a right to fight for our liberation through armed revolutionary struggle because the position we are forced into as a people make armed conflict inevitable. So long as the artifices of the white supremacist state continue to stand, Black communities will always be antagonized by forms of white terror and state violence. In the words of the Black Liberation Army “we must not only build alternative social, economic, and political institutions, but we must intentionally sabotage, overload, and destroy existing ruling class institutions in the process”. The development of a Black armed front is a logical and valid response aimed at abolishing the order of oppression from our communities and carrying out the revolutionary program of the people. We believe that differing political circumstances, climate, geography, and local conditions will all determine the character and shape of an armed movement in any given locality, but that there should be a few key features. The armed front should emanate from our people, be beholden to our people, and be supported by our people. Such an armed front should be free of hierarchy and honor the leadership and participation of women and nonmen who desire to pick up arms and enter in the struggle. The toxic gun culture

that incubates in armed cadres should be actively abolished and replaced with a culture of revolutionary love. The armed front should conduct its activities underground in order to minimize counterinsurgency measures and it should consist of small groups of fighters in order to minimize infiltration. Small groupings of fighters also increase the speed, flexibility and responsiveness of the front as a whole. Employing guerrilla tactics, such groupings might wage revolution horizontally, operating autonomously and collaborating with each other across groupings without a centralized axis. Finally, its activities should not be irresponsible lest it put our people in immediate danger. During the later stages of revolutionary struggle, armed movements would be key in liberating territories, establishing autonomous zones, and striking decisive blows to the white power structure.

However, Anarkata is expressly against vanguardism and understands the vanguard as counterrevolutionary in so far as it inhibits the revolutionary potential of the people and fosters political dependency on the vanguard. Likewise, we reject democratic centralism and see it as an authoritarian manner of organizing designed to create leadership hierarchies and chains of command within the cadre. Taking seriously the lessons from Black nationalist and pan-

Africanist groups in the past such as the Black Panther Party, the African National Congress (ANC), and the Convention Peoples Party (CPP), we see democratic centralism as a means to consolidate power for high ranking members of the cadre and forecloses the possibility of any further debate for those members of the cadre that are excluded from the decision-making process. Absolute, uncritical loyalty to the mandates of a political organization and its leadership

(even after a “democratic” decision-making process) is not “principled” or “disciplined” but authoritarian and dangerous. As Black anarchist Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin pointed out “democratic centralism poses as a form of inner party democracy, but is really just a hierarchy by which each member of a party is subordinate to a higher member”. We believe that national committees, national leadership, and all other centralized political formations are obsolete and

only get in the way of the necessary work that is done on the ground by local organizers familiar with the specificities of their communities. Finally, we understand centralized organization as always being a susceptible target to attacks by the state. We believe that the centralized nature of Black organizations in the past have contributed to those organizations being easily compromised by counter insurgency measures.

Anarkatas take cues from our ancestor Ella Baker who said that “strong people don’t need leaders,” and take the position that, rather than lead the people, the purpose of a truly revolutionary organization is to be of the people; to help people find their own strength, and empower the people to lead themselves. Anarkatas are interested in helping develop strong people, and by strength we also mean the recognition that liberation for all Black people is realized in the ways we actively and consciously advance the total freedom of one another,

especially in affirming and centering and defending trans women, disabled folx, and the most marginal. The people must be made to understand, as Fanon said, that we are our own magic hands—and that our success comes from the ways we ride for each other, and not from top-down hierarchical authority (especially if that authority is coming from cishets). Rather than vanguardism, we believe in bringing all power to all the people—and not their proxies. Anarkatas believe the people have the power to liberate themselves and that revolution must come from below. Anarkatas believe not in the absence of leadership, but that leadership should be organic, contextual, situational, temporary, and aimed at nurturing the masses and facilitating the masses towards fuller utilization of their own power and potential. A huge part of this is the intentional proliferation of leadership knowledge and skills. This gives space for the inexperienced to develop leadership skills and principled rootedness in the need to support the

most vulnerable—which improves the collective strength, responsiveness, mobility and flexibility of our people. For us, the goal of revolution is to support our community in becoming a well-informed, radicalized, autonomous, and self-sustaining mass.

To this end, Anarkatas consider the political education of our people as tantamount to our growth and success because it not only plays a key part in the political development of the people, but allows us to make well-informed, principled and responsible decisions regarding our liberation. It increases our ability to act on our own and in collaboration with others regarding matters of liberation and provides a foundation for doing so. Without political education, our efforts would dissolve into baseless, unprincipled chaos. In this way, political education provides the very conditions of possibility that support our people in the use of our autonomy. We see political education as consisting of two components: conscientization and radicalization. Conscientization is a process that makes use of practical, theoretical, and experiential knowledge to raise the consciousness level of people (our understanding of the totality of the situation we are in, including its origins and different iterations). Radicalization is the process that uses practical, theoretical, and experiential knowledge to raise a people’s capacity to act (our drive to fight and to organize against the situation we are in, encompassing its ideological and structural makeup). Together the processes of conscientization and radicalization unlock the revolutionary potential of a people. Revolutionary potential is the field of possibility where we

fully realize our collective strength, creativity, and capacity to act in the transformation of our external and internal conditions. Anarkata maintains that the conscientization and radicalization of our people through political education will ensure that Black people realize our revolutionary potential. We want to empower ourselves not only to lead (for) ourselves, but to do so in a responsible and educated manner.

Anarkatas affirm the mobilization of mass movements when it is in service to local organizing. Mobilizing is often an organic response to outrage at our conditions of oppression and can garner momentum, attention, and activity around a particular issue. Although mobilization can be useful to agitate for immediate gains, it is even more effective as a tool of conscientization and radicalization. It can be used to spread revolutionary ideas and inspire our people to act. The means in which mobilization provides opportunities for collective political education is by far the most worthwhile aspect it offers us. It is used well alongside insurgent activities and can gradually escalate political conflict, aiding in the conscientization and radicalization process. In this way, we see it as a powerful organizing instrument, one important for building the kind of

popular support and momentum that is needed to support other activities. However, mobilization without the proper channels of organized local activity to ground it, are largely unsustainable, ineffective and susceptible to institutional cooptation. Taking cues from Kwame Ture, all mobilization must be rooted in genuinely radical organization that is relevant to the specific issues Black people face across localities.

Anarkata’s approach to organization emphasizes localization, decentralization, horizontalism, and flexibility. We understand localization as the development of small, independent autonomous groups that organize around local issues in their respective communities. Decentralization is the cross collaboration of those local groupings who come together to form an autonomous Anarkata network, but still operate independently and freely associate with the network. Horizontalism is the flattening out of hierarchical relationships across and within both local and broader network levels, as well as the exchange of mutual aid and resources across these levels—which includes the intentional proliferation of leadership

capacity and skills. Flexibility is the process of figuring out when/how to erect or disband more or less rigid organizational formations in response to different situations. Together, these four allow us to minimize hierarchical power within our organizations and promote the highest levels of autonomy and direct democracy, and to keep our organized participation in movements

responsive to contextual needs.

Free association is the basis of Anarkata organizational frameworks, which value the autonomy of both individuals and groups. Members of the local group are free to choose how they might participate within the group and local groups have the autonomy to decide how they interact and participate within the network. Leadership arises within the group on a contextual basis as is necessary, and when it does, that leadership is beholden to the group as a whole and accountable to it. We understand this approach to leadership as free initiative. Any member of

the group is free to take the initiative in any instance where it is necessary for the group, including taking the lead or fulfilling a role or task. Once the initiative is taken, the member is held responsible for it by the group. Likewise, local groups exercise free initiative within the Anarkata network and might take the lead on collaborative efforts across local groupings or efforts that involve the network as a whole. Our use of free association and free initiative are expressions of our emphasis on autonomy and are the building blocks of Anarkata organizational dynamics.