Purnell details how multi-racial social movements rooted in rebellion, risk-taking, and revolutionary love pushed her and a generation of activists toward abolition. Calling them felt like something, and something feels like everything when the other option seems like nothing.
She saw too much sexual violence and buried too many friends to consider getting rid of police in her hometown of St. In Becoming Abolitionists, Purnell draws from her experiences as a lawyer, writer, and organizer initially skeptical about police abolition. Millions of people continue to protest police violence because these "solutions" do not match the problem: the police cannot be reformed. From community policing initiatives to increasing diversity, none of it has stopped the police from killing about three people a day. Anderson’s text examines reformism, orthodoxy, and the idea of the nation-state itself as problems that must be transcended and key sites for a liberatory re-envisioning of struggle.įor more than a century, activists in the United States have tried to reform the police. By complicating our understanding of the predicaments we face, The Nation on No Map hopes to encourage readers to utilize a Black anarchic lens in favor of total transformation, no matter what it’s called. It interrogates how history and myth and leadership are used to rehabilitate governance instead of achieving a revolutionary abolition. As a viable alternative amidst worsening social conditions, he calls for the urgent prioritization of community-based growth, arguing that in order to overcome oppression, people must build capacity beyond the state. Amid renewed interest in Black anarchism among the left, Anderson offers a principled rejection of reformism, nation building, and citizenship in the ongoing fight against capitalism and white supremacism. The Nation on No Map examines state power, abolition, and ideological tensions within the struggle for Black liberation while centering the politics of Black autonomy and self-determination.
Anderson, as well as new essays, and a contextualizing biography of the author’s inspiring life. New material includes an interview with writer and activist William C. Making a powerful case for the building of a Black revolutionary movement that rejects sexism, homophobia, militarism and racism, Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin counters the lies and distortions about anarchism spread by its left- and right-wing opponents alike.
This book places its critique of both capitalism and racism firmly at the centre of the text. Anarchist theory has long suffered from a whiteness problem. Now amidst a rising tide of Black political organizing, this foundational classic written by a key figure of the Civil Rights movement is republished with a wealth of original material for a new generation. Perhaps more so' - Peter James Hudson, Black Agenda Report Anarchism and the Black Revolution first connected Black radical thought to anarchist theory in 1979. Its analysis of police violence and the threat of fascism are as important now as they were at the end of the 1970s. A powerful – even startling – book that challenges the shibboleths of 'white' anarchism'.