The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Mansa Musa:

Welcome to Rattling Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa. When you hear the term “anarchy” and “anarchist,” what comes to mind? Joining me today is William C. Anderson, author of The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism and Abolition, and a columnist for Prism News where he writes the series Another Way Out. Welcome, William. Welcome to Rattling the Bars.

William C. Anderson:

Hey, thanks for having me on.

Mansa Musa:

First start out, could you introduce yourself to our audience and share how some of your background?

William C. Anderson:

Yeah. So my name’s William C. Anderson. I’m a writer, an activist, do some organizing here and there, and a person who’s just generally committed to struggle. I am from the deep south and I come from a working class background and I’ve been in movement for the majority of my life. So it’s a pleasure and an honor to be able to discuss a lot of different things with you today.

Mansa Musa:

And as we was talking off camera, this is an interesting subject matter because how you characterize what it is you’re talking about, like anarchism or anarchy and abolition. Most people have a definition and a working definition of abolition. Even if it’s not correct in terms of the overall politics of it, but they got a general idea when somebody say abolition, they can go somewhere and they hear something that somebody can publish or produce a movie or whatever. When you say anarchy and antarchism, that automatically conjure up a perspective that is constantly being perpetuated by the system to give people to define it and they define it through behavior. Right. In the nation on no map, you discussed the perpetual contradiction between black people and citizenship. Can you explain how the statelessness function both domestically and internationally as a cross class phenomenon?

William C. Anderson:

So basically, I think that the best way to start out talking about this and thinking about this would be there is a perpetual and a strong contradiction between black people and citizenship. And so I think for reference, one of the things I could quote is I would refer back to Malcolm X who said that the descendants of enslaved Africans were not brought to the Americas to be made citizens. Specifically, we weren’t brought to the United States to be made citizens. And so Malcolm also said, “I’m from America, but I’m not American.” And when you think about historical precedents like the Dred Scott case and the Dred Scott ruling,

Which was a 7-2 ruling in 1857, that ruling said that Black people were not citizens. It said that we were unable to achieve citizenship because of our Blackness. And it said that the terms citizens and the people of the United States were not synonymous terms. So the ruling explicitly lays a foundation for what Malcolm was expressing in those quotes. It codified a contradiction between blackness and citizenship that I’m working with to draw some parallels and make some other connections to statelessness. So when I’m thinking about what it means to be Black and to have had this historical precedent that said we were not meant to be citizens here, regardless of what happened later, regardless of what formal recognition might have eventually come along, that history is still there and that contradiction is still there. And Black people still experience a lot of the limitations that stem from that contradiction.

And it’s not just in the United States, it’s also across the Americas. A lot of the diaspora, the Black diaspora across the Americas experienced this contradiction too. In my book, I mentioned how it wasn’t until I think in 2015 in Mexico that Afro-descended Mexicans even achieved recognition, formal recognition in that country. And so

Thinking about what it means to try to work from this place where you might have citizenship on paper or not, but you still experience all of these questions around your place in a society, it leads me to start thinking about questions regarding statelessness and how that can actually be used to our advantage as Black people rather than have it be something that’s completely disempowering. And I think that what can be advantageous about it is the challenge to think outside of the state structure and society as we know it, and embrace alternatives that think through that and radicalisms that think through that.

Mansa Musa:

Right. I got it. And I understood that when you set it out, because it create foundation for resistance, how we resist and why we resist, as opposed to not have no vision as to why we resist, but to understand that and what we’re resisting for, am I resisting to be a citizen of the United States or am I resisting for the complete abolition abolishment of a system that treat people less than human and create a class system where racialization creates a dominant class? Sadia Hartman wrote your books forward. How have her concepts of the non-event and waywardness influenced your views of black anarchism and something people practice without using the label?

William C. Anderson:

Cydia is one of the most powerfully influential scholars of our time, I think. And her work and her prose will likely shape generations of thought to come. And I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the afterlife of slavery, which is something I reference a lot and the non-event of emancipation, not just in this text, I’ve been thinking about them a lot, but I just think about them generally a lot because I’m a

Mansa Musa:

Black

William C. Anderson:

Person who experiences all of the things that are implied. I think that when it comes to the non-event of emancipation, it is very much reckoning with a lot of those challenges and those hurdles and those limitations that we face because when we think back to what we’re told that the abolition of slavery was supposed to mean for black people, what it was supposed to mean for our lives, her framing of the non-event, again, brings a lot of those issues to the forefront that I’m trying to think through in my work. So we know that even though something could be said or done or codified and put on paper, such as the abolition of slavery or such as a formal recognition of a black person’s citizenship, that doesn’t necessarily reflect the reality of our day-to-day lives.

So in my book, I’m drawing parallels between her framing of waywardness and the way that myself and Zoe Samudzi frame the anarchism of blackness, similar concepts. And we’re talking about similar things regarding the necessity for Black people to struggle and organize and to thrive outside of institutional consideration. So I think a lot of Black people think about these things like what we were told the abolition of slavery was supposed to be for us, what we’re told citizenship is supposed to mean for us. We think about these things and what our reality is and what actually exists in the world around us. And we arrive at a place organically where we understand that it’s important for us to think outside of the systems that engulf our lives. And ultimately, what I think is so important about something like Waywardness or whether we’re talking about the anarchism of Blackness or any of these different ways that we might describe a specific condition that we experience as Black people, even Ashanti Alston, he talks about something similar.

Ashanti Alson, the former Black Panther and Black Liberation Army member. He also talks about a similar condition in his essay, Black Anarchism. And Lorenzo Kambour Irvin talks about similar things in his work too. So many of these Black people who are arriving across time at this place of trying to understand what it means to be Black and what it means to think outside of the state, what it means to think about statelessness, what it means to think about this condition that requires us to think beyond it and to move beyond it, it’s extremely important. And I think that that contribution that Sadia has offered in terms of her descriptions of waywardness is very much aligned there. It’s very helpful.

Mansa Musa:

Right. And you engaged deeply with the works of George James and imprisoned intellectuals. How has their intellectual production from within the castle system shaped the foundation of black anarchism? And we have attica, we have in this country, like at one point, you had rebellions that was physical response to the dehumanization and oppressive conditions that people that was rounded up and put into captivity, so- called imprisonment responded to, but they responded to the conditions they were being subjected to and they responded in a number of ways. They organized insurrection, took over the prisons. Talk about that. How do you shape that, see that paning out as it relates to the prison movement or prison in general?

William C. Anderson:

Yeah. So I would say that there’s a very strong connection because Black anarchism, as we know it, is born of the prison system. I mean, Martin Sostre, Lorenzo Kombor Irvin, Ashanti Alston, Ajoy Lurtillo, and others, both past and present and black anarchism or were former political prisoners. They are people who understand the depths of the rot of the system that rules over our lives and the true function of the monopoly on violence that we know as the state,

Because they’ve been at its core. And I know you have too. I know that you can speak to that as well. It’s something to see the core of the state from the inside out. And that’s something that you can experience in truth in the prison system. And so I always quote Martin Silstre saying that the prison facility itself is maximum security, but society is just an extension and it’s a minimum security prison. And that radicalism is at the core of Black anarchism. The former Panthers and civil rights activists, BLA members, and others who shaped it over time, they represent a radical departure from these sort of standard and doctrinaire approaches to conventional leftism because they saw and they felt and lived a lot of those shortcomings of past eras and they came to anarchism as an alternative because we’re supposed to evolve, we’re supposed to try different things, we’re supposed to learn and grow.

But so much of that journey for them, specifically in the more modern era of black anarchists in the shadow of black power and coming forth from then, they learned and came to that place through the prison system and through incarceration and through their struggles with repression and the destruction of the party and so much of the repression that happened during the black power era.

Mansa Musa:

Right. And you argued that the left must reject the state’s identifying revolutionary behavior or revolutionaries as criminal like Asada and George Jackson. I was talking to a professor who had her class read the confessions of Nat Turner, but more importantly, they was doing some work around that. And the question she offered them was, she was saying, define the act, basically define what he did, how did you see that? Did you see that as criminal savagery or what? And they say, nah, it wasn’t criminal, it was revolutionary. So why is it important we don’t identify their behavior as criminal as opposed to revolutionary? Why is that important that we do that, the left do that?

William C. Anderson:

Yeah. I think that there’s a lot of different things that we have to confront there and some of the stuff that you’re talking about. When it comes to criminality itself, it brings up a lot of things for me to be considered criminal, to be labeled criminal, it’s not something that everyone has the option of getting away from. Some people might be able to get a haircut or put on the right clothes and carry themselves in a certain way to avoid being characterized as someone who looks like they could be capable of criminality. When it comes to us Black people, our skin alone is enough to make us be considered a criminal. So we don’t really have an easy way out. It doesn’t matter what class we’re in. It doesn’t matter how much money we have. It doesn’t matter what kind of clothes we have on.

Criminality is something that we have projected onto us because we live in a white supremacist society that equates blackness with criminality. So you can have someone like the president of the United States, former president of the United States, Barack Obama, who was talked about like he was a criminal and like he was incapable of being the head of state because of his skin. And to bring it more, to connect it better for this conversation, to make a stronger connection around this, not only did he get characterized as a criminal while he was the president, he also was having his citizenship question. You remember he always had to talk about his birth certificate and where he was born. So that brings back in that point that I was trying to make earlier about black people not being considered citizens, whether we have citizenship or not. I just use that example to say that for us as black people, we can’t really seem to get out of that categorization because we live in a white supremacist society.

The other thing that is bringing up for me is the law in and of itself. Criminal acts under the law are completely subjective to the ruling class and who has power. That’s who decides what is and isn’t against the law. At one point, it was against the law for black people to be educated.

At one point, it was against the law for black people to use facilities to go to the bathroom or to go in certain establishments where there was no welcoming of black people because of segregation. So if you look at how the law has been shaped and changed across time, criminality is ultimately something that has to be called into question totally because the law is not objective. It’s subjective to the whims of the ruling class and the ruling establishment. If they say that it’s illegal for people in prison to get an education, then it’s illegal. If they say it’s illegal for a person who’s seeking asylum from another country to come to the border and make an asylum request, then it’s illegal.

Mansa Musa:

But

William C. Anderson:

We can know that there’s nothing wrong with us receiving an education or people who are incarcerated at receiving an education. We should know that there’s nothing wrong with us being able to access the same resources or go in the same establishments that white people would be able to go into. We know that those things are completely reasonable, but for some reason, we also still buy into this idea that the law is the law and we have to follow it. That’s absolutely not true.

What we need to do is determine what resources and conditions we want to see for our lives and know that people like George Jackson, like Asada, like so many of the Black political prisoners and Black radicals and revolutionaries who came before us, who broke the law intentionally, including as the Black anarchist, Martin Sostri pointed out, Martin Luther King, he has an essay called Martin Luther King was a lawbreaker. That’s exactly what that essay is about. He was pointing out that even the most pacifistic and peaceful people we think of throughout Black history had to break the law in order to get us where we are. So you cannot be scared and fear criminality to such an extent that you think that following the law is going to keep you safe or is going to make your conditions better. It’s absolutely not. And again, to go back to Martin Soster and quote him again, I know I’m quoting him a lot in this interview, but to quote Martin Soster again, he says, “It would absolutely be foolish to think that the rules of your oppressor are going to be what gets you free.” And that’s in essence kind of what I’m trying to get at here.

You can’t follow these rules and laws and think that it’s going to work out for you in the end when it was created by the people who want to keep you in the place where you

Mansa Musa:

Are. And I think that’s the overarching reality of it is that they create the laws to maintain their power and to maintain the authority of Donald Trump. When he got elected, the first thing he did, he went down to the Department of Justice and weaponized it. He had a press conference at the Department of Justice say that Attorney General said, “Look, you going to have a lot of work on your hand because you’re going to be responsible for going out policing the world.” And when he weaponized the Justice Department to the extent they had never been weaponized before, you had what we see estoppel style techniques being perpetuated on United States citizens. Talk about your critique of Panther Poem and how it’s being romanticized, the Black Panther Party aesthetics. And how do you compare that evolution to the equality of women and their ability to organize?

William C. Anderson:

We don’t really have, in my opinion, we don’t really have a functioning left in the US. So people cosplaying the Panthers is the result of that, I would say, to some extent. When you don’t have formations that effectively serve and meet the material needs of everyday people, that’s what you end up with. You end up with a lot of aesthetics. And that’s kind of what leftism is today, especially amongst my generation and younger. It’s largely these competing ideological factions who attach and project themselves onto various movements and governments and stuff around the world while failing to create anything comparable at home. So you don’t really get much beyond aesthetics when you have these denominations of different leftists who aren’t really materializing anything. They’re just trying to look the part or talk the part,

Mansa Musa:

And

William C. Anderson:

They’re kind of really just a lot of rhetoric. That’s really what the left is today, in my opinion. Sister Jenina Irvin, who is also a Black anarchist, and she was the last editor of the Black Panther Party newspaper. She’s someone who’s taught me quite a lot about this, as well as you brought up this point about women. She’s taught me quite a bit about the effectiveness of women in the party. And everyone should go by her book, just came out. It’s called Driven by the Movement, but she disturbs this narrative that Panther women were all miserable and they were oppressed within the Black Panther Party. She kind of pushes back on that a little bit. And that’s not to say that there wasn’t a real threat of violence or issues around gender within the party. I don’t think that that’s what she’s saying, but what she does is she talks about the fact that Black women were the Black Panther Party, and Black women did a large majority of work within the Black Panther Party, and some of the most impactful efforts of the Black Panther Party, like the survival programs, which would later be called intercommunalism, were brought to life by Black women’s labor within the Black

Mansa Musa:

Panther

William C. Anderson:

Party. So regardless of what issues might have happened at different times throughout different eras of the party, she’s always kind of made it clear to me and taught me that no matter what, it was Black women who were making the Black Panther Party function.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, it’s true.

William C. Anderson:

So I think that to bring those two points together, we have to have a real genuine, honest awareness of what the Black Panther Party was because even though a lot of people from my generation and younger generations might look at the Panthers with a very, very romantic view, I think that a lot of times what gets lost is the understanding that the Black Panther Party was an organization that had different eras, different chapters, and different phases throughout its life and its existence. And there was a lot of different turns. There was a lot of different splits. There was a lot of different things that occurred within the party, and it wasn’t just this one thing that you can try to dress up in cosplay. You have to learn from what happened, what transpired, what did and didn’t work, and try to grow from that, not try to mimic it, not try to claim it in the name of your ideology, not try to reduce it to something that it wasn’t.

It’s kind of part of the story of Black anarchism. So many of the Black anarchists who were former Black Panther Party members constantly talk about how we need to learn from the legacy of the Black Panther Party, not just try to mimic it, not try to cosplay it. So it’s a challenge for the current generation to do that and to move past aesthetics and to actually go outside and learn through praxis.

Mansa Musa:

And I think to your point, Kathleen Cleaver, she was organized the Free Huey campaign. She was instrumental in organizing that ultimately got them released. Elaine Brown, while he was in exile in the central committee, the majority of the central committee at the party at that time was women, Erica Huggins, Elaine Brown, and other sisters, they ran the party and they ran the free breakfast program. They maintained the infrastructure of the party in order for it to survive under the onslaught of the FBI. But talk about Angela Davis famously asked our prisons obsolete and has since suggested the nation state itself is obsolete. How does her abolition framework serve as a pillar for anti-state black anarchy today?

William C. Anderson:

I think that Angela Davis’s work is something that has been absolutely fundamental in terms of answering a lot of the questions that many of us have had about abolition. And the abolition conversation faces many of its own challenges because I think when we saw an Increasing popularity around conversations regarding abolition, so much of it centered on the police, the abolition of the police, the abolition of prisons, and oftentimes it stopped there, didn’t go beyond that for a lot of people. And I know that Angela Davis has also raised questions about the nation state form itself too. So I think that in much of her work, she’s provided a lot of foundations that we can learn from and grow from. And I think that with regard to how I approach her legacy, her life and her work and think about abolition, I think what’s important for me is to take abolition and think about it in a way that expands beyond prisons and policing, which is where a lot of people stop.

And I’m not saying that that’s where she stops, but I’m saying that I think a lot of people have a fear about taking that even further.

Mansa Musa:

So

William C. Anderson:

I’m working with a lot of the legacy of her life and also her scholarship and my personal work. And I’m trying to take abolition, that question of abolition further to the state. What divided the socialist movement more largely was this question around the abolition of the state. You had some people in the original historical socialist movement who wanted to reform the state, who wanted to control it, and who wanted to try to use that to create a better life for people and for the masses. Those socialists who would later become identified as anarchists were the ones who wanted to try to build outside of the state, who wanted to try to build through collectives and federations, and who wanted to try to create a life that wasn’t dependent upon, again, what we know is this monopoly on violence.

The state is a colonial construct. So I think that for me, when it comes to abolition and when it comes to my work, and when it comes to the influence of someone like Angela Davis, I’ve learned a lot from her about what the state is capable of through these institutions, through these forms of violence that it produces, like the prison, like policing. And I want to try to encourage people with my work to take it further and to not just try to reform it into something that’s absent of a few forms of violence that it uses, but instead question this construct altogether and ask why we need it in our lives. Can we not organize society free from any sort of colonial structures? Can we not try to build a society that’s liberatory for people that doesn’t centralize power in a monopoly on violence? I’m just asking these questions, and I think that it’s absolutely possible, but we have to at least be open to looking at ourselves as capable of doing so first.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah. I think Lennar, in this analysis, Lennar’s state and revolution, he identified the state as being an instrumental deoppressor and for the intent and the purpose of maintaining control over people. The whole concept of the state is to regulate people in some form, shape, or fashion that’s helpful and maintaining the status quo. Talk about-

William C. Anderson:

Absolutely. The thing that you … If I can just say something about that, I think that what you just said there is extremely important when it comes to that history. You made a great point because you brought up linen and if we go back again to the historical socialist movement, there wasn’t necessarily a disagreement on that point you just made. There might’ve been some people who thought differently, I’m not going to say everybody thought one way, but generally whether you were talking about the anarchist side of the socialist movement or whether you were talking about the status side of the socialist movement, it was generally agreed upon by many people that the state was an oppressive instrument.

It was just you had some people who said, “We need to get control of the oppressive instrument and try to use it to liberate people. ” And some people who said that’s not going to happen. And so at this point in time, I just think it’s really important to look at all of the state socialist experiments where people were able to seize the state or get control of the state and ask ourselves what happened to them, where are they at now? And if it makes sense to continue to try to take that path on a quest for liberation, on a quest for betterment. Because if people across the board were saying all that long time ago, the state is an oppressive instrument, we just need to figure out how we’re going to approach it. And we’re at this point in 2026 and we’re still asking that same question and having that same debate, that feels kind of silly to me.

The question has been answered by history. So we have to try to figure out something that is different instead of, again, just like when we were talking about with the Black Panther Party, instead of just trying to repeat these same approaches over and over and over again, that’s just rhetoric. It’s just empty rhetoric. If we’re all just saying the same thing that somebody said 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 150 years ago, there’s nothing liberatory about that. That’s called dogma. That just means you-

It just means you’re stuck and you don’t know what to do. And instead of admitting, I need to go outside and figure out what to do, you just repeat somebody else’s ideas and somebody else’s words and you stay stuck and nothing changes, shit gets worse. And we’re looking at the reality of that right now in the United States.

Mansa Musa:

And in terms of we recognize that francism being what it is, you had this perspective that in terms of the state, how is a movable phenomenon based on the need of the oppressor, state rights when the narrative is suppress the rights of people, but then Trump turned around and say, “No, the federal government need to get in there because your state is operating outside the norm and interfering with our ability to be repressed.” So the whole concept of the state is designed to meet the need of the oppressor and not design for the purpose of helping people self-actualize, get independence, get sovereignty, get stability. Everything is regulated in the state. Talk about in your conclusion when you talk about Gail Scott Herron, you say question was, who will survive America? And given the rise of fascism, wealth and inequality, you suggest that if we have to ask that question, perhaps America shouldn’t exist.

Talk about that.

William C. Anderson:

Yeah. I mean, it’s pretty evident to me that the United States is probably the biggest threat to the planet

Mansa Musa:

That

William C. Anderson:

Exists in the world today. I mean, when you look at what’s happening currently with the Imperialist War and attack on Iran, when you look at the exploitation of the global South through capitalism, when you look at the relentless onslaught that the US military has on the environment with its pollution, with its degradation and destruction, when you look at the genocide in Palestine, when you look at all of the destruction in Haiti and everywhere, the indigenous genocide that created this country, all of it tells us that it is our central role as radicals and as people who are freedom seeking people and who are interested in liberation to focus on making sure that empire is not safe, that it’s not something that continues to stand. Empire is something that shouldn’t exist. So you can’t sit there and say, “Perhaps we can continue trying to reform it and make it more palatable for different groups of people to be included.” That is not something that is really feasible, in my opinion.

I think that ultimately we have to be having a conversation that is questioning the utility or the purpose of its existence at all.

If we think that its existence is something that is going to be safe for the world, then maybe it would be a different conversation, but we all should be able to agree at this point. I mean, it seems like a reality that we could see, or it seems like it’s something that’s quite plausible rather, that we could see nuclear warfare in the near future in our lives, and we should not be tolerating anything that even makes that possible. We shouldn’t be tolerating anything that makes the state of Israel and its actions possible. It’s a country that has for sure led a lot of people to think that it is inevitable and indestructible and untouchable, but that’s not the case. The rise of Donald Trump and the current situations that are playing out in the United States tell us that this country is actually very vulnerable and it is made up of a lot of different elements and a lot of different groups of people in the far right who aren’t necessarily strategic or intelligent, but they’re just brutal.

And we have to be able to differentiate between the two. So the challenge for us to actually confront empire and be a real threat to it, it requires some honesty about, again, ending the existence of empire and accepting the fact that a lot of the people who declare us enemies and who you’ll be in opposition to, that they’re not invincible, but they are ruthless and they have to be thought about as such. When you’re going against ruthless people, vindictive and evil people, you have to make a decision to be just as willing to confront them in opposition and be realistic about what it takes to actually defeat something like that instead of being overly optimistic that maybe they’ll just figure it out and change. So that’s really the point that we’re at. Empire is not going to change, fascism’s not going to change, and we have to be truthful and honest about what it’s going to take for us to figure out the solution domestically and internally inside of the United States instead of getting caught up on other things that aren’t necessarily the task at hand.

The task at hand for radicals in the United States is to figure out how to bring an end to empire. I