William C. Anderson

“If we must visualize oppression and harm to make them believable, that limits our ability to conceptualize liberation or a better world. If we have to see pain to know it hurts, how can we achieve the freedoms we can’t even imagine because we’ve never seen or experienced them?”

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“While bound to the laws of the land, Black America can be understood as an extra-state entity because of Black exclusion from the liberal social contract. Due to this extra-state location, Blackness is, in so many ways, anarchistic.”

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“The life of a Black radical who fled state violence in the US only to find it under a different name in the Soviet Union shows the state is never the solution.”

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“One of the first rules of capitalism is: increase profits. That’s why it must be assumed that increasing big business’s power over the criminal justice system could only make things worse.”

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“But some 50 years since their initial formation, The Last Poets are still a vital, necessary force. Their new album Understand What Black Is—their first in 20 years—arrives into a world that’s capable of being just as distressing as it was when they first began recording.”

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“The troublesome New World is constantly creating new economies that are driven by Black demise; Black America has to adapt to the technological advances and grim visualizations that come with such updates. Our New World anxiety is in the stress of knowing what’s happening to us because we’re Black and being required to prove it.”

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“Author and independent writer William C. Anderson interviews veteran organizer and former Black Panther and political prisoner Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin on the current political crisis, fascism, and rising relevance of Black anarchism.”

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“A proactive pre-revolutionary situation will raise the consciousness of people to realize that they are already carrying out the radical politics they are often told to despise. Ahistorical liberal reimaginings of the past make tragedy into a necessary stepping stone for an empire that is learning at the expense of the oppressed. Real resistance positions people to build movements that undo the violence that oppression inflicts.”

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“It is time to honor the work of Martin Sostre, an underappreciated jailhouse lawyer who waged a revolutionary struggle against the US prison system.”

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This article was printed in the Power & Empowerment issue of British Journal of Photography magazine. Read it here.

“If there’s one thing many can agree on, it’s that garbage needs to be discarded. What’s incredibly distressing however, is that the same way that rubbish and filth are removed and forgotten, so too are the people who dispose of the mess. We carry ourselves away with the dust, dirt, and filth that societies seem to think magically disappears on its own every night. For this reason and more, we are martyrs.”

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“The rock music that Sister Rosetta Tharpe created is the unwanted child of sanctification and the Holiness church. As black artists have often done, she took this sound beyond the church walls where it was conceived. After all, dancing, singing, racial integration, black protest and many of the sounds we’ve come to know as blues or rock were already happening in the Holiness church long before the secular genres that followed were established.”

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