I am a light-skinned non-Arab descended from indigenous North Africans—a Berber. Unlike my parents, who were desperate to become Americans in every possible way—the typical children of immigrants—I am proud of my North African heritage. I had to learn about it from speaking to my increasingly forgetful grandfather. My parents had Arabic names that were changed to Anglo names, either just before or just after their families came to the U.S. I got my American name at birth, my legal name. My grandfather told me my Arabic name when I was 15. My real name is Berber, but I had to wait until I was 20 to learn that. By then I was already an anarchist, an anti-nationalist internationalist, so the fact that I had three names, each one describing a smaller community, meant little.

It wasn’t until about ten years ago that I heard about something called Anarchist People of Color. This APOC thing sounded good. My experiences among anarchists had been that virtually nobody looked that different from each other, sounded different from each other, or talked about different things. If there were any other People of Color at the meetings, demonstrations, or events organized by anarchists, they were keeping quiet. There were a few dark-skinned folks, but they wore the same clothing and had the same tattoo styles as the rest of the (presumably) white anarchists. They were invisible as POC. If anyone brought up the issue of racism, almost everyone else started getting nervous and defensive. “But we’re anarchists,” they’d say, as if that was enough to address the different ways racism works, the way it flows into just about all interactions between white people and POC in the U.S. It’s amazing how guilt works on people.

So I happily supported APOC and eagerly awaited some of them to come to my area. By the time I went to a few workshops, I no longer felt so supportive. I thought that APOC was a caucus within a larger anarchist/activist framework, working to bring an awareness of the particular problems that face POC within American culture, to help anarchists and activists to deal with their unconscious racist assumptions about POC, to bring more sensitivity to white anarchists. My understanding was that this would make the anarchist/activist scene stronger and more attractive to POC. When I sat in the meetings of APOC and listened to their presentations, however, I got the feeling that:

1. they were promoting the beginnings of a separatist agenda, perhaps one day working in coalition with white anarchists/activists—if the whites were “worthy,”
2. that they had a definition of POC based on racist American assumptions—the One-Drop Rule and the strictly visual cue of skin-tone, which marginalizes or ignores mixed-race people,
3. that they seemed very interested in making white anarchists/activists feel bad about not having POC in their groups and not having their particular POC agenda as a priority,
4. that to overcome this racism inherent (!) in anarchism, it was necessary for APOC to “take the lead” in anarchist/activist organizing.

Class got trumped. Almost nobody among current APOC wants to talk about it. After all, in America, class is not visually marked, and it’s not usually marked by speech. In other words, class is hard to detect. But being a POC is easy to see—except when it’s not.

American APOC completely ignore the ways that race is enforced in Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean—let alone anywhere else in the world. Although they probably won’t like hearing it, this makes them typically American: isolationist, inward-looking, believing their own experiences to be unique but then, ironically, extending those attitudes onto all other cultures, acting as if they are always right. American APOC view their oppression only in terms of white supremacy, and they insist that this is the main enemy of all POC, American or not. In this way American APOC attempt to colonize—that’s right, colonize!—the race-based oppression of all POC internationally, not acknowledging that nothing recognizable as “white supremacy” exists among the majority of the world’s people. White supremacy doesn’t exist anywhere in Africa or Asia (with the exception of Australia and New Zealand—maybe), is barely hanging on in some enclaves in South America (but even there, racial politics don’t take place only in terms of “whiteness”), and is expressed very differently in Europe than it is in the U.S. The Middle East has its own set of racialized conflicts, because not all residents there are ethnically Arab, not all Arabs are Muslim (most Muslims are Asian), and Muslims are split along religious (not racial) lines. Then there’s the “Jewish Question,” which makes American APOC really uncomfortable. I voted with my feet, distancing myself from APOC.

The American APOC discussions are an example of either/or logic (either white or not), rejecting distinctions (all POC are essentially the same, or at least should have the same agenda, and if they don’t, they aren’t “real POC”), and a colonizing of other POC experiences to fit in with their own easy answers. Mostly people don’t talk about the logic of capitalism except maybe for the way it influences how race and white supremacy are supposed to operate. Class is off the table—all oppressions are reduced to race (and maybe a combination of race with gender). Racial markers that are not visual are ignored—a particularly American way of looking at race.

The American APOC discourse leaves no place for me, an educated, light-skinned Berber; for the majority of American APOC I am invisible—even privileged because of my economic and educational background, but especially due to my light skin. Ironically (I guess?), I am more invisible among them than I am among supposedly racist white anarchists. Not because I can “pass” as white, but because I don’t have to prove that I am anything other than an anarchist. American APOC demand some kind of “authenticity” from their comrades, some kind of blood quantum. Usually all that takes is a high melanin content, regardless of how anarchist the comrade is.

So why am I writing this now? APOC discussions are all over the web again. People are being called “racist” for daring to criticize an APOC declaration or manifesto, regardless of its anarchist content. Now I’m not just disappointed, I’m offended.

What does that “A” stand for again? Are we anarchists or not? That’s the distinction that’s interesting to me, not how many of our grandparents weren’t white. Enough is enough.

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