Another Way Out w/ William C. Anderson

For episode 210,⁠ William C. Anderson⁠ comes back to The Fire These Times to talk to Elia Ayoub about the current crises in the US and how we should try and understand our current authoritarian moment.

Anderson is the author of⁠ The Nation on No Map⁠ (AK Press 2021) and co-author of As Black as Resistance (AK Press 2018). He writes a column for Prism called⁠ Another Way Out⁠ and is the co-founder of⁠ Offshoot Journal⁠. He was previously on TFTT (⁠episode 107⁠) to talk about Black Anarchism, Abolition and the Radical Tradition.

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Credits:

Elia Ayoub (host, producer, episode art), William C Anderson (guest),⁠ ⁠Rap and Revenge⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (Music),⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Wenyi Geng⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (TFTT theme design),⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Hisham Rifai⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (FTP theme design) and⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Molly Crabapple⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (FTP team profile pics)

Transcript via Antidote Zine:

We have a ruling class who is interested in our absolute subjugation and destruction, and they’re going to control whatever party is in power. It’s hard to think about when something could possibly change, as long as people are invested in party politics and representative democracy.

William C. Anderson: My name is William C. Anderson, I am a writer and a person who is actively trying to do my part in the struggle to make the world around us a better place.

Elia J. Ayoub: And boy does it need that kind of work.

Almost four years have passed since I last had you on. I was double checking that because I found it hard to believe. I’ve been reading your work since, including your “Another Way Out” series, which I would love to talk about. First, general reflections? Four years means it was early 2022 the last time we spoke. So much has happened since, and especially in the last few months, even if we only focus on the United States.

How have you been thinking about all of this?

WA: It’s a lot to think about. Unfortunately, a lot of the things that have transpired have been very unsurprising for me. I don’t say that to sound overly confident; I say that because I’d been expecting them based on a number of different trends and currents that I’d been observing in US politics in the years leading up.

A lot of that is what informed my writing The Nation on No Map, which is coming up on its fifth year anniversary too. Much of what I was trying to accomplish when I was working on that book was a warning of a number of different things that are now playing out in the United States—not just with relation to fascism, but a number of the different social and societal problems that have also risen up strongly: with ultranationalist currents among Black people, with a lot of the sectarian divisions among the denominational left deepening, with a number of different ways of people separating themselves, and digging deeper into this anti-intellectualism that was also getting stirred up.

All of those things that I was anticipating in that text came true. With ICE—I was also thinking about immigration a lot when I was working on that, and how that was going to play out. Many of those things are just a reality, in the worst ways. There have also been things I didn’t expect that are playing out. It’s a real mess. It’s extremely disturbing.

In terms of the column I have with Prism, “Another Way Out”—that’s a place where I’m trying to keep thinking through these things and updating my analysis, revisiting different parts of what I’ve been thinking about. I try to stay in touch with struggle and keep putting forward a perspective that lends itself to folks having practical and thoughtful ways of approaching these problems that they might be able to share with me and other people who I learned from.

EA: In terms of predicting all of it, I will say this: a lot of it has been unsurprising to me as well, though even my expectations have been surpassed.

For those who haven’t listened to that first episode or read your book, what did you get right? Is it an understanding of state power? Is it a specificity of the “American experience,” when it comes especially to white supremacy? All of the above? What was it, in your opinion?

WA: The biggest thing I would reflect on, with regard to The Nation on No Map as having been a key part of the analysis I was putting forward about what was to come—a big part of that book is focused on making an argument that Black people in the United States (but also throughout the Americas) did not need to be invested in a nation-state project, or nation-building as it relates to the state, whether through a national-socialist liberation project or through an investment in US nationalism as we know it.

The reason I was making that argument was because Black people are in a specific set of conditions that inform me making an argument towards us embracing a stateless identity, because of the fact that we have been rendered stateless by being subjected to this constant historical struggle to be accepted as “citizens” and as part of the US project—which we’ve never actually accomplished.

So since I’m arguing about the descendants of enslaved Africans (not just in the US but throughout the Americas) being able to embrace a stateless identity—when we look at stateless peoples around the world, many stateless populations reject the nation-state and state-building because they know what the nation-state does, because they were rendered stateless by these types of projects and by state violence and colonialism. In its origins, the state is a colonial instrument, and it’s a hierarchical class instrument. So it’s something that pushed me, over the years, into thinking about anarchism. It’s also something that pushed me towards thinking about immigration more, and there are a number of ways I ended up in all these different places.

With regard to immigration, I was deeply involved in the immigrant rights movement for years, and I still am, off-and-on. When I’m thinking about immigration and all the different things I saw in that struggle in the US, and thinking about statelessness for Black populations in the US, it led to me wanting to also have a deeper conversation about Black history and our relationship to mobility and to movement, because our history, in terms of Black people’s migrant story, the Great Migrations that Black people have experienced over the time we have been in the US—so much of that gets neglected by the immigrant rights movement, to the point that it’s just an accepted view that, Oh, Black Americans have papers, so they’re okay, their struggle is over. They’re protected and they’re fine.

But so much of Black history is Black people being forced to move, forced into migration—whether it’s in the current context with regard to gentrification, being pushed out of communities by corporations, or in a historical context where we’re actually chattel slaves and property, and we were going to different parts of the country through forced migrations as slave labor, or during the Reconstruction era when there were so many Black people who were forced to move, seeking better lives.

There are so many things I could bring up, and so many aspects of Black history in the US and across the Americas that are related to migration. Not to mention there’s a deep deportation history! Black people who were in different parts of the Americas as enslaved Africans were deported to different plantations in different parts of the Americas, the so-called “New World,” as punishment. All of this history is severely overlooked and under-discussed, in my opinion.

I wanted to lay a foundation for that in that text, the best I could, just to say: when these ICE attacks start happening, because that fascist apparatus is already there (it had been extremely expanded by the Obama administration in the years I was in the immigrant rights movement), just looking at what it was doing when I was deeply involved in that work, I was like, Oh, okay, I know what this is going to be used for in the future. And now that’s what’s happening.

It’s incredibly frustrating, if I can be honest with you. A lot of these things could have been circumvented. But I was trying to at least make an argument for people to start thinking about and seeing ourselves as Black people that way, so that we could have more solidarity and understanding with what was coming through federal immigration forces.

That’s just one aspect of a few different things. I do still think there’s going to be much more conflict, and other things I mentioned in the text. But it’s going to take time for more of these things to play out, and we have to see how it goes.

EA: One of the things Trump has said a number of times is he wanted to “outdo Obama” in terms of deportations, and Obama (among others, he’s obviously not the only one) laid the infrastructure for the monstrosity that we’re seeing today.

I’m going to do another episode with a few folks from Minneapolis, because there’s been quite a few interesting actions and mutual aid initiatives, people responding in different ways. As far as I can tell—I’ve never been there—it’s people who were not politicized before. Given the urgency of this moment—it’s so beyond the pale for even an “apolitical” person—do you see a rupture in what’s happening? Do you see potential for change, more than before?

What has been your interpretation of what’s been going on of late?

WA: I’m not sure how I feel with regard to the potential for change. I don’t want to sound like I’m saying I don’t think change is going to happen. It’s more about when. I’m not sure when change is going to happen. One of the things I worry about is that the liberal status quo is still operating as usual. It’s still business-as-usual.

What I mean by that is, people still have the infrastructure of the Democratic Party to keep them invested in the idea that as long as they vote, as long as they hope for a better representative, things will work out. As a matter of fact, a number of reactions we see from people on social media, and we hear people say in public and other places, is: Oh, we should have voted harder, or, If only we had been more loyal to the Democratic Party this would have never happened!

There are also people who throw up their hands and say things like, Well, I voted for Kamala Harris, so this is what y’all get. They’ll make her into this amazing sagely presidential candidate who, if we had just put all our faith in her and let her lead and be the best Black woman she could have been, then we wouldn’t be in this situation. But that’s just a complete separation from reality.

The road that we are traveling down is the road that this country has been on since its inception. The United States has never been a country that embodies the ideals and democratic egalitarianism and equality that so many people speak about it embodying. When we’re talking about a number of populations in the United States, we’re only looking at Black people, for example, really kind of having the right to participate in the vote and elections within the last recent decades—truly. And that’s being rolled back, because it’s never actually been truly secured.

This idea that we’re going to be better off if we continue to be better liberals, and be truer and more dedicated to believing in this country, is still very much in place. As long as that’s there, people are not going to see and overcome and get out of this situation in the ways that they need to. It’s there for a reason: to keep people in this situation. It’s not tied to one party or the other; a lot of this is getting lost in, The Republicans are really bad, and if they were gone this wouldn’t ever happen! But all the stage-setting for this situation has been bipartisan.

It’s unfortunate that people get frustrated when you say that, but it’s just the truth. It’s the same thing I was just talking about with the Obama administration and ICE. During those years when we were doing all this organizing in the immigrant rights movement, we were screaming from the rooftops, saying Obama has to stop doing this, because it’s going to be in the hands of the right wing in the future, and he will have expanded this so much that they’re going to be able to do anything they want with it.

And here we are now, in this situation where this is playing out, and people have amnesia. When it comes to the Bush administration and the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, the invasions, same thing: people were screaming then, saying the PATRIOT Act, all these things that were happening post-9/11, the creation of ICE—we don’t need to have these sorts of tools for anyone, for any party, they don’t belong in anybody’s hands.

So rather than discussing why this would exist at all, it became about party politics. For a lot of people, this is still about party politics. As long as people are trapped in all this stuff, they’re not really seeing the bigger picture, which is: we have a ruling class who is interested in our absolute subjugation and destruction, and they’re going to control whatever party is in power. It’s hard to think about when something could possibly change, as long as people are invested in party politics and representative democracy.

EA: One of the hard things about being a historian is that you get to read a lot of things from history that seem to be about the present. As you were talking, I was picking up Aimé Césaire, the post-colonial thinker who described a society that colonizes as a “sick society, morally diseased, that inevitably calls for its Hitler.”

I think, for example, of Hannah Arendt. She wrote in the fifties speaking of the “boomerang” which people in the humanities would attribute to Michel Foucault, but he wasn’t the first one to talk about it. Essentially, the violence “at home” (in this case being Europe) would not have been possible were it not for imperialism and colonialism abroad. We know the Germans themselves did an entire genocide in modern-day Namibia, even before the Holocaust.

It is a frustrating thing to feel like a Cassandra, the mythical person in ancient Greece who was cursed to predict accurately but never be believed. Not that I’m saying we are special in any particular way, it’s just a certain framework that, when it comes to my anarchism or my skepticism (to put it mildly) when it comes to power, especially state power—if this is not part of the conversation, a healthy skepticism of state power, so much gets lost. So much gets erased.

And people who don’t want to entertain this, or don’t have the framework for it, still have to compensate in different ways. They have to fill in the blanks to make sense of what they are seeing. I don’t know, I can’t be in people’s heads. But it has been quite frustrating.

Among the many things that have been helping me cope with this is your series of essays, actually, “Another Way Out.” If you have some reflections on this, go for it. Just to read some of the titles: “You can’t just wait for tyranny to go away” is your most recent one; before that there was “Finding clarity for resistance,” “How denying reality aids fascism,” “Building resistance when passivity is the norm,” and “Hiding and obedience won’t stop fascism.”

I can see a frustration, maybe the same frustration that’s coming out in my own voice now. With all the disagreements we can have with so many people on so many different things, we do need to recognize certain through-lines. We can’t just pretend that something is just in the past and doesn’t have consequences on the present, as if the technologies they have been testing on “foreign populations,” and the companies that made a profit doing so, won’t also need to find new ways to make a profit once that specific war ends.

WA: Of course. There’s something at the basis and the foundation of me writing this column: ultimately what I’m trying to do is describe, push, and encourage different ways of approaching the predicaments that we’re in, not just in the US but around the world. The reason I want us to try to come up with different solutions together is because when you look at how people react to the problems at hand, there’s so much prescription based off of contrived recipes that people have for fixing things based on their politics, their ideologies, their dogmas.

When I approach looking at a situation or an issue, I’m not just trying to reference the same quotes, books, ideas, and standards that other people draw from. “Another Way Out” is largely about looking for another way out through thoughtfulness that isn’t rooted in the doctrinaire. That’s especially hard for the sectarian left, which I have spent a large majority of my life being among, politically. I say that because the sectarian left has become a secular religion, and people have made leftism into something that has much more to do with zealotry than it has to do with intellectual, political, and creative rigor.

So many of the ideas you hear from people about how to change conditions are based in the thoughts of someone else from the past, and it’s just being reconfigured for today. But people in the past were experiencing different conditions, and were in different places, different contexts, and different eras. Whatever their ideas about fixing a problem may have been, those were specific to specific situations. You have to carry that with you when you’re looking at someone’s analysis about what is to be done with regard to anything you’re looking at in your current, contemporary context.

I’m trying to pull from people who are lesser-known, overlooked, and also encourage people to embrace history and analysis from below, and really look at having a people’s analysis that is not always rooted in top-down, vanguardist, Great Man, Great Revolutionary-type history. Listening to hear those things that haven’t been heard as much—that’s what I want to do. I want to translate and interpret that in my own way and share it with other people, and see what we can come up with together.

You just mentioned someone who I take a lot of inspiration from, who is quite well-known, Aimé Césaire. But Aimé Césaire talked about things being at an impasse in his resignation from the French Communist Party—and he said it didn’t mean that there wasn’t any way out. That’s one of the places that I take inspiration for the name of the column, because there are still ways out of this situation. There are still a number of options. There are still things we can do; all is not lost.

In order to get there, we’re going to have to ask some different questions and we’re going to have to look for some different answers. So much of my understanding of that comes from the work I do with regard to Black anarchism—which I am not treating as some sort of sectarian promotion, but rather when I analyze and think of the history of Black anarchism, which has also been severely neglected, I’m looking at a number of people who were former Black Panthers, who were former civil rights activists, Black radicals who turned towards anarchism because they realized they needed to be asking different questions and be looking for different answers.

Their example gives me the example that I use to analyze history and look at the present, and to try to have an intellectual and political rigor that I feel is lacking among a lot of the people who would describe themselves as revolutionaries, radicals, and so on.

EA: Given you’ve been doing this series for a while, have you gotten different reactions that you think are interesting, that have maybe evolved over time? Or are you still seeing a reluctance to engage with the broader topic?

WA: Honestly, the column gets a lot of love. I’m honestly blown away by the amount of love I get from people who read it regularly. Prism shows so much love; the team there is amazing and supportive, and I appreciate them giving me the space to have the column and to be able to do something that feels really important to me at this time like that.

I don’t get a lot of pushback, because so many people are looking around at how bad things are, and are opening their minds to hearing different perspectives, and looking at different things. It’s generally positive.

EA: That’s good to know. I had been wondering about this because the framework is not one many people are used to. It’s a good sign if you’re getting a lot of love.

More broadly, you suggested it would be good to talk about grief. I’ve mentioned in previous episodes, including the one before this one, but I’ve been dealing with my own set of griefs as of late, including what’s called pre-grieving: I have a loved one who is dying, just very slowly, but we know it’s coming.

Why did you want to talk about it? Or let me put it this way: do you see a link between grieving in a certain way, or grief as it is, and the sort of politics you’re interested in?

WA: You wanted to talk about hope, too, right?

EA: Or the way they contrast or link to one another, I guess.

WA: If we’re starting with grief (I have a lot to say about grief and I have a lot to say about hope, too): so many of the things that I’m thinking about these days are related to the ways that people deal with grief and with grievance. When you look at my people, Black people in the US, a lot of the tendency to go toward certain ideas about what we need to do as people are related to how we’re reacting to grievance and to our grief. I think if you don’t handle this carefully, it can actually become the fuel for reactionary politics.

One of the best examples of that is the state of Israel. When you look at grievance as it relates to the Holocaust in Europe and everything that was unimaginably horrific that the Nazis did, it’s hard to comprehend the amount of post-traumatic stress and trauma and pain that so many of us carry in our bodies. And when you’re thinking about how it gets passed on from generation to generation, you get a better understanding of how we ended up with the genocide that’s being carried out against the Palestinians. You get a better understanding of how people justify some of the most egregious, terrible, mind-boggling crimes that you could ever think of.

I think if we have a better relationship to grief, and to managing how we approach our pain and the trauma that we are confronted with—that we are expected to go on living with—that it could serve us well in not repeating a number of the terrible horrors and atrocities of the past.

With regard to myself, I have not only experienced grief and pain and trauma as a person who is a member of group of people who have historical trauma and plight and oppression, but I’ve experienced it on an interpersonal level, too, in a number of ways, including losing my parent, my mother, who was the most important person in my life—my pride and inspiration, the woman I learned so much from and who birthed me and taught me how to navigate this world.

Experiencing grief in the interpersonal, but also having it be a deep part of my family history, and having it be a big part of the identity that I have as a Black American—there’s so many levels and layers to it, and they feed into each other, and they’re amplified by one another. Because the interpersonal level is obviously connected to the much broader, bigger part of life as it relates to my identity—they’re not separate.

So I have to look at them and think about them, and approach them carefully. I wanted to talk about it with you, because you had shared some of the things you were going through before we got a chance to talk today. My condolences—I know what it means to go through watching someone deteriorate, watching someone getting ready to pass away. I know what it feels like to be a caretaker, I know what it feels like to have to work multiple jobs, I know what it feels like to be poor, I know what it feels like to feel like everything’s unfair, all these different things that can come with these situations.

I wanted to share that it is possible to come out on the other side okay. And it’s possible to not let these things turn us inward so much that it develops into a rot, and it develops into a toxicity that can lead us to unjust and oppressive and dangerous thinking.

EA: First, thank you so much for sharing this.

When I was dealing with grief—and it’s still ongoing, it’s not a linear process, obviously—it helped me a lot to read James Baldwin, and when he was talking about the people he lost, and thinking of him being gone, the loss that that is. At some point I went through a phase for a few weeks where I was listening to a podcast (called The Griefcast; it’s no longer active) by a comedian here in the UK who also lost her father, talking to other people who lost loved ones. Because there’s this comedy angle to it, finding the funny and the absurd in the horrible, in a very personal way, that was also very helpful for me.

Maybe this segues into the hope component of this. I always think of this clip that makes the rounds every now and then, of James Baldwin basically saying, You cannot tell a child that there is no hope. It’s interesting that even the most cynical doomer among us—I’ve experienced this with people I know—when confronted with a kid, somehow we don’t want to tell them that. There’s a part of us that does believe in hope.

Hope, for me, is a discipline, as I think listeners would know by now. I’m rambling a bit, but in terms of hope in this moment that we’re going through, how have you been approaching it?

WA: Hope is such a huge subject. I was really appreciative of you wanting to have me on to talk about it, as well as these other things, because I oftentimes don’t get to talk about subjects like this as much as I’d like to. First and foremost, I have to go back to talking about being descended from slaves. Being a person with that family history, with that relationship to the past, informs my relationship with not just grievance, but hope. Because I’m also thinking about motivation and inspiration, too.

Whenever I talk about liberation, I always mention that it’s something I don’t imagine or describe in too much detail, because that’s a misstep. When you get stuck on trying to name, on nomination, it does a disservice to thinking about what liberation could be. I often use the example of how enslaved people might have thought that just being able to read, or to eat what they wanted, or to travel freely, was maybe liberation to them. But we have a number of those things now that they didn’t, and we’re still not liberated.

With that in mind, I analyze hope as a component of an aspiration grounded in reality and circumstance. What you “hope” for could very well have everything to do with what you lack. What you lack could be unreasonable, it could be unfair, it could be disproportionate—and at the same time, hope is filled with so much possibility. The things I have now that my ancestors did not aren’t just indicators of achievement or some liberatory completion, obviously—this isn’t finished—but it’s also a testament to how far we’ve come, and that hoping for more isn’t unreasonable, and actually sometimes betterment and progress are right around the corner. They might be coming much sooner than you even would have anticipated.

My relationship to hope is understanding the incomplete struggle, the perpetual struggle that so many people have engaged in, for me to get to this point where I’m at, and the struggle we’re still supposed to be engaged in to carry things forward so that future generations have more than we would have hoped for. That’s a big part of it for me.

I’m telling you, I’m coming from people who dreamed, who hoped to be able to just go to school—to just go to school. That’s a couple grandparents ago. It’s not super far off, these are people you could reach out and touch. It’s important to me to center that when I’m talking about hope and when I’m thinking about hope. It really puts things in perspective, and brings the whole conversation full circle for me, because when I look at folks throwing up their hands—I wrote about this in the column: I talked about seeing Black people who would say something like, I went and voted, I did my part, I’m not fighting for anything anymore.

We come from ancestors who didn’t have the luxury of saying that. There are people fought tooth and nail to be able to get us to this point, so that we could continue to fight for the folks who are going to come after us. It’s actually disrespectful and neglectful towards the Black radical tradition to not have a critical and complex relationship with hope. I’m not just talking about happy feelings and saying everything is going to be alright and there’s a beautiful sunset on the horizon; I’m talking about that disciplinary aspect that you mentioned, that Mariame Kaba has popularized.

It is an everyday practice, that’s what she’s pointing out when she says hope is a discipline. It’s a major key to understanding what we’re supposed to be doing as people, as people working towards something that is a big part of progress for everyone, not just ourselves.

EA: This perfectly brings us full circle, as you said. My friend, I can always do this, and we could do this for hours and hours.

Could you tell listeners where to find you? And are there any upcoming projects that we should be paying attention to?

WA: Of course. These days I am skeptical about social media. Look for me on BlueSky if you’d like. If you want to reach out to me, my email is on my website. I would also tell people to check out Offshoot Journal, a journal that I co-founded with Eunsong Kim. We have been working to try to create a lot of different political education, art, and awareness that fits into a lot of the things we’ve discussed today.

I’m always appreciative of you, this was a really good to be able to talk about, and I appreciate you making the time.

EA: Same here. I appreciate everything you do, and I’m sure we’ll be doing this again, and hopefully we don’t have to wait four more years before doing so. Thank you so much, William.

WA: I’d love to talk any time. Thank you.

One response to “Another Way Out w/ William C. Anderson”

This! February 2026 – Pieceoplastic

February 28, 2026 at 1:12 pm

[…] Another Way Out w/ William C. Anderson [the fire these times] – “This idea that we’re going to be better off if we continue to be better liberals, and be truer and more dedicated to believing in this country, is still very much in place. As long as that’s there, people are not going to see and overcome and get out of this situation in the ways that they need to. It’s there for a reason: to keep people in this situation. It’s not tied to one party or the other; a lot of this is getting lost in, The Republicans are really bad, and if they were gone this wouldn’t ever happen! But all the stage-setting for this situation has been bipartisan.” Obama was instrumental in the expansion of ICE and border control. […]

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