Camping at the crossroads: Introductory essay to a special issue on antiracism and anarchism

By way of introducing this special issue of Affinities, I would like to ask, what can anarchism and antiracism learn from one another? Attempts to critically reflect on the two traditions have certainly been made in the past (Evrin 1993; Adams 2000; Alston 2003; Aragorn! 2007). As writers who have pursued this task point out, a crossing-over of the two currents of thought makes certain intuitive sense: the anarchist tradition of kicking against every imposed hierarchy is incomplete without a challenge to racism, and, in the same vein, antiracism can only go so far without approaching racism as a problem of authority. And yet, it seems that the task of having both traditions learn from and challenge one another has hardly gotten off the ground.