Black anarchism is a loose term sometimes applied in the United States to group together a number of people of African descent who identify with anarchism. They include Ashanti Alston, Lorenzo Komboa Ervin, Kuwasi Balagoon, Kai Lumumba Barrow, Greg Jackson, and Martin Sostre. Critics of the term suggest that it elides major political differences between these individuals, incorrectly presenting these individuals as having a shared theory or movement, while imposing a label that these individuals do not (or did not) all accept.

Ashanti Alston (who has explicitly used the term Black Anarchism) also argued that: Black culture has always been oppositional and is all about finding ways to creatively resist oppression here, in the most racist country in the world [the United States]. So, when I speak of a Black anarchism, it is not so tied to the color of my skin but who I am as a person, as someone who can resist, who can see differently when I am stuck, and thus live differently.[2]

He added that, as an anarchist, he viewed black nationalism as progressive yet also as deeply limited: Panther anarchism is ready, willing and able to challenge old nationalist and revolutionary notions that have been accepted as ‘common-sense.’ It also challenges the bullshit in our lives and in the so-called movement that holds us back from building a genuine movement based on the enjoyment of life, diversity, practical self-determination and multi-faceted resistance to the Babylonian Pigocracy. This Pigocracy is in our ‘heads,’ our relationships as well as in the institutions that have a vested interest in our eternal domination.[3]