In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Ben Passmore. Passmore is the author of the ongoing comic book series Daygloayhole, as well as the Eisner Award-nominated and Ignatz Award-winning comic collection Your Black Friend. His book is Black Arms to Hold You Up: A History of Black Resistance.
Roberto Sirvent: How did you come up with the idea for this book? What were some of the highlights and challenges you faced during the creative process?
Ben Passmore: I’ve been drawing comics as a job for decades, but at some point around 2015 a career centering political comics came together. I started working for the NIB, a now defunct political comics outlet, which hired me on to do work focused at the intersection of anti-police, anti-racism and anti-fascism movements. This was an ideal “beat” for me. I’d been an anarchist of one kind or another since I was in high school and I’d had a lot of experiences with street-level political movements, both as an observer and participant.
If you’ve been in the mix of political movements in this country you often hit various emotional lows. There are very few “wins” in our movements and you often find yourself tired and asking “where do I even go from here?” The comics I made for the NIB tried to track some of the optimistic energy of resistance on the street level, but they often seemed to end on a pessimistic note. I think that was due to a mix of my own dry humor and sense of futility. After a number of years, I wasn’t sure where all this energy anarchists had should go.
Every time I feel unsure about my next steps, about the path forward, I go back to the Black radical tradition. In 2020, when I was pitching this book to publishers, I was deep in a political crisis. There was a lot of good energy in the street as folks rallied against the killing of George Floyd, they even burned a police precinct down! But having seen the rise and fall of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the cyclical ways we’d seemed to be making the same mistakes over and over, I was asking myself the old question about direction.
It seemed like we had a chance to build a serious Black liberation movement again, but I wanted to talk about how we’d gotten here. In the past you’d have all these folks quoting figures like Assata Shakur or Malcolm X, but then pursuing political goals that had nothing to do with these figures’ politics. So I wanted to make something accessible that informed people, but I also wanted to present a lot of the contradictions that’s lead to misunderstandings and revisions of these significant figures.
The biggest challenge while making the book was deciding who to focus on. I selected Robert Charles, Robert F Williams, Imari and Gaidi Obadele, Assata Shakur, Sanyika Shakur, MOVE, and Micah Xavier Johnson to write about. These are all deeply complicated people, but I had limited space to give a reader a sense of them, what they believed, and how they were connected to each other. It was a battle just to give everyone their own space and to make connections clear while also trying to make an exciting story.
Many readers of Black Agenda Report are familiar with Rebecca Hall’s book, Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts. How can the comics medium help illuminate and educate in ways that go under-appreciated in community organizing spaces, especially communities looking for more rich and complex histories of Black resistance? For those of us who have never been properly taught how to “read” or study comics and graphic novels, how might these kind of reading skills be beneficial for political education?
Rebecca Hall’s Wake is really excellent, and the artist Hugo Martinez did an amazing job with the art. The first hurdle when producing work about history in comics form is figuring out what to leave out. It’s not an ideal medium for detail in the same way prose is. You can do a lot with setting, costuming and dialogue, as Wake did. But there’s always limitations of space; you need rising and falling action in addition to facts about the events you’re featuring. In my book I talk about Robert Charles, who fought ten thousand racist soldiers, police and farmers in New Orleans. He grew up in Mississippi during reconstruction and I wanted to feature some of that, but I had to cut it all out to give other things air. As a writer it can feel insulting to have to narrow it down so much, but it’s the form.
Those are all technical considerations though. The biggest hurdle I see with comics being taken up by organizing spaces is that they’re often not taken seriously. This is not to say comics should be overly deferred to either, but I think they can do a lot for people who don’t have the vocabulary and attention span for dense text. And that’s not just a benefit for children. We have so many grown people that don’t know how to approach text, despite the fact that they are very curious. Any one building political relationships with others are in the perfect position to pass them something like my work, give it context and suggest similar material.
Which comics and graphic novels have had the most impact on the way you see the world?
There are some comics that are personally defining for me as an individual, and then there are comics that helped me define my approach to comics making. I think the Battle Angel Alita series probably unlocked a lot of love for high-speed violence, but I don’t think it’s had much effect on the work I do. Maybe that’s all unnecessary to say.
For a big project like this I always need to engage with things that inspire me to craft my specific approach. It’s a bit like throwing logs on the fire. Joe Sacco’s work is always a big inspiration, and I think people might see a bit of Art Spiegelman’s Maus in how I enter into Black Arms specifically. We both are using a conversation with our fathers as a framing device. Ho Che Anderson’s King, about Martin Luther King Jr., was constant guiding light for me as I battled through my own book. I was inspired by how he approached a deeply revered person with a lot of experimentation and risk. I tried to take really big swings with how I chose to characterize important people and the world around them. That often meant pulling from media outside of comics. For instance, I watched loads of 50’s era propaganda cartoons so that I could make my own fake one at the beginning of Robert F. William’s chapter. I think choosing to make this over-the-top version of white America’s fear of Williams and his movement helped frame the motivation for his repression.
All that said, it can be difficult to say if one work has impacted how to I see the world, or how I communicate that vision. Nonfiction work that I enjoy making is still fairly rare, and I find that I need to apply a lot of visual grammar from a mix of apolitical Indy comics and popular culture.
Your book is critical of what many former and current editors of BAR refer to as the “Black misleadership class.” Why is a critique of this group of “leaders” so important for understanding the history, repression, and taming of Black resistance movements?
Something I came across in numerous revolutionaries’ writings was a critique of how leaders repressed their own people and mismanaged rank-and-file energy. There’s a degree to which any militant formation under immense pressure is going to use its most vulnerable members as an outlet for frustration. This isn’t a critique unique to anarchists, but I think the anarchism I’m interested in talks about this a lot. One of the aspirations of anarchists is one that takes away the capacity of anyone to exploit their own people like that. With that said, something Ashanti Alston (former BPP and BLA soldier) has said about the repression of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army is that systems of exploitation within the party made repression by the state significantly easier. If you ignore a comrade’s domestic violence, can you blame their spouse for turning on him when her family is threatened by the feds?
I could’ve made a whole book cheerleading everyone I wrote about, but I really wanted to reflect the lessons our elders have learned during their years of struggle. We have a lot a legitimate fear that our flaws will be exploited by our oppressors. That’s happened many times. But I don’t think the solution is avoiding things and/or acting like they’re not there.
This is also not to say that my own aspirations are more moral leaders. I’m an anarchist after all, and my aspiration is that we see how our own individual intelligence and creativity is what makes formations formidable, not leadership.
As a Black anarchist, one of your chief influences is Kuwasi Balagoon. BAR readers might remember an interview we did with Akinyele Umoja about Balagoon. How has Balagoon’s life shaped your thinking around anarchism and Black revolutionary struggle?
I was an anarchist for almost a decade before I engaged with Balagoon’s work. That said, my own radicalization included third world struggles as guides for non-European struggle. So we’re talking the Zapatistas first, and then folks in Rojava years after.
A lot of the anarchists around me were very obsessed with what militants in France, Spain, and Greece were doing. I never felt comfortable with what has felt like a eurocentrism in American anarchism. On top of that, the view anarchists have had for a long time is that groups like the Black Panther Party were all Marxist-Leninists or Maoists, and therefore not politically aligned. It wasn’t until I reengaged with the writings of former Panthers, and other militants of that era, that I realized that there was much less political uniformity in the Party. So I didn’t just read Balagoon, but Ashanti Alston, Russell Maroon Shoatz, Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, and others.
I wouldn’t say that Balagoon’s anarchism is the same as mine, but that’s consistent with the wide variation that exists among anarchists. I think his concept of the “Anti-State” is interesting, and maybe something close to the maroonage I aspire to. I think his greatest contribution to my life is his uncompromising thoughts on what to look for in comrades and what to avoid. He talks about how a brother who is all “ra ra” about armed struggle should never be trusted, and that’s pretty consistent with how I experience overly performative folks in my life.
In the “Black Arms Reading List” at the end of your book, you include Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Can you share how her work has informed your writing and organizing?
I only read Ida B. Wells’ work when looking for contemporary writings about Robert Charles. Other than Wells I relied heavily on contemporary newspapers archived by the Library of Congress and one book called Carnival of Fury. When comparing the newspaper entries about Robert Charles to Wells’ writing you instantly appreciate what she was doing. It must have been nearly impossible to get any information past the blood thirsty narrative of the police and white population. I often have misgivings about the role of reporters and resistance. So often we see news outlets defer to our oppressors, or be uncritical of inequities without using them to exploit a movement’s weakness. All that being said, Wells’ beat feels immensely important and inspiring.
I actually looked for contemporary negro papers to see if I could get a sense of what the community outside of New Orleans felt about Charles. They were not easy to find. The Library of Congress hasn’t made a real effort to preserve them. Despite that, I found a couple digitized collections and there was no mention of Charles. I don’t know if this was due to some kind of respectability politics or just a lapse of some kind. If it’s the former this makes Wells’ contribution all the more important.
How can BAR readers support your work?
There are a few ways, the cheapest and easiest is to ask for my books to get into your local libraries and follow me on social media (daygloayhole on Instagram and Patreon). You can by my book Black Arms to Hold You Up in any bookstore, but obviously it’s best to support your local Black bookstore.
Roberto Sirvent is the editor of the Black Agenda Report Book Forum.
Preserving the Black Radical Tradition demands struggle not only against white supremacists, but also against the co-opted Black political class who actively support the very evils Dr. King named.
Africans in the U.S. must weaponize their position and sabotage imperial projects from the inside. Black revolutionaries must modify traditional strategy.
Israel's recognition of a breakaway region in Somalia has redrawn the map of the Horn of Africa, pitting two oil-rich Gulf powers against each other and forcing the U.S. to delay its imperial plans…
Harris County, home to a world-renowned medical center, holds the worst maternal death rate for Black women in the entire nation. This staggering statistic represents a systemic failure that subjects…
Venezuela's official stance remains one of principled anti-imperialism. Internal discussions reflect the complex realities of navigating a crisis.
