kay’s (draft) appeal to shifting our paradigm for this new age of resistance

in conjunction with their masking as fugitive praxis presentation given at the Garden during anarkata rising: a Black fugitivity series ~ sag szn 2025

I’m past all the surprise and confusion that masking is an uncommon action—increasingly vilified in media & law, pathologized in the medical & mental health industrial complexes (though notably not in the field of scientific research), and largely considered anti-social behavior.

So i’m offering this shifted view on it to folks who already get that society ain’t got shit to behave for:

masking as anarchic, fugitive praxis

The fear and separation inspired by masks is real. This is not an appeal for further isolation. Masking doesn’t have to mean we stop gathering, dancing, laughing, or hugging. I’m making a case that it’s not the repression it was sold to be, but radical adaptation and a means towards liberation. I’m offering a re-consideration of masking as a powerful praxis for fugitivity, mobility, underground movement-building, collective well-being, protection, climate realism, and privacy from the state.

I fw anarchism because reaching it as a politic requires radical acceptance of the depth and scope of oppression—no reformist nonsense, no liberal rose-colored glasses, not fooled by the psyops or misguided by state propaganda. Ideally.

Anarchist politic doesn’t shy away from the discipline and commitment that genuine autonomy calls for.

Masking is anti-social behavior

in the sense that it doesn’t comply with the dominant social order. It makes people uncomfortable, because it disrupts the norms and scripts we’re socialized into. If the social order is to maintain a facade of normalcy at any cost, wearing a physical marker of an Omnipresent Danger when the narrative of the Omnipotent State is that There Is No Danger is antisocial behavior.

When the social order is entertainment as a distraction from the existential grief & shame of living in the heart of empire, complicit in horrific systems of domination…not participating in the distractions becomes anti-social behavior. Concerts, clubs, restaurants, movies—these consumer reprieves are levity to balance out the weighty responsibility offloaded onto citizens under the social contract and facade of representative governance.

But we’re moving out of the age of distraction and into futures of sharpening clarity.

Masking takes us into afrofutures. It’s an act of adaptation.

My praxis is inspired by the Earth and my body’s—as an extension of Earth—wisdom and the belief that my foremost purpose is as a steward of their sovereignty. Both have taught me how to adapt to changing circumstances. Adaptation not as complacency, but as resistance to the dominant order’s (violent) attempts at maintaining the status quo. My fugitive praxis is radical—as in rooted into my ever-evolving integrity.

Deviating from the social order is its own liberation.

Masking wasn't taken on as a script within western cultural hegemony in part because it disrupts the eugenicist social order. Taking risks with people’s bodies at capitalism’s behest and abandoning disabled folks, though? Right on track. Come to find out we’re all essential workers, because people working themselves to death is essential to keep the machine running. And the malevolent power in this hegemony spreads throughout the globe, much like an airborne virus. Stopping industry to preserve lives any longer than other nations became the true fear of world leaders, and the millions of folks dead along the way would be soon buried beneath the collective trauma.

That shows up in individuals as well, as folks fear falling behind because masking has an impact on professional success. Because the primary association is with illness, masked folks are generally punished with similar social ramifications as disabled people. The successes offered there are basically Black Capitalist, Black Excellence, and/or Prettiest Product—wrapped in illusory packaging with different ivory stamps of approval. Thankfully, as an anarchist, I don’t get off on institutional validation, and as a disabled person, my body already had one foot out the door. It’s been freedom-seeking to take on revolutionary social suicide, jumping into unknown waters with my life still my own. I value the creative freedom and fugitive potential underwater with my ancestors who chose the sea.

Rhetoric in the Black community emphasizes our longevity, strength, and survival above grieving and honoring the millions who've died on the trafficking to the coasts of Africa, over the middle passage, and while in tortuous bondage up through today. Knowing we are these holistically talented descendants of the survivors of enslavement and genocide puts us in our own complex with “good genes." Whether we identify with the language or not, many of us have internalized the colonial pseudoscience of natural selection. But there’s nothing natural about genocide, forced breeding, or contemporary health disparities. Nothing natural about the medical industrial complex, or who gets healthcare and who gets left to die.

When the social order is centered around capital, and the state cannot outright own us as living, breathing commodified capital, they’re gonna capitalize on our death and our dying.