For all the Misfits patches and anarchy talk, punk rock is really about community and belonging. This, anyway, is the assumption of the documentary “Afro-Punk.” After a celebrated run on the festival circuit, the 2003 film about blacks in the white world of punk rock is now being touted as “the film that sparked the movement.” What that movement amounts to – beyond a few internet bulletin boards and a My-Space page – is unclear. The film has irrefutably sparked, for the second year in a row, a weekend of Afro-Punk programming at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Today begins a five-day presentation of music and films loosely organized around the concept. “Afro-Punk” itself will be screening on Friday, Saturday, and Tuesday, along with half a dozen other films about black identity and alienation sprinkled over the extra-long weekend. More interesting are three nights of concerts that will bring to the city many of the bands featured on the new “Afro-Punk Vol. 1” compilation, which will go on sale, along with a DVD of the film, at BAM beginning July 11.

The interplay of pop music and race has been spinning off weird and wonderful hybrids for, well, as long as pop music has existed. Afro-punk is no exception. The film’s director, James Spooner, is himself a former afro-punker, and the film is largely motivated by his need to sort through this complicated hybrid identity. To do so, he crisscrosses the country, interviewing every black punk rocker he can find about how they were introduced to the community and the limits of their integration into it.

Several of the subjects are mildly famous – Kyp Malone of TV On the Radio, D.H. Peligro of the Dead Kennedys, and Angelo Moore from Fishbone – but in true egalitarian punk style, the film makes no distinction between the stars and the unknown kids who play, dance, and sweat in crowded basements. All their experiences are equally valid, and in many cases the latter group’s are the most illuminating.

In some respects, punk rock is a natural fit for black youth. Both identities are forged on the margins of mainstream culture and both have managed to turn their alienation into an asset, a source of strength. “Being black and being a punk rocker are pretty similar,” says one of the film’s subjects. The black kids’ face-piercings and rubber-cement Mohawks serve roughly the same function that afros and dashikis do for some of their peers. Punk style may even be the more powerful declaration of difference – what baggy pants and corn rows were for suburban white kids in the early 1990s before hip hop had really arrived.

Seen from a slightly different angle – the film is a succession of slightly different angles – punk rock is really about affirming one’s black culture. Many of the subjects talk about their involvement in punk culture as a way to reclaim the legacy of Chuck Berry and Little Richard. Afro-punkers also argue – quite reasonably – that it was they who perfected punk music, with the early 1980s hardcore band Bad Brains. There are other resonances as well. One woman sees punk dress as her cultural inheritance. It’s a “contemporary eurocentric version of what people in the bush were doing,” she says, thumbing through National Geographic photos.

Whatever the resonances between black culture and punk rock, the discords are more pronounced. Punk is overwhelmingly white – historically and presently – sometimes stridently so. It has an unfortunate fondness for fascist imagery and has at times been defined by the white-supremacist strains within it. To belong, afro-punkers undergo a whitewashing that’s a little painful to watch. They straighten their hair to affect proper punk style,speak of wishing they were white, and mosh harder than everyone else to prove they belong.

Despite all this, afro-punks report that they’re far more likely to be harassed by fellow blacks than by white punks. In fact, the hazing is so intense that some have to tone down their dress in their old neighborhoods (one doesn’t become a punk and remain in the hood) for fear of being assaulted by b- boys. But on this count, the experience may be universal. If you substituted the word “jocks” or “preps” for “b-boys,” I’m sure most white punks could relate.

Perhaps the most fascinating result of this pop-cultural miscegenation is a punk outfit called Cipher. The lead singer, Moe Miller, is an articulate dreadlocked afro-punk who served as president of an Afrocentric organization while at Howard University. The rest of the band is white.The songs are all about black oppression, which does nothing to dull the enthusiasm of the all-white crowds. The scenes of scrawny bald white kids grabbing Miller’s microphone to bark his black power lyrics could spawn a thousand American Studies dissertations.

Miller’s allegiance remains undivided. “When the revolution comes, [blacks] are the people I’m gonna be fighting for,” he tells the camera. “There’s not gonna be a hardcore contingent, unfortunately.”

These and other paradoxes will be on display at this weekend’s live shows. Tonight at Southpaw, DJ Spooky and Don Letts, the West End DJ who popularized reggae within the 1970s British punk scene, will do battle on the turntables.Their weapon of choice: the records of seminal reggae label Trojan. But the highlight of the weekend will be the “Afro-Punk Vol. 1” compilation release party Saturday at CBGBs, featuring two of the stars of the film, Tamar-Kali and Cipher.

Between them they illustrate the irony of afro-punk music: namely, that when it sounds black it doesn’t sound punk, and vice versa. The molten punk guitars and Mephistopheles-worthy growls eradicate all signs of race in Cipher’s sound and render Miller’s black-power lyrics all but unintelligible. Still, judging from the film footage, it promises to be an entertaining show. Tamar-Kali illustrates the point in reverse: Her soulful delivery is recognizably black, but it probably wouldn’t appeal to fans of hardcore punk.

The story continues. Spooner hasn’t quite exorcised his demons, and he just wrapped shooting his next film,” White Lies Black Sheep,” a fictional narrative about a young black party promoting afro-rocker living in white Williamsburg who slowly rediscovers his black identity.

“Afro-Punk Weekend” through July 4 at BAM (30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).