With American current socio-political climate, The Radical Futures Now t team had a conversation with adrienne maree brown to discuss emergent strategies and pleasure activism. In this episode, Adrienne breaks down their life’s work in activism with various communities adrienne maree brown is the author of Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds and the co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: | Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements. She is the co-host of the How to Survive the End of the World and Octavia’s Parables podcasts. adrienne is rooted in Detroit.
Resources:
adrienne maree brown’s website
Pleasure Activism book
Emergent Strategy Book
Octavia’s Brood Book
How to Survive the End of the World Podcast
Transcript:
Intro:
Welcome to the Radical Zone Podcast, where we get updates on the current state of the world and how various communities are impacted from activists and organizers who are out there doing the work. The Radical Zone Podcast is housed under the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership. I know you’re probably wondering what the Arcus Center is.
The Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership, also known as ACSJL, is an initiative of Kalamazoo College whose mission is to develop and sustain leaders in human rights and social justice through education and capacity building. We envision a world where every person’s life is equally valued, the inherent dignity of all people is recognized, the opportunity to develop one’s full potentially is available to every person and systematic discrimination and structural inequities have been eradicated. Listen to and engage in conversation with organizers and activists across the globe about social inequities that impact us all.
Rhiki:
Okay, so this time I want to start off with a question. adrienne, what has been your positive obsession this week?
adrienne:
Hmm. Thank you for that question, and thanks for having me as a part of the Arcus podcast. I think my positive obsession this week has been transformative justice and abolition, and really sitting in some big questions around how do we do justice well, and how do we do justice in ways that are satisfying to us and don’t replicate state processes, white supremacist processes, capitalist processes, but then how do we really center survivors and make sure their needs are met as we’re in this transitionary phase from that state justice to something that we’re now co-creating?
I feel positively obsessed. I keep finding myself waking up, and thinking about it, and dreaming about it and writing about it. And yeah, I also feel positively assessed about rest. I’m trying to figure out like how do I get more rest. Yeah.
Rhiki:
Do you take a lot of naps?
adrienne:
I’m not really a napper. If I happen to sit down in the middle of day to watch something, I might fall asleep, but I tend to have very full days once my work starts for the day. I have like quiet mornings where I do a lot of reflecting, and then once my day starts I’m kind of all in, going, going, going.
And I think that’s the case for a lot of us, that like between the pandemic and the uprisings, and ongoing work, and constant adaptations, and trying to make it work in an unlikely circumstances, and trying to navigate, I’m used to living alone, and for this quarantine I’m living with three other people, who I care about very much, and love very much and want to be in a relationship with.
There’s just a lot of pieces to navigate in a day and I keep being like, “Oh, right. I was supposed to sleep a little later, maybe that would have helped or something.” But I also find, and I find this to be true amongst a lot of people that I’m talking to now, that we’re waking up in the middle of the night and reflecting, thinking, processing.
And I think I’ve always felt like some of that is when I am most available to spirit and most available to those voices that are harder to hear when you’re in this sort of non-stop news cycle and social media cycle and all the other things. Sometimes I’m like, well, that’s when I’m quiet enough for them to talk to me and I don’t want to ignore those messages, but I also don’t want to walk around with bags under my eyes and so I’m trying to strike that balance. Yeah.
Rhiki:
Paige, how do you find rest during this time?
Paige:
Oh, that’s such a good question. I’ve been taking a lot more naps. During school, I would take a nap, but I’d be kind of nervous to not wake up in time for my next thing, whereas now if I think a three hour nap, it’s not as … The stakes aren’t so high. Yeah, and I feel like I rest a lot by listening to … I’ve been on this kick of like NPR, Tiny Desk Concerts and just listening to a lot of good music. Yeah, have you listened to those?
adrienne:
That helps a lot. Yeah, I love those. I mean, the way I listen to music is very active. It’s not a sleepy time. I actually tried to put on a jazz list to relax to the other night and I was just up the whole night, like, “Wow, I love this. I love how this is sounding. I love the choice that they made with that horn,” and so I was like, “Okay, that’s not my sleepy time stuff.”
I do have a really great … I use the Insight meditation app, and there’s sounds on there that I know once I put those on I can get to asleep. So it’s more like finding the actual literal time in a day to do it, and it’s different as life feels very, very full right now.
And I think there’s also the constant wrestling. I think we’re all also doing this of like what is urgent and what is not urgent. And it’s hard to track that as cleanly when there’s so many different things to be held, and that all need to be held well. Yeah, it’s a lot.
Paige:
Right. And I think jazz too, I always try to put jazz before I go to sleep, but it’s actually like very vibrant.
adrienne:
Jazz is very cerebral. It’s very vibrant. It’s very alive. Even the slower stuff with the … I’m a vocalist and I like to listen to vocalists. But even if I put on the instrumental, I’m just feeling like I am still fully engaged. John Coltrane is one of my very favorites. And I’ll put on John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and then it’s a different thing.
It’s my brain going to a different place, which can also be restful. If I have been in conversations or meetings all day, switching into a place of letting my brain roll down a jazz path can be really useful, but it’s not necessarily restful. I think that’s a big thing that I’m trying to hold the distinctions around. It’s like there’s rest, and I do know I’m good at rest, but it’s finding the time.
Paige:
Positive obsession this week, Rhiki?
Rhiki:
My positive obsession. I tend to find rest, not like sleep rest, but rest in food. I don’t know why. I’m a foodie. Food can make my day, and so it can be really bad if I’m obsessed in something that’s not healthy for me. But lately, I’ve really been enjoying kind of diversifying my palette with some healthier snacks. I’m really into dried mangoes right now and I’m really into rice cakes.
And it’s not for the taste. I don’t know, it’s really weird. I just like chewing them. Dry mangoes, it’s kind of like chewing leather. It’s really weird. But I don’t know, my mind finds it satisfying. And then rice cakes, again, it’s not the best taste and it’s more like chewing styrofoam, but for some reason, I like chewing things and that’s what I’m positively obsessed with right now.
Paige:
Nice.
Rhiki:
Let’s get started. Welcome to the Radical Zone Podcast, and to another episode of our BLM series. It’s Rhiki and I’m joined here with Paige. And today, we have the pleasure of talking to adrienne maree brown about her take on activism and organizing.
Paige:
Yeah, adrienne maree brown is the author of Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, and co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. adrienne is rooted in Detroit. I wanted to share a story today actually. I actually remember meeting you in Arcus, I think, 2017 or 2018. I was a sophomore.
And I had walked into the office and I was just like, “Oh, hey. I’m Paige.” I knew you weren’t someone who had worked in the office because I worked there. I thought you were a student, and I was like, “Oh, okay. Cool. There’s this student visiting,” and then you said, “I should probably go get started,” and I was like, “Oh, she’s like the facilitator for the night.”
adrienne:
Ah, yes, I remember that.
Paige:
But yeah, since then, I read your book both Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism.
adrienne:
Thank you.
Paige:
And I also remember reading in the first couple of chapters of Emergent Strategy to be like, you’re like, “If you haven’t read Octavia Butler, stop reading this book, go read that book.”
adrienne:
I still feel that way.
Paige:
I know a lot has changed for you in the last few years. I’m wondering like how you’re feeling about just your journey since the release of your first book and your upcoming project going on.
adrienne:
Well, yeah, a lot has changed. And it’s interesting because Octavia’s Brood was not my first book. I put out a book back in 2003 that I think is not in print anymore,
but it was called How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office. And it feels relevant, more and more relevant every day.
But it was in the same vein of other work that I do which is trying to uplift lessons from a variety of voices around how we do something that the media or government might try to make us think is mysterious. And rest and pleasure, and creating change and all of those things are in that realm. And Octavia’s Brood felt like the first effort that was like I had this vision, I had this dream. I partnered up with someone who shared that vision, shared that dream, shared that analysis.
And that experience was super satisfying. It’s really satisfying to find people who do share obsession with you, and who can meet you there, and be positively obsessed and see something unfold. And what I feel has shifted a lot is since Octavia’s Brood came out. When Octavia’s Brood came out, I was very much like, “This is going to be a specialized taste. This will be for other people who are really nerdy and willing to even possibly consider that science fiction has something to teach us strategically,” which is what I really felt, and really feel that science fiction is a way that we practice the future together.
And that we are futurist, that we are science fiction writers and thinkers when we are organizers, because we are putting ourselves in direct relationship to and trying to shape a world to come which we have never actually experienced. And that’s all fiction really is, it’s like I’m crafting something that I haven’t quite seen but maybe I know emotionally, or I know some piece of it and I want to deeper dive, deeper understanding.
And then when Emergent Strategy came out, we had built a following. We had built supporters in Octavia’s Brood who were willing and open to the ideas of Emergent Strategy. And I felt blessed around that, that people were like, “Okay, you want to talk about how ants could be strategic now? Cool, let’s talk about it.” And then the people who read Emergent Strategy, they showed up in droves for Pleasure Activism, and so Pleasure Activism ended up showing up on The New York Times Best Seller list in the first week of coming out.
But when I heard that, what I thought was, those are Emergent Strategists. Those are folks who have been kind of following along this journey, because to me, all the thinking is very related. It’s like, how do we learn from nature? How do we get in right relationship with each other? How do we get in right relationship with our bodies? How do we get in right relationship with being visionaries?
It’s all very related to me. And now, it’s been this interesting period of time where I’m like, “Okay, I’m listening for what’s next, and what’s next is a book on facilitation and mediation.” And I’m really excited about that because it draws most directly on the work that I’ve done for the last 20 plus years, and it feels really necessary right now.
I feel like we really need to openly encourage each other to be developing a skill set around creating ease when we’re together, so that we can turn and face the hard work we have to do together, because it is hard. There’s a lot of hard changes coming, so yeah.
Paige:
Right.
adrienne:
And the world has changed completely during that time, so now I feel like movements talk very openly about needing to center joy and pleasure and making movement irresistible. And I feel a part of that, and I also feel like the stakes have changed and what we’re able to change is becoming bigger and wider and more bodacious every day. And it’s exciting to be a part of that even though this is a pretty terrifying time to be alive as well, so it’s all happening,
Paige:
Right. Yeah. I remember talking to some of my elders and they say that specifically about about centering joy and how our generation does that a lot more than the previous ones when they organized. Yeah.
Rhiki:
I do want to switch gears just a little bit and talk about your Pleasure Activism book. There was a line in there that I kind of just want to get your thoughts on and want you to expand a little bit more on. Because Pleasure Activism is new to me, so when I think of-
adrienne:
Me too.
Rhiki:
… when I think of what it means to model activism, usually they tell you, you got to have the language, you got to know the common language, you got to have a historical analysis. You just have to be well-versed in the past and kind of upbeat with what’s happening currently. Be in conversation with other organizers.
But the way you talk about modeling your pleasure and modeling your joy is so different, so I just want to get your thoughts on this line. In your book it says, “It is a short step from there to the false belief that only by the suppression of the erotic within our lives and consciousness can women be truly strong.”
adrienne:
Hmm. Is that from Audre Lorde?
Rhiki:
Yeah.
Adrienne:
I feel like this Audre did a lot of good work in her writing, in her thinking, and I feel like has taught a lot of us. And I feel like when she writes about women suppressing ourselves, suppressing our desires, what she’s saying to us is that we were trained that suppressing our desires is what will make us palpable to the world around us, survivable to the world around us, and it takes so much of our power away from us. And I feel like her essay is an invitation for us to come back to our power, to return to it. What did you hear in that line?
Rhiki:
I was trying to decipher it, so I did kind of look into it a little more. And I came across a book reading of yours where you were talking about, not this particular line, but that section of the book and what it means to have that erotic awakening and experience your full free self.
adrienne:
Yes.
Rhiki:
And I don’t know, it was just really hard for me to grasp it because I think some of what you said is somewhat true. I don’t think when I walk into rooms, I don’t think I’m like as joyful as I could be, so is that affecting the way I’m modeling this work? Yeah, there’s just certain things that I feel like I haven’t thought about and wondering if that is affecting how I do this work, my imagination in kind of considering what could be trying to envision a world outside the context and confines in which we live now.
adrienne:
Yes.
Rhiki:
Yeah.
adrienne:
Yeah. I feel like this piece, and she says it so well that when we don’t know how to experience our own aliveness, that it’s easy to get us to settle for any old thing, right? Any old thing that someone comes along with, we’re just like, “Okay, I will self-negate.” She talks about that. They will settle for self-negation and self-denial.
And I remember the first time I read this piece of hers, it was so far over my head I can’t even visualize how far, because it was so far from what I understood to feel. At that time, I think most of my personality was inauthentic. My orgasms were authentic. My sense of vision and having a right to vision was inauthentic. And then I read this piece and I was like, “Well, she just woke me up. Who am I serving with all this inauthentic participation? I do want to be free.”
And I kept trying to behave in the right ways, the ways that I thought a revolutionary should behave, but I wasn’t actually practicing freedom. And then for me, it was awakening in my body, awakening inside of relationships with other people as it had to do with my body and as I had to do with my time, that I started to feel my freedom.
And when I feel out of touch with my freedom, almost always it means I’m out of touch with my body. And if I want to get back to it, then I have to drop in. And not always for pleasure, sometimes it’s like, “Oh, I’m stressed.” Since this pandemic started, I’ve been randomly itching. And I keep trying to figure out what’s the source of this itching, am I allergic to something?
And I keep coming back to, “No, it’s just a distressing time. I’m actually feeling so much. And I have to just honor the fact that this is a stressful time for me.” I can’t pretend it away and it helps to be in my pleasure practices. But my pleasure practices will not give me an escape from this moment, this moment has to be contended with.
And Pleasure Activism for me is the way that I was able to awaken that, “Ah, I actually have the right to be fully awake and alive inside all of these different kinds of emotions, and all of them are instructive. It’s really important that I’m able to feel my anger.” And for me, orgasm opened my path to feeling my anger. It opened my path to being able to feel my disappointment in others.
It opened my path to recognize when I was lying to myself and others about what satisfied me. And this is another thing that really blows my mind still is how many of us are in movement with no sense of what is satisfaction. We are making demands, and sometimes those demands are met or partially met, at least waive that. And we have no idea if that satisfies us or not.
Immediately, we either turn around and start the next campaign or we bring the complaint around it, but there’s not a lot of practice in us around victory, winning, recognizing when we have a moment and we should be celebrating what we’ve done. And I think that learning satisfaction from the inside out for me has been a really helpful practice.
And I do think for where Audre was writing from that she’s writing for women who have so often been denied the right to feel the space to be our whole selves and be recognized and honored for what we’re feeling, what we need, what we experience.
And today, I think a lot of what she’s writing is highly relevant for trans communities. We always need to be paying attention to which are the next communities that have been unseen, that have been invisibilized, that have been told that their pleasure doesn’t matter.
And I think trans communities, I think disabled communities, I think immigrant communities are the communities that still get held and looked at as if their pleasure and their joy don’t really matter, that they should feel lucky that they’re getting to survive and lucky that they’re not being attacked all the time, lucky that they get to be in this country.
All kinds of things that are like, but that is not. That’s not liberation. That’s not solidarity. If we’re in movement with each other, to me, we have to always think, “Who here is still being denied their right to pleasure, the right to peace, the right to calm, the right to rest? And how do we organize ourselves around making sure that, that rest and joy and pleasure become possible?”
Paige:
Yeah. I’m wondering like how you understand facilitation. I actually just had this conversation recently with a friend, like, how do you think about teaching and how do you think about facilitating as like maybe not necessarily like different things, but what is possible to be accomplished?
adrienne:
I think they’re pretty different. And it’s one of the things that I feel like it took me a while to understand that when I’m in teaching mode, I am taking very seriously that there’s something that I have experience in that I have to share, that I need to make sure people understand. And my job is theo make it as compelling and interesting as possible, but I also have to really deliver something.
And it might be this popular education teaching that I have been involved in where I believe that what I want to help people see is something they already have inside of them. And then there’s other times where I’m like, “I need to help you see something that you don’t have access to yet. You haven’t had experience yet.” This is often true around issues of race, class and privilege that I’m like, “Ah, I’m helping you. I’m trying to teach you to see something radically differently from how you were trained to see it.”
And I feel inside of that facilitation is when you’re saying, “There’s not something that I, standing in front of the room, have to impart on those of you who are here in the space, instead, there’s something that you in the space are trying to do, trying to make happen that you believe is necessary, that you’re trying to find a way for. And my job is to help remove any obstacles to being able to do that work and to help you hear each other, feel each other, see each other, honor each other, respect each other and stay in the conversation, stay in the relationship long enough to get that work done.”
I do believe that the work we have to do together is very complex. And so I also think that the work of the facilitator is to help people understand what is the conversation that this particular group of people needs to have to move our very complex work forward. Often we get in the room, and because the work is complex, we try to address everything at once, right?
So it’s like we have to address every aspect of our identities, and every aspect of oppression, and every aspect of class, everything else all in the same moment, and that’s how we move forward. And it’s like actually, that’s not possible. Literally in time, space continuum, that’s not how things change and that’s not how things work.
So really figuring out like what is the next elegant step we can take as a community to grow our learning, to grow our strategy, to turn and face what is ours to face. And I really deeply believe in facilitation. I think our movements needed to be done and done well. And I’ve gotten to be a part of some incredible facilitation that I can see has supported movement to go far.
There’s also a big part of the book that is about mediation, which is another distinction is like holding space for conflict, holding space for hard conversations. And it’s another piece that I feel like our movements need to get both good at doing and good at asking for like understanding that, “Oh, that’s an option I could have. I could be mediated. I could be held in this conversation. I don’t have to try to move through this conflict without support,” which I think so often just exacerbates our conflicts. So yes, I’m excited about it. I feel pleased with what’s in there. I think it will be of use.
Paige:
Wow, that sounds amazing. Yeah, I’m looking forward to reading that book as well. Yeah, I think that will be really good.
adrienne:
Thank you.
Paige:
Yeah. I think just listening to you in the last few moments has changed my ideas about facilitation. I think for a really long time I had conflated them together. Yeah, so thank you for that. Yeah. I also recently went to the Movement Generation’s last session. [crosstalk 00:28:18]
adrienne:
Oh, yay.
Paige:
Yeah, your introduction, your facilitation was really moving-
adrienne:
Thank you.
Paige:
… and the way you, I think, you kind of introduce like moving through the imaginative space and the possibilities of being in 2050.
adrienne:
Yes.
Paige:
How do you return to your future building and the way that you … How did you prepare for that, or like how do you do that?
adrienne:
How do you time travel?
Paige:
How do you time travel?
adrienne:
I mean, I feel like there’s a couple of tricks for me for time travel that really help me to go into it and then to return, one is I think about my age now and the moment that I’m in now and really let myself landing in that. In this moment today, 2020, I’m 41, about to be 42. And it’s easy for me to look back and say, “Oh, I’ve changed so much in the last 10 years, in the last five years. I’m a different person. My ideas have evolved. My way of being has evolved, and who I’m in relationship with has evolved.” And so when I’m time traveling forward, I try to release holding onto the way that I am now, and I try to make a possible to me that I could change very radically and that I’m in community that will also change very radically. And I try to let myself be interested in that changing rather than only committed to staying exactly the same forever.
I feel like we need to, there’s a teacher that I really respect named Lama Rod Owens, who is a black Buddhist teacher who actually has a book out now called Love and Rage, which I think is an important piece of work. But he talks about the responsibility we have to be prophetic and to be willing to really name what is as a part of looking forward at what can come and what can be. And that’s what I think Octavia Butler did for us. She was prophetic. She was willing to say, “Well, given how we behave, we can draw some conclusions, and we can see that this is our most likely next step or most likely next phase.” Now, I deeply believe that what we put our attention on grows, and I feel like I’ve seen this over and over again when I’m facilitating in a room.
If the group really becomes obsessed with all the ways that they are not fully aligned yet, then they can become stuck there and it can become almost unimaginable that they could find a way towards each other. But if they instead are asked to bring their attention to the places where there is alignment already, even if it’s small, and sometimes it’s quite tiny, but if they’re asked to bring their attention there, what I find happening is the people are like, “Oh, we’re actually not that different or that distant. Maybe we have different starting points, different frameworks, different … ” often it’s different political starting points.
And we make a lot of assumptions about each other that make it hard to understand that we actually come from very different contexts; our experience of class, our experience of race or experience of citizenship. These things really matter in how we see the world. The process by which we get politicized really matters. So when I’m doing time travel, I really think, “How do I bring myself and others into a space that is really open ended really possible, and that allows for their cultural and political shaping to be present as well as mine, and allows for something to grow between us that in this moment right now in history might not even feel possible?”
There’s certain groups that I’m like, “Oh, I don’t know that they can even imagine themselves visioning together. But if I create an open enough space, then maybe they can imagine a future in which they not only coexist, but co-vision and where there’s some kind of peace between them,” and so I try to bring my attention to that.
Now, with Movement Generation, there’s a blessing, because I know that people who are showing up to Movement Generation have been thinking about just transition, and have been thinking about getting in right relationship with the planet. And so we’re not starting from scratch when it comes to finding some common vision and common language, so it’s a little bit of a cheat for that. I know that there’s some shared vision there, and all we’re doing now is trying to add some specificity to that vision. And it also really helps to track if you’re still able to get excited by other people’s visions and ideas.
This is something I think we can lose, especially in the process of education, that we start to get very committed to, “This is my dissertation. This is my idea. This is mine,” and forget that the most interesting thing about being a human is actually how many different ways there are of understanding this world and finding paths that serve as many of us as can be served, and that really start from and include as many of us as can be included, which I am still ambitious enough to think is almost all of us. I haven’t figured out where racists can fit, so I don’t leave room for them in my visions, but everyone else has a seat at the table.
Rhiki:
Thank you for that. I really like what you said about as time traveling, like creating this open space in which everyone can see themselves and just creating the possibility to have different levels of understanding about certain things and how we co-exist with each other. I have kind of a big question for you, but I feel like you’re the perfect person to ask this to because of how open-minded you are and how expansive your imagination is.
I watched the video on you kind of giving some insight into your Emergent Strategy book. And you said in the video that Emergent Strategy is learning to be interdependent, fractal, decentralize, also adaptive and ever evolving. My question is, how can we use this concept of Emergent Strategy and apply it to movements of today in an effort to end a problem and issue systematic racial oppression that’s also just as highly adaptive and ever evolving as our movements are?
adrienne:
I love this question. This is one of the things I talk about with Emergent Strategy because people are like, “Ooh, nature, she’s totally peaceful,” and I’m like, “No.” There are predators in nature and prey, and there is unfair situations in nature. There are unfair situations in nature. There are natural disasters in nature. There are toxic poisons in nature. I think one of the things that really helps me is to understand that in nature there’s very little that is willfully harmful. Where we are willfully harmful, that’s the place where I often am like, “How do we get ourselves back in right relationship with the natural world?”
Creatures don’t hunt for things that they’re not planning to eat, but humans do. And creatures don’t attack or tear each other down if they’re not worried about their actual survival and being able to have the territory for survival that humans do. And a lot of what we think of as justice is vengeance and harmful, and it doesn’t actually break the patterns of harm.
And those are the places I think where humans can benefit the most from Emergent Strategy. When it comes to racial oppression, I think one of the most interesting pieces is how do we continue to believe that people can change along the lines of racism? And how do we continue to believe that this can be shifted, healed, responded to, eradicated? And right now I think a lot of people are like, “This is just how white people are, and it’s the only way that they’ll ever be.” And I think Emergent Strategy says everything is constantly changing, and this too can change. How we change it actually really matters. Some of the efforts that I am most excited about are those where white people are taking on a certain level of responsibility for doing their own work. Emergent strategy works best when people feel a sense of responsibility, collective responsibility. That it’s not my duty to go and change someone else, but it’s my duty to play my best position inside of this ever-changing world. I see a lot of white people now who are turning and saying, “I actually have to change. It’s not enough to point the finger at other people.”
I think this is one of the most crucial aspects of changing around race, is understanding that there are aspects of racism, aspects of internalized anti-blackness. These things get inside of us. They get into our beliefs of ourselves and they make us think, “I can never rest. Nothing I do is good enough. I constantly have to be overworking. I’ll never be paid enough. I have to monitor myself. I have to compromise my values. I don’t get to be the person who articulates the future, I just get to be the person who helps someone else manifest their dream.” There’s things like that, that are insidious beliefs that get into our systems. There’s what white people need to do and then there’s what the rest of us need to do in healing our own relationships with ourself, our racial relationships with ourselves, and our racial relationships between ourselves.
One of the things we learned, last year we took Emergent Strategy into a variety of different communities in the form of these events we called immersions. And each community got to shape a lot of their own immersion, right? They got to say, “Here’s who should be in the room to practice Emergent Strategy together, and here’s the conversations that really matter to us.” And several of the spaces said, “We actually need a BIPOC space. We need a space where we get to come together just as people of color and work on the anti-blackness, and the assumptions and stereotypes that we’re making amongst each other.” And having white folks in the room can really flatten the racial conversation, because people think it’s all about the black, white dynamic. But anti-blackness works in so many more ways than that. And there’s a lot of ways in which other people of color have been turned against black people, and the black people have been pit against other people of color. That we have been trained to compete against each other, to be more than minorities, or to try to get jobs from each other.
All these different things, there’s healing needed along all these front lines. Being willing to take the room to say we actually need some BIPOC space before we come into that larger multi-racial space with white people, that was one of the things we learned. Another was Emergent Strategy happens at the level of bringing our attention into relationship and interdependence, and putting people into situations where they actually get to relate to each other human to human, story to story outside of the starting point of like, “Here’s all my stereotypes and here’s all yours.”
So we had gathering after gathering where people would come out. I never thought I could experience a white person that way or experience a man that way, or experienced an able-bodied person that way, where we were de-centering those with privilege and recentering those who had struggled more as the teachers, as the guides in the space. And a lot of people who are waking up and realizing that they have more privileged than they need or deserve, or should have, a lot of those people are looking for opportunities to put themselves in a different position in relationship to power, but we don’t have great options for it yet. Right?
Mostly we’re still pretty angry, and justifiably angry, and so it becomes hard to find those places to be in practice ground with each other. And I think Emergent Strategy has a lot to offer there for people to get to practice being human with each other, and being in community with each other, being of service to each other.
Rhiki:
I love that. And I really like what you said about having space where we can kind of work out some of the things that we’ve internalized. For example, so I’m like been going through this internal kind of battle with my ideas around code-switching, and if I should continue to do it or not. It’s so hard because I’ve been socialized to like it’s almost automatic.
And I’ve been trying to turn it off, and it’s so hard, because I want to get to a space where I can be my full self, speak the way I naturally speak, which isn’t American standard English all the time. And people don’t associate the way I speak with me being illiterate. I kind of want to disrupt some of those perceptions, but it’s so hard because I’ve been doing it for so long it’s almost like I have to train myself to not do it.
adrienne:
Hmm. That’s a really good noticing, a good self-awareness. Something that helps me is I think of those things as artifacts of white supremacy that are still in me, that have gotten into my system, and where can I be mindful? And for me, I’m a mixed race woman. My mother is white, my father is black.
And I grew up without even a concept of code-switching, it was just like, there’s just many ways to talk, and many ways to be and many ways, and I just move between them. It wasn’t until much later that I had a sense of like, “Oh, I’m racializing, I’m shifting, I’m adapting, and a lot of it is for my survival.” And I think that is one of the hard parts is, it’s not just, in many of us, it’s not just any sense of like, “Oh, this is my preference,” or, “This is what I think they’ll enjoy,” it’s literally in our blood, in our DNA, in our memory, in our ancestral memory, this is how I will be safe.
We learned it for a reason. And so what we have to learn now is that safety has not actually shown up and it will not show up because of us speaking a certain way or not speaking a certain way. There’s actually nothing that we do as black people, or indigenous people, or Latinx people or Arab people, there’s nothing that we do that justifies the harm that gets done to us.
And there’s nothing that we can undo or practice that will protect us from the hatred that fuels racism. Once we realize that, for me, at least it becomes a lot easier to just be my full self, and have my full self without an expectation of safety externally, and my full self with a sense that I have to keep safe what is fundamentally myself.
That’s the best work I can do by myself is to actually fully be myself and create conditions where people have to contend with that. And that’s all of me. I think one of the things that’s been interesting is for those of us who have been educated in white schools, or have white parents or white community what do we do with the white cultural shaping that’s also there. And I think we’re on the precipice of being ready for some of those conversations.
I don’t know that everyone actually is yet, because right now there’s such a need to push away from that shore of whiteness, and to get clear on how much of white culture is swollen and co-opted and all the other things. And then to also experience a lot of what we call whiteness or experience as whiteness currently is actually just what it means to be human outside of constant persecution, and access to, “I can talk how I want to talk and dress how I want to dress, and go where I want to go,” and other things.
It’s like that’s actually not whiteness, that’s just being a free human being, and that’s what we want to guarantee for all human beings. And the de-centering of whiteness in our mouths, in our hearts, in our communities, the de-centering of it allows for everyone to actually experience their full humanity.
Rhiki:
Thank you for that.
adrienne:
So good luck.
Rhiki:
I’m just like kind of is taking it all in, a kind of awestruck moment. But I do want to-
adrienne:
We’re the freest that we’ve ever been. I think this is an important thing to notice too, is like we’re able to wrestle with these things that our ancestors didn’t necessarily get to wrestle with in the same way. It’s like I’m super excited to hear that you’re wrestling with it, thinking about it, taking it seriously, and the practice ground is all around you. Every conversation you get to say, “How am I showing up authentically? How am I contorting? And who benefits from my contortion?”
Rhiki:
… Yeah, and I agree. I feel like it is a different time now where we can … What’s the word? Kind of like politics of respectability is kind of like our past, and so we get the opportunity to kind of make a choice on how we want to show up regardless of how we may be affected.
adrienne:
Yeah.
Rhiki:
So yeah, I’ve been trying.
adrienne:
I really try hard also to not deify my ancestors in a certain way. Like, not go back and try to rewrite who they were in history, but also not go back and judge them. I’m like, I think that our ancestors did what they needed to do to survive and now there’s more options. Because of them, we have more options, and so how do we live fully into those additional options? Yeah.
Rhiki:
I want to be mindful of your time. Do you have time for one more question?
adrienne:
Let’s see what time it is. One more we can do. Yeah.
Rhiki:
Okay. Paige, go ahead with the next question.
Paige:
I remember at the beginning of the conversation you were talking about transformative justice and dreaming about it. And I’m wondering how can we be intentional about bringing a transformative justice lens into the work around this moment with the Black Lives Matter uprising, the defunding the police and ending the police brutality?
adrienne:
Yeah. This one it feels like I’m really actively in and learning around, but a big part of it is understanding that we have to break with our commitment to punitive justice. And what does that actually look like when we’re so deeply steeped in it? At every level of our society, we punish our children and they go into detention, suspension, expulsion.
And so often punishment looks the same at different age ranges. When you’re a child or an adult, it’s about being removed from community and othered, and made to feel as if you are uniquely bad, uniquely don’t belong and shamed, and then from that place trying to affect some kind of change that makes people feel like, “Okay, I’ll get better.”
Sometimes there are definitely instances where it’s like, “This is rape. This is molestation. This is murder. This is egregious harm,” and there needs to be some way to create a boundary between the harm that, that person seems to be committed to doing in the community. And I feel like we need to figure out like, well, what are the ways we do that without the state? Because so far the state puts people into prisons, death penalty, solitary confinement, but it doesn’t actually end the cycles of harm. We know that, that method of separating people from community and sort of setting them apart someplace to feel ashamed and disappeared doesn’t actually work. And we’re still in that middle ground where we don’t yet know what all the other options are.
Part of it is seeing yourself as experimental ground for what is possible for us as a species. And I think it starts at the level of interpersonal conflict, right, when you just are like, “I’m having a fight. I’m having a beef with someone.” How can we show up in a more principled way to be in those arguments in ways that don’t engage the state, but also don’t go straight towards blame and punishment frameworks? How do we stay curious? How do we say we actually are holding a difference of opinion? That’s okay. It’s actually important. We need to hold differences of opinion.
That’s what a healthy ecosystem actually looks like, is different ways of being. To me, I think that’s a starting place for it. And where I think I’m still in my own learning is how do we center and make sure that survivors are cared for all along that process. And I think it’s a place where we’re still struggling to figure it out because it actually takes a lot of resources to really be there for the time it takes in an unrushed way to recognize what harm has happened, and name it and figure out what would actually be a satisfying and healing consequence.
And I’m excited that people are turning to face it. I think it’s helpful that we’re starting to understand that even restorative justice practices as a framework are about restoring the conditions that existed when the harm happened, which means some fundamental aspect of what needed to change often has not shifted.
I think about this metaphor of someone being hungry and stealing a purse. And maybe they serve prison time, or they do community practice or apologize, but if we haven’t addressed the underlying economic disparity that led to their hunger in the first place, it’s only a matter of time before another purse is stolen or more something else material is exchanged, or that, that person is driven to the mechanisms by which capitalism has always functioned, the sale of illegal substances or trading of what we have, which is often our bodies, ourselves.
I think the question is, well, then how do we actually get in right relationship with what it takes to transform the underlying conditions? What would it look like to live in a society where we had a living wage and nobody had to worry about that, where we had a right relationship with our abundant food cycle? And so that there weren’t people who were walking around hungry or that we had a sense that because you were alive you had access to your basic needs and healthcare instead of having to work for them, which is an assumption that capitalism makes feel innate, which is not innate. There’s things like that, that for me when I think about transformative justice is very much in line with what does it take to abolish the system of imprisonment that is left over to us from slavery, and what does it take for us as a community to take responsibility instead to take accountability for each other and for ending these cycles of harm.
Rhiki:
adrienne, thank you so much for agreeing to talk with us. This was awesome.
adrienne:
Thank you for having me. I really appreciate your questions, they were super thoughtful and engaging.
Rhiki:
You all know how we do, we want to leave you with a quote. And this one is actually by adrienne, and it says, “I believe that all organizing is science fiction, that we are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced.” And I think this quote is so important, because like we said in our conversation today, the imagination is a very powerful tool and it’s very important, because it helps us envision the world we want to strive towards, and that vision helps us figure out what direction we’re going to go. It’s really important that we really actively use our imaginations. And if you’re having trouble doing that, there are writers like Adrienne, like Octavia Butler that you can read some of their works and they can help guide you in utilizing your imagination. And also think about it this way, we are living in someone’s imagination right now. This is the product of the imagination of the one percenters or those group of white males that have all the power to kind of take their imagination and make it tangible. So let’s actively use ours and envision a better world.
Paige:
adrienne, thank you so much for being with us and gathering here today. Please go check out her book, Octavia’s Brood, Emergent Strategy or Pleasure Activism. They’re all amazing. She also has a podcast called How to Survive the End of the World and Octavia’s Parables anywhere you listen to podcasts. Thanks for coming to the Radical Zone with Rhiki and Paige, and we’re out till next week.