adrienne maree brown talks about how to create the future, through "emergent strategy", "pleasure activism" and lots of SF
We have been dipping into the black American activist adrienne maree brown’s work, specifically Emergent Strategy, for a number of years now.
She sits at the nexus of a number of themes we’re interested in here - the power of facilitation to move communities out of static and frozen mindsets; an interest in unpredictable and blooming processes of change, with the maximum diversity of participants in these processes; and the kind of reckoning with history represented by Black Lives Matter, climate youth strikes and #MeToo.
We found this expansive interview with adrienne in this new publication, Deem, and have taken a few extracts that are relevant to our agenda. brown’s most recent book is Pleasure Activism.
Alice: In 2017, you published the now highly acclaimed Emergent Strategy. This book is often described as being about radical self-help: personal help, social help, global help, ecological help… Many people must ask you what emergent strategy is. What do you tell them?
adrienne: My answer has shifted over time. Right now, emergent strategy is how we can intentionally get into the right relationship with the planet and with each other. Emergent strategy is focused towards people who have a desire to change the world. They see that something is wrong. They see that there's injustice, imbalance, and that deep transformation is needed. The question is, how does one transform oneself in order to bring about that transformation?
It's also about creating the right relationship to change. So much of emergent strategy is inspired by Octavia Butler and the idea that all that you touch, you change, and all that you touch also changes you back. For most of us who strive to create change, we love that first part—“all that you touch, you change”— yes!
But the idea that we're also being changed is much harder for us to contend with. For this reason, the book provides strategies for how to adapt with intention. How can we understand that change is non-linear? How can we understand that change happens through relationships?
I never have a short answer, by the way. You will notice this. A funny thing to me about the book is that I meant to have the introduction be quite concise and the rest of the book be a toolbox. But, as it turned out, the majority of the book is the introduction, and there's only a small toolbox.
AG: Could you tell us about the importance of facilitating social justice movement work in your life? What led you to this?
AMB: I feel like we would be much further along in our social justice work if we had more facilitation happening. This has occurred to me many times, especially as someone who was pushed into leadership roles from a very young age.
I became a managing director at 23 and an executive director by 26. When I look back, I know for sure that I needed someone to help me have certain conversations in those spaces. I needed people who could help me take a step back and find a new perspective on whatever was happening. Facilitation is exactly that. It's all about making things easier for people. Movement is already so hard.
One of the ideas in Emergent Strategy is that birds coast when they can. Struggle is inevitable, so how can we find places to increase ease? Over the years I've kept sharpening my tools. Now I'm focused on working with black leaders or majority people of color groups, mostly around climate-related problems or issues that are connected to black people, such as police brutality and reparations. Facilitation is passion work for me, so I do it for those who I want to see win
AG: You described Octavia Butler as one of the cornerstones of your awareness in Emergent Strategy. Could you tell us about your introduction to her work and what it means to you to look to her writing for guidance? [Note our blog on Butler here]
AMB: Octavia Butler was a black science fiction writer who did a lot of her writing in Pasadena, California. Before Octavia was born, her mother had four miscarriages, all of male children. Now they've done all these studies about what happens in the womb and how the material of each pregnancy becomes part of the children that come through that space, so I just love this idea that Octavia was at least five people. It makes sense!
Her imagination was so vast, and what she could see and how she could understand was so big. She put black women protagonists in direct relationships with the unimaginable. The power dynamics are like, “Wow”—something had to shift so massively.
That's the first thing that drew me to her work. A black woman is going to be the first one to talk to aliens and navigate how humans figure that out? Right, that makes sense. Of course we’re going to do that!
Or, a black woman is going to be the one who is able to heal her own body just by turning her attention inward and realizing what's wrong. Then she is going to become a dolphin so she can breed a superhuman race of pattern masters? I'm like, "Yes! Octavia, I believe you!"
The texts that are most relevant in this political moment are The Parable of the Sower (1993) and The Parable of the Talents (1998). These two books were written in a trilogy, of which she had created eighty versions. We don’t yet have public access to the third book, The Parable of the Trickster.
In these parables, there's a radical right-wing president who runs for office with the slogan “Make America Great Again.” She understood what was coming. She really grasped it. To me, Octavia is a north star and all of her characters are dancing with change, trying to figure out how we can act as guides in processes of change. How do we shape the changes we want?
I want to say one other thing about Octavia. There are more poetic, lyrical writers. She's a very straightforward writer. There's no extra fat on the bone. She’s like: “Here's the story. This is the belief system. This is what happened. This is how it felt.” I think that's really important, too. She wasn't precious; she was saying, "I need you to know this stuff. I'm sitting with it. I'm wrestling with it." You could feel her pain in her work.
I don't trust people who are alive and paying attention and don't feel pain about what's happening. As a writer, she earns my trust right away because I can tell that she knows we are all going to die and she’s terrified, just like I am.
AG: You quote Butler, saying that, “Our fatal human flaw is the combination of hierarchy and intelligence.” Do you think it is human nature to create hierarchical systems of difference, and if so, can we change this?
AMB: Based on our behavior, this does seem to be our nature. For as long as we can look back, we see forms of human hierarchy. There's some leader, there's some chief. But not all these power systems need to be fatal. I think that one reason for hierarchy is that it's actually much harder to facilitate direct democracy, direct communication, and relationship building. And now we’re so caught up in the capitalist expectation that everything must constantly be scaling up.
It's very hard to keep the relationships that you need intact once you get to a certain scale. I think that we default to hierarchy instead of deepening the kind of relationship work it would take to create other, less centralized structures. But, I'm not a purist in this belief. There are some productive hierarchies.
For example, I believe in hierarchies of age. My mentor, Grace Lee Boggs, passed away when she was 100 years. When I met her she was 92. When I encounter someone who has lived for three times as long as I have, and we’re having a conversation, I want to weigh their words appropriately. That kind of intellectual hierarchy works for me. If you're actually my teacher, let me defer and submit to that.
Unearned hierarchy is where it becomes really harmful. White supremacy, for example. That's an illusion that only causes tremendous harm. I try to disrupt unearned hierarchies whenever I can, even if it’s a simple conversation with a white man who is expressing supremacy in which I maneuver the situation to force him to understand me differently.
…Fractals are a big part of Emergent Strategy: the idea that small actions replicated on a large scale create massive and complex systems. How do you personally transform yourself to transform the world?
AMB: I'm a big practice person. I am constantly practicing things. I have several key practices that I use for self-transformation work. One is the practice of 1000% honesty, which is very, very scary and daunting for most of us. We're trained and socialized to be polite even—and sometimes especially—if it means being dishonest. If you think about it, you’ll start to notice.
How many lies did I tell today? How many times did I keep the truth just tucked right in my throat? It could have just come out, and it might have made the situation better. It might have saved resentment from building up. It might have helped us get to the project we actually need to be working on.
Try just that one thing. Commit for the next three months to being 1000% honest in even just one or two of your relationships. I would bet that most people would find that their life fully transformed in that time.
Another crucial practice is asking for help. I have to unhook this from my perfectionist Virgo self. This could mean asking for feedback or admitting that you can’t do something on your own. I will often assume that someone doesn't have any feedback for me because they didn't volunteer it.
Even when I get a lot of affirmation from my readers, I'm still thinking, “Okay, but I also want to know your critical opinion. What kinds of shifts come next?” Asking for the help you need will make you more able to perceive and offer others the help they need.
AG: Tell us about your latest book, Pleasure Activism. How do the methods in Emergent Strategy work with the ideas outlined in Pleasure Activism?
AMB: I was surprised that Pleasure Activism ended up being my next book, and I’m also surprised that it's going so well. The main idea is that what you pay attention to grows. It’s the explicitly overlapping principle that if we put our attention on pleasure—on joy, satisfaction, and happiness—we can develop these things.
Audre Lorde’s 1978 text Uses of the Erotic is the guide for Pleasure Activism. She talks about how we have been convinced that we don't deserve to feel joy, to feel pleasure, or to feel the erotic aliveness of ourselves and that this repression is intentional. As long as we don't think that we deserve these feelings, we will settle for self-negation, suffering, depression, and stagnation.
After reading that over and over again, I was thinking about how I might put my attention, as a black woman, on my own dignity. How might I put my attention, as a black woman, on my freedom? How might I put my attention, as a black woman, on feeling good? I deserve to feel good.
My hurdles have been convincing myself that I deserve to feel good as a black woman, as a fat woman, as a queer woman, as an organizer woman, and just as a woman.
Many communities are awakening to these ideas now. When it feels good, more people want to be part of it. We have numbers that say that we need to be fomenting an irresistible space that everyone wants to move towards. It should feel like home; it should feel delicious; it should feel caring. It should feel like a community.
That's also a design piece. Several of the groups that I’ve been working with are now co-creating their own spaces, which is very exciting to me. Imagine what our movement looks like in ten years if we focus on making it an irresistible and compelling space rather than a mine field, which is what my political work often felt like.
I do also want to say that rigor has a big role in pleasure. There's eroticism in having a high standard, in withholding, and in not pretending.
More here. Here’s a great context piece.