adrienne maree brown Quotes

We hold so many worlds inside us. So many futures. It is our radical responsibility to share these worlds, to plant them in the soil of our society as seeds for the type of justice we want and need.

Science fiction is the perfect "exploring ground," as it gives us the opportunity to play with different outcomes and strategies before we have to deal with the real-world costs.

You are a personal front line. What’s happening in your life and in the relationships you have with your family and how you treat people when you’re upset with them — I always ask people that, when I talk about transformative justice: Are you punishing anyone right now? And could that punishment be shifted into a boundary or a request? Is there a courageous conversation that needs to be had? How do you personally begin to practice whatever’s in alignment with your largest vision? Abolition is something we practice every day in our lives. Liberation, emergent strategy, all of these are things to practice every day. And I guess maybe to bring it back to the first question of spiritual practice — to me, that’s the ultimate spiritual practice, as well. It’s not about the bombastic meditation retreat. It’s about, can you sit every day? Can you bring mindfulness into every activity?

My pleasure icons are... Marla Stewart of Velvet Lips. Rihanna, obviously. Lizzo too, the pleasure she gets from just confronting the world with her excellence and then laughing.

Afrofuturism, I will say, is a thrilling — to me, a thrilling arena. And now there’s African futurism. There’s Black speculative fiction. There’s all these arenas where, basically, Black people and people of African lineage are saying, “We were almost erased from the lineage. Right? People wanted to erase us and have us just be labor. We’re writing ourselves back in. We’re writing ourselves back in. We’re creating stories that are rooted in African heritage and that articulate an African future.” So, it’s an exciting place. It’s an exciting arc to be inside of as a creator.

My body has the capacity to sense immense pleasure, and as I get older I keep intentionally expanding my sensual awareness and decolonizing it so that I can sense more pleasure than capitalism believes in.

Ultimately, pleasure activism is us learning to make justice and liberation the most pleasurable experiences we can have on this planet.

When I feel like a failure, I look at my plants, at how they wilt and seem to be dying, and then water and sun and my loving words bring them back to vibrancy. I let water move over me, sun change me, love reach me. I root down into the soil and back into my lineage, which reminds me that everything is temporary but nothing disappears, this is how life is. I reach forward and up, shaping a world that feels good for me, for all who look like me, for all who love like me, for all who have yet to realize that love is liberation. I let myself work through anger until all that is left is compassion. I cultivate justice within myself, rooted not in vengeance or righteousness but in love and interdependence. I work hard on answering my calling, listening to the bass notes of my life, following underground rivers to find more room for my whole self. I let my days be spent in love, connection, and creation.

I appreciate the chaos of unplanned time. I find unorganized human time particularly intriguing.

I think we're in this really important, beautiful phase where we're learning so much can happen even at a distance. But it's a double-edged sword because so much of what is happening is happening on platforms that were not necessarily designed for us to use them to foment change and to bring down systems of harm. They were designed to serve capitalism, which means they want as many clicks and likes and as much engagement as possible. And what gets a lot of engagement is drama.

The stories I think we need to tell are ones of what it is like to be in a relationship with the Earth. What is it like to live on an abundant Earth? What are communities that are thriving by being in relationship to the Earth? What does enough feel like?

The first interactions I had with the ideas of abolition work were around the system of slavery. [For people living during that time,] it felt impossible that that system could end and there could be some other way of functioning that didn't rely on Black people being enslaved. And I think we're in a similar moment now. It's impossible to imagine what our societies would do, what cultures would do, what communities would do if we didn't have prisons.

Some of the things that have most astounded me that have come to pass in our recent history have been the ways we have galvanized and changed the culture and conversation around sexual harassment, harm, assault, and violence through the #MeToo movement and understanding that that change was made possible because of a lot of people at a relatively small scale being willing to tell their stories, tell their truths, and begin to make interventions for themselves by stepping out into the light. Concurrently, we've seen a major shift in the culture and the conversation around abolition and prison systems and the preciousness of Black life through the work of Black Lives Matter and the Movement for Black Lives. And with both movements there have been massive learning edges.

I don't think that we're quite at the place where we can do a prescriptive framework. I think we're so early in the experiment of this phase of abolition. That said, I point in the book to resources that I think are able to do a lot more of that. Fumbling Towards Repair by Shira Hassan and Mariame Kaba is an incredible resource. It's a workbook that basically supports people who want to go through a transformative justice process. And Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha [and Ejeris Dixon] put out a book called Beyond Survival that really is like a grand gathering of transformative justice stories, case studies, lessons from people. Patrisse Cullors is releasing An Abolitionist Handbook this year, which which has this 12-step program of what it looks like to actually take abolition on as a practice.

When I imagine the world in a right relationship, it's a love story between our species and this Earth and amongst us.