adrienne maree brown Quotes

I don’t avoid the “activist guilt” that’s tied to devoting yourself to justice, but... I certainly examine it. I believe it's tied to the truth that, as an individual, I can never do enough in the face of all the intersecting injustices of my life and time. But I sometimes look at how far I've come, in my lifetime, in my lineage. How much repression I have cast off, how much oppression I have negated, how I went from homophobic to pansexual, from military brat to post-nationalist/post-capitalist. I feel free a lot, I surround myself with good revolutionary people...and I think, ok padawon. This may be an insignificant life in some grand epic scape, but in the scale of my life, I am doing my best and really getting a lot done for a lazy weed lover.

White supremacy has a certain view of who the villain is. Patriarchy has a certain view of who the villain is. Capitalism has a certain view of who the villain is. Ableism has a certain view of who the villain is. And throughout history, we have notoriously been wrong about who the villain actually is, or what concepts are actually villainous concepts to our species.

Mariame Kaba has given incredible talks about this, that we've had 250 years of this well-funded prison system experiment. And it hasn't stopped rape. It hasn't stopped robberies. It hasn't stopped drugs. It hasn't stopped anything at all. All of those things that we think of as harm, they continue without the responses they need...One of the other things that Mariame points out—what would it look like if the experiment of transformative justice was as well funded as the experiment of prison? We have no idea what things could look like at scale because we've never actually had the resources to even experiment at any kind of scale. We’ve had to argue over every penny.

Life moves towards life, you know. That’s the trick.

We can begin to see there are no isolated patterns. The universe has some favorites, and they repeat and they repeat, at every scale.

I believe that all organizing is science fiction-that we are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced. I believe that we are in an imagination battle, and almost everything about how we orient toward our bodies is shaped by fearful imaginations. Imaginations that fear Blackness, brownness, fatness, queerness, disability, difference. Our radical imagination is a tool for decolonization, for reclaiming our right to shape our lived reality.

I want my lineage to be a lineage of someone who fought hard for human existence on this planet. My despair and grief and fear and anger informed that, and they're powerful parts of that fight, just as much as my love.

Going through an abusive situation just creates another need. And if we can stretch far, we can say even the person who's caused abuse has some unmet need, and they think it can be met through harm and domination and manipulation and gaslighting. And they think that's going to meet some need in them, but the need is not met. The abuse continues. They just find new people to take it. But mutual aid suggests those needs can be met. Maybe they need a different therapist, maybe they need a different kind of healer or a group of healers, maybe they need to see that people who were structured and shaped to be abusive found another path.

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

(White supremacy) is a fundamentally mythological state. Human beings are not supreme to each other based on the vagina we came out of. That’s not what determines our worth and our well-being or miraculousness.

I know that I'm not grieving because death is unnatural, I'm grieving because love has overfilled my banks, and I can no longer just pour it into this other person. When I'm angry, it's because I love something, and I want to defend it. When I am feeling fearful is because I love something.

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 work of decolonizing the future is the work of decolonizing our imaginations. We have to tell stories in which the protagonists are those whose stories are least often told, recentering our attention away from the elite, the celebrities, the influencers.

I remind myself I can't be good at something I'm doing for the first time, and that reminder helps me humble into learning mode.

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