adrienne maree brown Quotes

Octavia Butler said that “[t]here’s nothing new / under the sun, / but there are new suns.” We are in a time of new suns. We’re in a time of new suns. We have no idea what we could be, but everything that we have been is falling apart. So it’s time to change. And we can be mindful about that. That’s exciting.

We’re losing leaders left and right, because people are making mistakes and now there’s no room for making mistakes.

Can we be honest — at least honest that there’s not love in the way we’re doing it now? Because I think that was also what was hurting my heart, was people being like, Yeah, we just have to love each other — and then we’re doing the most awful, awful dismissals and disposals of each other.

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

Everything dies, but that’s kind of good. It makes for a very rich world. All the richness, all that fecundity, all that beautiful miracle of life, it happens because we live in cycles, not perpetuity.

Organizing is a way of saying, We are going to put our hands directly on the future. But it’s also time-traveling backwards. So much of organizing is looking back at, what did our ancestors try? What did they learn? What were they up to?

In that process, I started the work of emergent strategy, started to listen to what is up with the natural world — what can it teach us about how to be humans and how to be humans in a better relationship with each other? And what I realized is it is the work of radical imagination to do so, but also that we’re living inside of imaginations that other people told us were true and told us were like, this is how the world is. And I always uplift my friend Terry Marshall. He was the first person to say this to me, that we’re in an imagination battle, which just blew my mind. And I think about it often — that we live in this abundant world, and we’ve been told it’s scarce. And then we’re given all these stories of scarcity. So, so much of the work, for me, of radical imagination is like, what does it look like to imagine beyond the constructs? What does it look like to imagine a future where we all get to be there, not causing harm to each other, and experiencing abundance?

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.

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?

Imagination is a muscle that, for many of us, will atrophy if we don't use it, especially under the pressure of constant fear. Fear and imagination often can't be in the same room. So, one of the things I think to strengthen that muscle is, first of all, reading. Reading visionary fiction, reading visionary texts. I often recommend Octavia Butler to people because it's reading things that are hard. Walidah Imarisha always says, "It's realistic and hard, but it's hopeful that change is possible." How do we be with what is and keep our eyes up?

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.

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

If we were able to unshackle our imaginations in this moment, I think our compatibility with the Earth would become possible.

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.