ADRIENNE

MAREE
BROWN ON
CANCELLATION,
ABOLITION
AND HEALING

THE FINAL STRAW RADIO

A conversation between our occasional host, Scott, and adri-
enne maree brown. For the hour, Scott and adrienne speak
about “We Will Not Cancel Us and Other Dreams of Trans-
formative Justice”, her latest booklet available through AK
Press, as well as sci-fi, abolition, harm, accountability and
healing.

Aired on February 14, 2021

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This week on The Final Straw, we feature a conversation

between our occasional host, Scott, and adrienne maree
brown. For the hour, Scott and adrienne speak about We
Will Not Cancel Us and Other Dreams of Transformative
Justice, her latest booklet available through AK Press, as
well as sci-fi, abolition, harm, accountability and healing.

adrienne maree brown is the writer-in-residence at the

Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute, and author of
Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, Emer-
gent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds and the
co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social
Justice Movements and How to Get Stupid White Men Out
of Office. She is the cohost of the How to Survive the End
of the World and Octavia’s Parables podcasts. adrienne
is rooted in Detroit. More of her work can be found at
adriennemareebrown.net.

Also, to hear an interview with Walidah Imarisha, who

co-authored Octavia’s Brood with adrienne, search for
“Walidah Imarisha on Angels With Dirty Faces” on thefi-
nalstrawradio.noblogs.org

The Final Straw Radio / adrienne maree brown

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The Final Straw Radio: Thank you for coming and talking to us in the
Final Straw. Do you mind introducing yourself with a pronoun and
relevant information you want to give?

adrienne maree brown: Yeah, so, my name is adrienne maree brown,

I use she and they pronoun. I am a writer based in Detroit and I’m the
author of Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, co-editor of Octavia’s
Brood, and most recently, and I think what we are going to talk about to-
day, the author of a book called We Will Not Cancel Us and Other Dreams
of Transformative Justice. I have been a movement facilitator and media-
tor for over 20 years, close to 25 years now. And most of the writing work
that I do is rooted in the experiences and questions that have come from
those places. That’s who I am for people who are meeting me here.

TFSR: Thanks! I’m so excited to get to talk to you and I wanted to

dive into your most recent published book because it offers a lot of
food for thought, especially for people who are engaged in different
kinds of community processes and accountability and larger projects
of abolition and transformative justice.

amb: Oh, one thing you should know and it may show up for your lis-
teners, too. I have neighbors upstairs and today is the day that they host
the preschool pot, so if you hear big thumps and bumps and things like
that, just know it’s kids playing and everyone’s all good.

TFSR: That’s a good [chuckle]. I also have a sleeping cat that may
awake and attempt to hang out on the computer.

amb: Real life continues happening even during Zoom calls, so...

TFSR: I kind of wanted to just jump in into the stuff thinking about
listeners have a basic concept for abolition and transformative jus-
tice. The first thing I started thinking about when preparing to talk
to you was that way that cancel culture which you, you know, you
reverting in the title, it’s become a kind of meme at this point. And
there is plenty of critiques from the radical liberatory side which is
the one that you are offering, but also right-wing conservative per-
spectives, like I’m thinking of Trump getting kicked out of Twitter, or

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the J.K . Rowling transphobic stuff that prompted this all of these rich
and powerful people to talk about cancel culture, so I was wondering
what you think... How do we differentiate those critiques from the
liberatory side vs. the powerful side?

amb: Yeah, I feel like I’ve had to explore this a lot more since the book
came out than I ever did before. I’m really not following what right-
wing conservative people are up to or saying or doing. It’s literally not a
part of my world, my conversation. So when I wrote the initial piece and
people were like “Trump uses this language”, I felt like “What?” I don’t
follow him, so for me, it was interesting. I can totally see the right-wing
using the critique of cancel culture to dodge accountability and to me,
the major distinction is what is the impetus of the critique. For me, it is a
love-based, abolition-based impetus. I do believe that as people who are
fighting for abolition, there are conversations we need to have, questions
we need to be asking and practices we need to get good at that are related
to how we practice being in deeper accountability with each other and
starting to develop an expectation that accountability is possible when
harm happens. Because I believe that those twin expectations are what
lay the foundation for a truly post-prison, post-policing coexistence. So
that to me feels like the primary thing is that when someone like J.K.
Rowling is being like “No, cancel culture is being no good”, what she is
fundamentally fighting for is like “I want to protect my right to be op-
pressive, to basically cancel or deny the existence of other people”. And
what I think we are fighting for is the right to protect as many people as
we can from being harmed, denied, erased. So there is a call, you know,
to me, the difference is also people talk about call-out vs. call-in and this
kind of things, I think a lot of what we are doing is that we want to actu-
ally pull ourselves into more interdependence, relationality, accountabil-
ity. And that feels like a huge distinction.

TFSR: That’s a good point, cause the words can become slippery, es-
pecially as they get co-opted by people who don’t have those horizons
that we have.

amb: When I was trying to figure out which words were are going to
fight for, and how we do that fighting for. It’s hard, but I do think it’s
worthwhile in some places. Abolition is actually still ours, transforma-
tive justice is still ours. I don’t think cancel culture necessarily is the one
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that is ours. For me, We Will Not Cancel Us is about the activity, like we
are not going to cancel people we need to be accountable for. How do
we do that?

TFSR: Yeah, this is a very important distinction, because cancel cul-

ture is already a mainstream critique of this thing, probably they see
it as a youth phenomenon on social media. And canceling is a thing
that people do, but it’s not a whole culture necessarily.

amb: It’s not, and what I think is interesting is that there is a culture of
disposability, and there is a culture of conflict avoidance, but I think
the cancelation... So much of it is rooted in social media culture, so so-
cial media culture is a shallow engagement, clickbait headlines, very
surface-level arguments, and then canceling people. It all goes together:
trolls-gone-wild, then we are trying to build a movement and how do we
navigate and organize around social media as a part of building move-
ment, and how do we harness it as a tool? I think what’s been happening
is that it’s been harnessing us. We’ve got drown into the way social media
works as if that’s how a community works and changes.

TFSR: There are two different levels that we can use social media as
a tool for things that we’ve done historically to protect ourselves, but
then there is this other level where it takes on another meaning. One
thing I was thinking about reading your book is that probably also
the most notable mainstream version of this that gets discussed is the
#metoo. It’s called a movement, but from what you discuss in your
book I don’t see it as a movement, cause it’s an isolated ax of naming
something. It’s not necessarily a struggle in the streets. And I’m not
saying this as a judgment, I’m reserving judgment of like it’s effective
or should people do this, but I’m interested in thinking about that,
not having a basis in a tangible community.

amb: It’s interesting, I think it depends on where and when you enter the
MeToo conversation. If people enter the conversation as like this hap-
pened related to Harry Weinstein, a year and a half ago now, then I think
that’s the case. But if you take it all the way back to the work that Tarana
Burke has been doing for years, that was very tangible and the work that
she has continued to do is very much tangible, happening in real-time,

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in real space, in real relationships and calling for changes that happened
in the offline world, and using social media to help push that along, to
spread that. But I just did an event with them recently and I was blown
away by how much they are inviting people into offline practices. And
I think ‘movement’ is a kind of slippery and tricky term. I see people
telling like “We are starting a movement”, I don’t think that is how move-
ment works, how things take off or people get called into something and
like what is actually moving. And I look at, like, is policy moving? Is our
sense of identity moving, is our sense of capacity moving? And in that
sense, I would say that to me MeToo is absolutely a movement because it
has moved and transformed how people negotiate the intimate relation-
ship, intimate harm, how people negotiate being public or non-public
about the harm that happened to them. So I would see it that way.

TFSR: I like that idea. I was thinking, bell hooks distinguishes be-
tween political representation and pop culture that doesn’t get
grounded in grassroots. But the way you mention it makes sense, and
the thing I admire about the call-outs that happen, cause though we
could read from a lens of canceling or even carceral sort of minds, but
it also is demanding accountability and giving voices to people.

amb: Absolutely, and that’s what I think is interesting is who do we listen

to, so if we listen to Cherana and Nikita and so many people who are
now working in that space, one of the things they talk about all the time
is...this is actually not about destruction, it’s not about trying to bring
people down and destroy them. We are trying to heal trauma, to end
cycles of harm, and end trauma that has come from that harm. And I
think this is one of the most interesting pieces about the distinction be-
tween what I had actually an issue writing about and the larger culture of
cancellation and call-out, cause call-outs are rooted in the communities
I come from – brown, queer, trans communities. And the reason why we
initially needed the strategy was because the power differentials between
us and the folks who were causing harm were so vast that we couldn’t be
heard as equal parts of the story-telling, we couldn’t be heard in our sur-
vival. That’s still the case in so many scenarios where “Oh, these workers
need to call someone out, or call out an institution, a corporate entity
because the power dynamics are so vast. And with Harvey Weinstein,
with R. Kelly, with some of these big public cases, I hundred percent

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support those, I’ve tweeted that, those make sense to me because the
power differentials are so big that the only way to potentially stop this
harm is by making this huge call. I think the difference is then how do we
handle it when the harm is much more horizontal, within a community,
where there might be slightly more positional power, slightly more social
media cachet or something, but no one is wealthy, no one actually owns
anything, no one has long-standing security in any kind of way, and a lot
of time we are talking about survivors, where everyone is in a situation
of survival or something.

And that to me, as I’ve stressed, has got much more complex, and again,
that still doesn’t mean that we take it off the table. It might still need to
be. I’ve witnessed, I’ve held, I’ve supported the situations where we have
tried a million other things to get this person to stop causing harm and
this is not the move. And I think that is the case...A lot of the push-back
I got from people when I published the original essay, they were like
“Hold on, in a lot of these cases, we have tried everything”. Don’t take
the power out of the move that we do need the capacity to make. And
that was not my intention in writing and it’s not my intention now is to
say “How do we make sure that we are using the tactic precisely when it
needs to be used and how do we make sure we have other options when
we need other options, right? This is not the first thing people jump to.

TFSR: I guess that’s the thing with social media, and we have so many
examples of it, especially because being harmed is a really isolating
experience and being able to voice it really scary...

amb: It’s so hard.

TFSR: We see the representation of that on social media that can give
you the ability to do something even if you wouldn’t reach out to your
pod or whatever. That’s a distinction that, I don’t know, I don’t know...

amb: Well, just briefly on that point, that’s also part of what I’m fighting
for. As someone who is a survivor myself and who really has to battle
like “Would taking this public be healing for me? Who would I share
this with that it would be healing for me? How would I actually be able
to heal the pattern that happened here? What do I want for the person

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– multiple people in my life – who have caused harm?” And it’s a very
intimate reckoning. I can’t outsource like “Here is what I landed on, and
that’s what everyone got to do too”. Because it’s very intimate. What I do
know is that I want the result to be satisfying. If people are taking this
huge risk to tell these stories, I want them to be satisfied that they are not
able to get justice, but they are able to get healing. I think it is often what
happens with the way the call-outs play out right now. A lot of what hap-
pens is people take this huge risk, tell a story and now they are associated
with that story. It’s now they become a public face of the worst thing that
ever happened to them, and sometimes there is some accountability, but
often there is not, sometimes the person who caused them harm just
disappears and goes somewhere else and keeps causing harm. For me,
I’m just like “Hold on, let’s examine this strategy and figure out how do
we actually make sure survivors are having a satisfying experience or
healing and being held, and getting room to process and not having to
be responsible for managing anything to do with the person who caused
them harm.

My vision is where we live inside of communities, that have the capacity

and the skill to be like “That harm happened to you – we are flanking
you, we’ve got you, you are being held, we are attending to your heal-
ing. And that there is also enough community to go to the person who
caused the harm and hold them in a process of accountability and also
healing”. Because fundamentally, we know something’s wrong if some-
one is causing that kind of harm, if someone commits sexual assault, if
someone commits rape, steals resources, abusing power. We know that
actually some healing is also needed there. Not that the survivor needs
to guide the healing, but the community does need to be responsible for
it. I think we are a long way from that. Where we need to be heading if
we call ourselves abolitionists is we have to develop a capacity to hold all
of that in the community, so that we are not outsourcing it to a prison,
to the police.

TFSR: Yeah, it’s interesting in this transitional period, we are not

there, it that vision just discussed, we are trying to reach that. There
is that experience that so many people have and you’ve probably seen
and had it yourself where accountability processes go wrong or a call-
out isolates someone and the person who caused harm gets scruti-
nized and their process doesn’t happen or even I feel like processes

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can be used to wheel power within subcultural communities, whether
that is anarchist or queer, and exclude people. So there is a high level
of burnout or disillusionment with these processes, and I just wonder
what you think about how we counteract that. That’s another form of
healing that is needed.

amb: Yeah. I keep pointing people to these two resources, they just came
out last year, which to me says so much about how early we are in the
transformative justice experiment. And to place ourselves in a context
of time, helps me to drop my shoulders. Be like “Of course we don’t
know what the fuck we doing, these processes are fucking hard and ev-
erything” because we are so early and we have been... Mariame Kaba
talks about this, that we had 250 years of the carceral experiment, of
well-funded policing and prison systems rooted in enslavement practic-
es, had a long time of those being well-funded and we have never had a
period of experimentation in what we are talking about – transformative
justice and abolition practices – have been well-funded. Of course, we
don’t have the resources to do it.

So one book is Beyond Survival by Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi

Piepzna-Samarasinha which gives a history of transformative justice,
which talks about the people who were doing it before they knew that
they were doing it, maybe they didn’t call it that, but just different kind
of case studies and models and experiments so people can see that we
have been innovating and adapting and trying to figure this out. That
feels like one resource for people to say “Go look, we are not the first
people to fuck up”. We still don’t know how to hold this, we are learn-
ing. The other resource is Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan put out this
workbook called Fumbling Towards Repair, and I’m in love with this
workbook because it’s very tangible as a resource. Here is how you can
do a community accountability process in your community when some-
thing happens. It’s rooted in the idea that Mariame talks about which is
it’s not going to be a one-to-one shift from the carceral state to a perfect
transformative justice system that someone else still holds outside of us.
It’s going to be a system where we want to defund the police and the state
and redistribute resources into a million different options in our com-
munity including that many of muscle up our capacity to do community
accountability processes. And if we are doing one for the first time – I
remember the first time I did one – I went in with a big dream of healing

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and I came out mid-level satisfying, like I said my piece, and this person
agreed not to do whatever.

So I just think it’s important to be humble on a grand scale about the fact
that we are still learning these things and there is a lot of people in our
community who actually are developing some expertise around this, but
you are developing an expertise in something that is very often a private
process, so it’s not something you are writing out like “Honey, let me tell
what I just did with this horrific person”, a lot of it is very private and
quiet, and I think that also skews the sense of this moment because a lot
of times the initial call-outs, initial accountability moves are much more
public, and social media takes them very far, but then we don’t see what
happens behind the scenes, we don’t see what was happening behind
the scenes to lead up to that moment, all the things that are behind. So if
we were able to be like “Ha! We don’t know how to do this yet, we have
to learn how to do this. And learning happens mostly through failure.
We learn by trying something, it doesn’t quite work, then we make the
adjustment. We have so much to learn. We have to learn what roles work
best for different people, who are the mediators, who are the people who
can hold these processes, who are the people who are like “I’m a healer,
I can hold a role in a community”. Do you have to experience these ac-
countability processes yourself, can you just read about it and hold it?
There is so much to figure out, and to me, it’s actually exciting. We are
in an exciting place potentially for transformative justice and abolition.
But not if we stay committed to outsourcing those we deem as bad or the
processes themselves. It’s more like how do we turn to be like “Yeah, we
don’t know how to do this, let’s learn”.

TFSR: Right. I actually had an opportunity to teach a queer and

transformative justice class, it was very well-funded, it was right
when those books came out, I was so excited, look at all these new
books on this. Teaching this stuff to young people seems important,
but also familiarizing them with the fact that it’s not a one-to-one
replacement or solution. I use a lot Walidah Imarisha’s Angels with
Dirty Faces because she talks about it not being a resolution we are
used to within a Capitalist society...

amb: Exactly, and looking at those three stories, cause I think that’s the
stuff, looking at these different real-life scenarios and being with the

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complexity of each of these human beings, I think it is such a great book.
I also point people a lot to Mia Mingus’s work, particularly the work
around apology, because so much of it is, you know, you are trying to get
water out of the stone, it feels like “When I really need is an acknowledg-
ment of the harm you did and an apology for that. Few people know how
to give a good apology. There is a myriad of resources that we’re building
and generating and slowly bringing into a relationship with each other. I
think in ten years, it’s going to look very different.

TFSR: There is something interesting I was starting to think about.

You talked about the privacy of the intimacy of situations that need
this kind of handling. If we start having people specializing in train-
ing and that stuff that go around doing the work, we can run the risk
of professionalizing it.

amb: I hope this is not the... To me, that’s why the workbook model is so
exciting. And I say this is someone who has worked as a facilitator for the
last 20 years. I recognize what happened for me was I had the skill, those
I used in my community, and then it became a professionalized skill.
Suddenly people started “We’ll fly you to all different places to do this”.
For a while, it worked for me and allowed me to work with very exciting
movements, but it also has the impact in the long run of making people
think that they have to fly me in rather than looking around and see who
in their community has this capacity and strength. I wrote Emergent
Strategy to help with spreading those tools and I have a book coming out
this spring called Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy. Facil-
itation and Mediation. And for me, the idea is similar, the workbook is
like “Pick this up, integrate the skill-set, find the facilitators, the people
who are like this in your community and do mediation, who are drawn
to it, and let’s start to have more capacity for local reliance in these dif-
ferent systems and needs. I think the professionalization and the sense of
bringing someone from afar to do this – we can do this, it’s possible on
the level of the community.

TFSR: I know since you post so much from Octavia Butler that maybe
you are kind of seeding the communities, then figure it out them-
selves.

amb: Exactly.

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TFSR: And thinking about Emergent Strategy and the new book
you’ve just mentioned, OK , in We Will Not Cancel Us, you talk about
the sort of supremacy within us and connect it to the diagnosis that
the Oankali make in Octavia Butler’s book about the problem with
humans is like...

amb: Hierarchy and intelligence...

TFSR: Yeah. I see that work that you do, the writing that you do as
part of the process, the internal process that we need to do to un-
learn supremacy, the hierarchy within us...And that would work on
so many different levels – power, masculinity, and all these things.

amb: Everything.

TFSR: Do you see this as a sort of thing that takes place in culture,
is it internal... It seems like you’re initiating a new genre to have an
“anti-authoritarian help book” or something.

amb: [laughs] Thank you. The other day I was interviewed and they
said that my new genre was “facila-writing”, writing stuff that facilitates
people through a process, so I’ll accept this too, “anti-authoritarian help
books” I do think that is something that happens at both ends and I say
this like one of my great teachers, mentors, was Grace Lee Boggs who
is an Asian-American freedom fighter based here in Detroit, part of the
Black Power movement. And she said we must transform ourselves to
transform the world. And when I first heard it, I was like “No, we have to
go out and transform all the fucked-up people who are doing bad things,
we are good”. It took me such a long time to understand what she meant,
which is any of the systems that we are swimming in have also rooted
inside of us, and as we un-root them, uproot them, we unlearn things
inside of us, then we become both models for what it looks like to be
post-capitalist, post-nationalist, post-patriarchal, post-white supremacy,
we become models of that, we become practitioners and scholars. We
actually understand what it takes to do that unlearning. That feels like
such a crucial part of this.

In We Will Not Cancel Us, I reference my friend Prentis Hemphill’s essay

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‘Letting Go of Innocence’ because that feels connected to this. First, we
have to recognize we are not above the people who have caused harm.
They may have had different circumstances, they have let us to moving
our harm in different ways or processing our traumas in different ways.
I think it’s such a blessing, you know I have a life of trauma, but early
in my life I was given tools around therapy and healers, I had a loving
household, a loving jumping off board from which to process the trauma
of being alive in this time, which I think everyone actually is experienc-
ing at some level. I interact with people and they didn’t come across the
idea of therapy or they thought that’s not an option or a healer – that’s
private, that’s something you don’t do. And that energy is going to move
somewhere. So I don’t look at myself as above anyone who ends up in
the prison system or anyone who ends up canceled. I just had different
circumstances and they allowed me to process the trauma in a different
way. That’s internal work that allows me to be present with the fact that
capitalism is in me, petty jealous behavior is in me, judgmental behavior
is in me, and that I have to examine what is white supremacy, what is
patriarchy, what are those things that live in me. I keep uprooting that.

At the same time, I do believe it is cultural work and that is why I write
books instead of just having these thoughts in my head or only doing
the work with a small group of friends, as I am interested in dropping
seeds into the culture to see if other things can bloom. And my experi-
ment with that, with Emergent Strategy, was so exciting to me because I
released the book, didn’t really promote it, I was just like “Look, if there
are other people hungry for these ideas, this will spread, if they are not,
I will know that I’m alone in Detroit looking at ends and that’s fucked. I
felt kind of OK either way cause the Earth is still offering its amazing les-
sons regardless of people see it through my book or not, but now I know
that that strategy can really work. And We Will Not Cancel Us similarly,
we did a couple of events that just felt like important conversations to
have with Charlene Carruthers, with Cindy Weisner, with Shira Hassan,
and with Malkia Devich-Cyril who wrote the Afterword. But mostly it
was like the book is out and people are either reading that or not. And I
have a lot of people who were like “I’m reading this”. I got a lot of messag-
es from people who are like “I’m really surprised based on the first essay
to what happened in the book, I’m surprised. I see what you did, I see
the growth”. That’s still not the perfect book, it was a quick process, but

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to me, it feels important that people are reading it in their own groups
and talking about their own local culture. Because social media is not the
whole world, and so much is happening in our local movement circles,
and how at a local level we are integrating these questions of “Well, how
do we handle harm? How do we handle conflict when it arises? What
are our case studies? Are there people who we have canceled or tried to
dispose of? What happened with them? Where are they now? Did they
stop causing harm? Did that work? If not, what else could work? Are we
putting people in the line of the state, in the eyes of the state?” Just hav-
ing it as a local conversation.

The thing I’m interested in is a culture of discernment, a culture of ma-

ture, generative conflict, and I think that’s so important on this journey
towards an abolitionist future is it’s not just a policy change that will
make that possible, it has to be an entire cultural shift, and culture shifts
because lots of individuals shift.

TFSR: That’s a good way of thinking, cause the internal work, we are
sort of taught to think of the internal work as of the work you do for
yourself, your goals and your profession, but actually the internal
work and this stuff, it turns you into a potential facilitator. I’m not
perfect obviously, but I’ve done a lot of work, and the work that I
do allows me to enter the situations from a different place, that I can
help facilitate them. It’s not because I’m better or to be above them or
avoid them completely, cause that’s impossible.

amb: Yes, and I think right now the culture that is being produced is one
where people have a lot of fear around making mistakes which limits
how honest people are, because if we are being honest, we are making
mistakes all the time, and we have fucked-up thoughts all the time. One
thing that I appreciate about my best friendships is that I can say some-
thing that is wild and my friend will go like “That’s wild, girl, you can’t
say that, and let’s examine where that thought came from”. I grew up in a
military household, in a capitalist family. I have to know that that shaped
me that by the time – I went to an Ivy League University – all those
things shaped me. And so as I’m unlearning this, a lot unpack there, and
if I’m above that unpacking or I’m hiding from ever making a mistake,
then I can’t do that learning. We want to move from a culture where

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people are terrified to show up to a culture where people are excited to
be able to be like “Here is all of me and I know I have work to do”. And
if it’s a culture of belonging, where even if you are fucked up, which you
definitely are, you still belong to your species and you still belong to your
community. And belonging means you are in a constant state of growth.

I’m rereading bell hooks’ It’s All About Love, and she uses this definition
of love which is that you have the willful extension of yourself towards
the nurturance of another’s growth or your growth. I want love-based
communities, to me, that’s what it looks like when you see that someone
has fucked up or failed, you are like “I’m going to willfully extend myself
towards your growth” so that there is room to come back. That doesn’t
mean people are ready for that. I held space for people who were like “I
am a flamethrower, I’m in a flamethrower phase of mine, I’m just going
to throw flames and everything, and then I was like “OK, this communi-
ty just needs to set some clear boundaries, so that you know it’s not OK
for you to be burning down everybody’s everything.

And that’s a particular move that says “You have a space here when you
are ready to come back, and until you are ready to come back, we have to
set this boundary. And again, there is no public shaming needed for that,
there is no public humiliation, we don’t get pleasure from boundary set-
ting, it’s just a boundary that needs to be set. So that is a kind of cultural
shift that to me feels important.

TFSR: That’s an interesting way of putting it, to try and talk about it
without shaming. In a relationship, I try to say “If I fuck up, tell me,
cause that’s a learning experience for me, it’s an opportunity for me
to hear your thoughts and know something else and also not do that
again if I can avoid it.” It’s surprising that so many people don’t ex-
pect that, you have to normalize that.

amb: Right, because people don’t even realize that this concept of per-
fectionism is one of the ways capitalism plays out within us and within
our community. That there can be some perfect and we can buy our way
there or fake our way there or botox-or-plastic-surgery our way there or
something. But actually, no one is perfect, people are making mistakes
all the time, and I love how you said that, Scott, that a mistake is a place

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where an aliveness becomes possible, and learning becomes possible.
There is also something really important. Just that piece around bound-
aries. I want boundaries from other people around me. I want to know
what the boundaries are that I need to uphold and honor, even if it hurts.
I think about it, in my most intimate relationship, when someone’s like
“No, adrienne, you can’t cross this line”. And I’m like “Me? For real?”
and them “Oh yeah, let me integrate that”. Because it actually isn’t per-
sonal, that’s that don Miguel Ruiz shit. Don’t take it personally, when
you stop taking it personally, you recognize that people’s boundaries are
about them, taking care of themselves, and you can love them by up-
holding those boundaries. Even that is part of learning.

I know a few people who have been through big call-outs and now they
are sitting outside of a boundary, outside of a community that they once
felt so at home in, and it fucking sucks. And I’m holding the boundary
and I’m learning what I need to learn out here in order to be able to
make my return. Even if I think there are other ways to do it, fundamen-
tally, what we are trying to do is to develop a culture where we can set
boundaries, the boundaries actually create growth and space for actual
authentic love to be possible.

TFSR: It’s so funny, I always thought about the thing I liked about
hanging out with anarchists is that I can leave any situation and peo-
ple don’t need an explanation for it. I’m just like “I’m done”, with that
ability to... there is not the same kind of expectation to participate
beyond your limits.

amb: Because there is a practice of non-attachment, a practice of really

being free around other free people, which is very uncomfortable for
people who are... Ursula Le Guin wrote about it in The Dispossessed,
that’s I really still identify as an anarchist, is that what it really means
to be free is so at odds with how our culture is currently structured. We
don’t realize all the ways we are weaving ourselves into a self-policed,
self-controlled state, and we are making all kinds of agreements – con-
trol me, control me, police me, correct me, control me. I’ve just noticed
that in the past year my visibility has gone up to a whole different level,
which means that a lot more people think they should have control over
me, and really staying free within that context is like “Oh, I’m glad I have

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developed the muscles before this visibility, that I am free and I deserve
to fuck up and make mistakes and I can handle being in public, and
someone is like “Yeah, I fuck up”. I am a human being, visibility doesn’t
make me less human, but it is a muscle that I wish more people were
thinking about even developing, much less practicing.

TFSR: Yeah, you have your podcast, but also your book model is a
process. We Will Not Cancel Us is presented not as a finished...

amb: Yeah, it’s a process and I made uncomfortable decisions in it. It

would be much easier for me on some level to just pull down the origi-
nal piece and be like “That’s embarrassing. I made mistakes and people
can see that”. But again, if I step outside of it, if I don’t think about it so
personally, then I can imagine some young organizer being able to read
a book and go back and see the piece and make a connection and be
like “Oh, this was what you learned and improved, you still have room
to grow, this could be better, sharper, clearer”. And I’m like “Great, you
write the next book”. Keep this process going.

I recently got to be in a conversation with Angela Davis which is wild,

she is someone who I really look up to, but I also love how I see her
handle critique in her life. People come to her and are like “Why are you
like this, whatever?” And she’s like ” Yes, exactly. Those questions are real
questions that I’m in”. That she keeps herself a living, breathing, growing
being who is learning and changing all the time. And she’s like “I’m not
the same person I was when I was being pursued by the government
when I was arrested and all that, when you campaigned to Free Angela
Davis, now I’m this Angela Davis and I will continue to grow”. And I’m
like “That feels like a great model for those of us who hope to be elder
organizers, elder activists, elder radicals. Grace continued to be curious
and grow, Angela continues to be curious and grow, and I want to be
that. If I have the blessing of being old, I want to be that kind of an elder.

TFSR: I got what you mean, to have a continuation and the inter-gen-
erational connection for a diversity of people coming in now, stuff
that is happening and just sharing our knowledge and experience and
also getting theirs, cause they have a different perspective.

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amb: Exactly.

TFSR: I’ve seen this tactic used when there is a serial abuser in a com-
munity, someone who the community doesn’t believe can be account-
able, they do a general call, flyering, posters whatever. There is also in
science fiction like Woman on the Edge of Time, there’s this idea that
eventually, if you keep harming, you get killed, right?

amb: In Woman on the Edge of Time, you get one chance. You mess up
one time, they give you the tattoo, if you mess up again, they say “We are
not doing prisons”.

TFSR: I have an organizer friend who says that part of abolition is

maybe the community decides that that’s it for you, that’s the vision
of it. I’m not saying that everyone everyone needs to adopt that, but
there is also revenge and stuff like that, and I was wondering what
your thoughts are on this.

amb: I think it’s complicated because I will admit that I have one re-
sponse – here is my theoretical, philosophical higher-self response,
which is that we have to keep building our capacity to hold even the
most harmful people, somehow we have to figure it out. But then a part
of me is in communities regularly and has had to hold and set those
boundaries and has seen that person, I’m like “You literally don’t care,
you must work for the Feds, you are just... when they are passing out
fives of happiness and joy, you miss the entire bucket, you don’t know
what happened”. I’ve seen this side and I’ve definitely been in a place
where it felt like there was no other option. What I mean inside of this is
I am not actually judging what communities have to do to survive and I
don’t think that any of us can do that for other communities. At least I’m
not trying to judge, I’m not trying to be like “You all are weak, cause you
need to do whatever”. My thing is, there is something around how we feel
inside of it. Any of those times when I finally had to be like “Look, they
are not willing to stop causing harm, we have to set this boundary”, for
me, it’s been a move of grief and relief. Like we just have to make this call
and prayer, cause I know us holding this does not mean that the harm is
going to stop and they are going to find someone else to hurt. And at an
individual level, this is always a thing, someone has been abusive to you,

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do you call the person they start dating next and say “Look, this person
is going to fuck you up” or you just like “Well, I hope it goes better for
them”? People make different calls about that. The things that helped
me through this: one is I do believe that people change. They may not
change at the pace that we want them to. I do believe that sometimes a
hard boundary is the only way to get people to change. I’ve seen it hap-
pen before, I’ve seen it happen to people who had that positional power,
that they were abusing and abusing, and finally were like “You don’t have
it anymore”. And that’s where they actually were able to turn inward.

So I do believe that hard boundaries sometimes can be the most power-

ful thing. I do think it’s difficult with the flyers and revenge. I’ve said it
before – that person just needs to get their ass kicked. That what needs
to happen. I struggle inside of the same complexities. I think it’s the im-
portant piece here. What I want us to get good at as a community is
feeling like we have as many options as we do actually have and prac-
ticing all the options. A lot of what my writing is in this time is let’s not
just above all the options that help keep this person in our community
or help this person to heal from the harm that clearly has happened to
them, or help this scenario play out differently. Let’s not leap over all of
that to have the very first thing we do is, say, plaster this person’s face
and name and the intimate stories of the worst moments of their lives all
over the internet and then anyone can see. For me, that’s the move that
I’m trying to keep us from. To be like “First, let’s understand the history
of that person. What do we know? How do we protect the survivor from
any further harm? Is the person actually open to mediation or any other
process? If they are, who are the right people to hold that, we need mul-
tiple people to hold that?” And so on and so forth.

Now, I think we need a boundaries school. If I were creating a school

that everyone in the movement had to go through for the next year, it’s
the pandemic, and we are like “OK, you can’t be on the streets, let’s all go
to boundary school, let’s all go to abolition visioning school and figure
out when we say ‘Defund the police’, what responsibility are we taking
on in that scenario?” I would have us be in some real serious schools. I
think Prentice Hemphill could run a boundary school. I have visions on
this step. And Sendolo Diaminah could run the school on abolitionist vi-
sions and on practicing it at the local level. Andrea Ritchie could do that,

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Mia Mingus, Mariame Kaba, there are so many people. There is a lot of
learning and political education and practice education that we could
do because there is pleasure in revenge, there is pleasure in being able
to finally say “This asshole is an asshole”, there is pleasure in all those
things. But I think it’s a temporary pleasure that doesn’t actually change
the conditions that will lead to more harm happening. I want us to get
the pleasure mostly from healing and knowing that we have a chance
from the conditions that the harm will not happen anymore.

TFSR: That’s a really good way of putting it. I was thinking about
glorifying Fanon sort of violence that cleanses things. Going back to
Butler, she explores violence in terms of community, but she holds it
in complexity. She doesn’t endorse it, she shows detriments to it.

amb: Yeah, and there is something fascinating. In one of my favorite ex-

plorations that she has, which is The Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind,
those are two books inside the Patternist series, there is this character
Doro, who is a straight-up body snatcher. I remember doing a series of
reading groups around this where eventually, a whole huge intercon-
nected network has to take him out because he just cannot stop causing
harm. He literally can’t survive if he stops causing harm. But I was sitting
in one of the reading groups one time, and someone turned to me and
was like “Did she ever try to heal him?” The lead character is one of the
most amazing outstanding healers that’s ever existed. And the person
said, “Did she ever try to heal him?” I went back and read the book and
I couldn’t really see it, cause she tried to argue, she tried to demand,
she tried to shame, to run away, she tried a million things to hold him
accountable and ask for him to change, but there is not really a moment
that she laid her hands on him the way she did with others, and reached
into that place where he was a child, his entire family had been killed,
and this was the strategy that emerged for him to survive. I always come
back to that, it moves me to tears each time, cause if we look at each
person causing harm as a child who has been harmed, it changes the
conversation, and I think it can change what’s possible. I keep wanting
to make this distinction, but that to me is not the work of the person
surviving their harm, for me as someone who had been and is being
abused, it’s not my job to be like “Oh, I can see the child in you”. But I
think in the community, we need to grow that capacity. We have to help,

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to figure out getting this person to therapy. That might be the mandate.
I do feel there are things like that, like if you want to be here, we have to
know you are getting support, if you want to be here, we have to see this
commitment to your healing. And that would be a sophisticated future
if that was happening.

TFSR: That’s a really good point. I was really intrigued in the book
about this idea of how we feed intp surveillance and sort of a count-
er-surveillance. I just wanted to hear more about that idea. Is it airing
dirty laundry, is it leaks that get turned against us? Again, it’s like,
I’m thinking COINTELPRO and we are bringing all this stuff back to
black queer organizers who use call-outs as self-defense. How do you
conceive this kind of surveillance?

amb: I think it’s an interesting conversation and it’s part of why I was
really excited to have Malkia write the afterword because Malkia grew
up as a child of a Black Panther who has really done a lot of scholar-
ship around COINTELPRO and surveillance and who has been fighting
around facial recognition and surveillance and all these things. I feel I
learned a lot about what Malkia thinks about these things. I wanted to
bring this conversation into the larger conversation that we are having
which is I don’t think we’ve ever healed from COINTELPRO and I don’t
think we’ve ever really figured it out. There are people who are doing
really interesting work around how do we relate to living in a completely
overwhelming surveillance state, how do we relate to the fact that infil-
tration is very common and expected. And we can see the patterns of it
play out, that is very hard at an interpersonal level to ever know who you
can trust and who you can’t trust.

I just saw a screening of ‘Judas and the Black Messiah’ which talks about
the infiltration of Fred Hampton in the Black Panthers in Chicago, and
it’s just devastating to know that people show up inside movement spac-
es with the intention to cause dissent, harm, and to keep us from justice
and liberation. But that is definitely happening. And at meetings, I’m like
“Hmm, I think that person is here for the wrong reasons. My response
to this is mostly like “Let’s be overwhelmingly on point with what it is
we are up to and hope that we sway them and they become a turncoat to
the government, whatever. But that is very unrealistic. And much more

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realistic, since we have to be thinking how are we building trust with
each other...For me, it’s all of the above, that is airing the dirty laundry
piece that harms us mostly in the eyes of our opposition. They are like
“Hey, they don’t actually have unity and solidarity, they are everyone at
each other’s necks. And even if it’s true, I don’t think it serves us to have
that be public and transparent. And I don’t think it feeds to generative
conflict, if the move is that we put people on blast rather than sitting
down and having a face-to-face conversation, I’m concerned about that.
Zoom, face-to-face, whatever it is.

But then I also think there is something around how we isolate people. If
we are taking someone and we are like “This person caused harm in our
community” and we are putting that on the internet, then that person
is now isolated out of the community and if someone who is surveilling
and is looking for like “Who could we turn into an infiltrator, who could
we reach in those ways, who could we take out, who could we disap-
pear”. To me, it’s saying “Here are our weakest links, here are the weakest
points of our movement. Come get us”. And I think right now, because
the movement has grown so fast and because social media is such a bi-
zarre space where people think they have a relationship with people they
never met, they don’t know anything about, they don’t have any sense of
an actual history for, we are in a really endangered species’ zone, when
it comes to our movement work right now. That was a big impetus for
the writing that I did, cause I was being asked to do these call-outs, and
then I would go look who was asking me to do this call-out, it was almost
people I didn’t know and there was nothing to show me that this person’s
ever done any other community work. I can see that they’ve done other
call-outs, but I don’t see anything like “Here is what they’ve built”.

I said this in many places: I’m much more moved by people who are
creating, building, growing the movement, rather than people who are
like “My job is to destroy this institute or organization, or turn down this
activist, whatever”. That’s not organizing work. And we definitely have
people in movement right now where I’m like “They may not be on the
State’s payroll, but they might as well be based on how they spend their
time, how impactful is it growing efforts of actually being able to ad-
vance a united front, something that is complex organizing strategy. So I
just think we have to be more mindful around it. To me, even if you don’t

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agree with me, even if you are just like “Fuck that, it’s more important to
be able to call these people out”, I’m like “That’s fine”. And at all times,
let’s not pretend we didn’t live through COINTELPRO and not pretend
that infiltration and subterfuge and undermining and sabotaging our ef-
forts is not a possibility for what’s happening right now. To me, it’s not
learning from our history and be able to transform the future, which is
what our job is.

TFSR: That’s such an important point. That we can be serving the

state in ways that are unintentional and holding up a purity...

amb: If we are already embedded in philanthropy, we already have so

many compromises. We can’t also be throwing our people into those
hands.

TFSR: Exactly, we need to accept that we are not pure and not expect
other people to be pure. That was a really helpful way of way of pack-
aging it, thank you.

amb: Thank you for this conversation. You have really good questions
and I hope that it serves us all.

TFSR: Thanks for making the time.

The Final Straw Radio / adrienne maree brown

The Final Straw is a weekly anarchist and anti-authoritari-
an radio show bringing you voices and ideas from struggle
around the world. Since 2010, we’ve been broadcasting from
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We also frequently feature commentary (serious and hu-

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