adrienne maree brown's Loving Corrections Wants Us to Talk About the Hard Stuff
Art: Liz Coulbourn | Photo of amb: Anjali Pinto
adrienne maree brown has spent years in the muck, doing the hard work of bringing liberation to reality. Her works Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism have become go-to texts on what to do if, say, there’s disagreement in your community organizing group. So in a year of serious ideological division, including among people who thought they were “on the same side,” brown is right on time with her newest book, focused on navigating conflict and necessary hard conversations.
brown’s latest work, Loving Corrections, released by AK Press in August, is an effort to provide invitations for growth. A collation of letters, conversations, and some of brown’s “Murmurations” column for Yes! Media, the book seeks to start answering the question of how we contend with each other while working through some of our thorniest subjects, from COVID-19 to Gaza.
“We have so much information that it numbs, and it just becomes a flat surface where anything could be true or untrue, anything could be fake,” brown tells Teen Vogue. In these conditions, argues brown, it is pivotal we lean into conflict with those who are trying to do better, so we can build relationships and communities that can withstand what’s yet to come. Loving Corrections is an effort to acknowledge that challenge, and give readers tools to start figuring out how to live together differently.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Teen Vogue: Loving Corrections opens with letters to those with more privileged identities, like those who identify as men and white people, attempting to become less oppressive. It reads very open and conversationally, like a lot of your work.
adrienne maree brown: One of the markers [of this] phase of movement is trying to act as if those who cause harm are very, very far away from us and could never be a part of us; we don't see them as “us.”
What if we understood that those oppressive socializations, … those ideas, can be a prison for people? Rather than looking at them [like,] you're in prison and I hate you for that, I'm an abolitionist, so I'd be like: You're in prison, but we don't want to leave you there. It's cold and isolating and lonely, and that's not how people really change for the better. A lot of the people that have taught me the most are people who've spent significant time in prison and are able to get themselves free, either through community or by breaking themselves out of it in some way.
That's the invitation of this book: I see you; I see your humanity, even though you're caught up in this prison of white supremacy or patriarchy or some other idea that keeps you from your whole humanity. I can still see that there's a spark in there, and I'm calling you forward.
"There's a very small group of people who want us to go backwards; the majority of us are actually trying to move forward, and forward means more autonomy of the body; more relationship to land, finding right relationship and giving land back to indigenous peoples who are still here, still all around the world, listening."
TV: A theme in your writing in recent years is all the forms of bad faith conflict we see in a given day online. In the wake of the 2020 lockdowns and how integral platforms like TikTok have become to young people’s political education, I think a lot of folks are used to arguments without the end goal of growing together (resulting in hitting the block button instead).
amb: What I see happening so much right now is that a lot of people are being politicized by the internet, [and] generally you can count on [many of] the people that are interacting with you in that space [not being] there in good faith… A lot of the folks that you're interacting with are from comment farms, they’re bots [or] trolls, or they’re just people coming on in an antagonistic way, not sure where else to find a sense of power or connection around their issues, so they're bringing it into this space.
People are getting politicized in that space, and they're thinking, Oh, the way you handle politics is by shouting each other down, shaming each other, trying to bully and push each other into taking stances or taking positions, or just shutting up or disappearing. I don't think that’s how you build a movement.
TV: Obviously we’ve seen a ton of this around this year’s elections.
amb: It's really interesting because [presidential elections are] when the majority of people in the US turn their eyes and attention towards the political process at all. Every single day, we're just as responsible for what's happening, but we're given this process – some would say “myth” – that every four years, we actually get to shape what's going to happen.
I'm finding through the touring I'm doing [for the book], it's so exciting to be able to talk about this other way of course-correcting. That's really what Loving Corrections is: It's saying, let's course-correct ourselves towards a vision of the world where love is at the center of how we shape our policy, economy, our relationships to the earth, our relationships to each other. That is actually possible, and this is a bunch of practices for it. You can be in conversations with your siblings, and that can be a front line where you practice this.
TV: I loved that chapter, where you and your sisters discuss how you work on your relationships and build solidarity together.
amb: It’s one of my favorites…. That also feels important to me: Rather than having yourself out on the internet yelling at strangers, this is a great time to turn towards the people you love and talk about what you love; [about] how are we going to all move in a way that honors our connection to each other.
We have a really gnarly knot right now, which is that this election [is] framing up as “antifascism versus anti-genocide,” and that's not, I don't think, a split we can afford to perpetuate. [So] through the book, through how I hold my politics, and through the education I'm doing on my platform — whenever I'm not posting memes — I'm trying to create a space in which both things can coexist….
I'm not asking anyone to make a vote that feels totally impossible to make because they're literally unable to bury their family members. [I'm] also not asking anybody to not vote or not participate in the process when they're like, “I can tell that my rights as a trans person, queer person, or a Black person or a woman, [that] all of my rights will be taken away if I don't organize and protect the little bit that we still have left.”
In this moment, it looks like we're being dragged backwards, but I keep telling people, I think it's more of a retrograde. There's a very small group of people who … want us to go backwards; [the] majority of us are actually trying to move forward, and forward means more autonomy of the body; more relationship to land, finding right relationship and giving land back to Indigenous peoples who are still here, still all around the world, listening. There's so much that I feel excited about that's actually unfolding right now.
TV: You mentioned Gaza just now; among the book’s “loving corrections” are around the tensions of that subject in particular.
amb: The organizing around Palestine has been really jaw-droppingly beautiful, in terms of the solidarity and the nuance. People are having to learn a lot very quickly, so that they can be in a movement that can't be accused of being anti-civilian, because it's not; it's being led by Jewish people who are saying “not in our names.” A movement that is being critiqued as being violent when it's absolutely not — it's being led by people who are talking about children and life and protecting people's health. It's doctors, it's nurses, it's journalists, it's all the people that we turn to and trust under the pressures of these moments who are in leadership in this. All of that feels like a very exciting place to be writing into.
TV: We met in May briefly at the alternative graduation hosted by Columbia faculty and staff to celebrate students left out of their universities’ official ceremonies as punishment for protesting. As someone who also attended Columbia – but more relevantly, as someone who’s been deep in organizing work for decades now – what are your observations on the uprising of young people for Palestine in the face of serious pushback? Are you optimistic about how many young people are paying attention to politics and the world at this time?
amb: I got to go and speak to the Columbia students who were part of the encampment there that sparked encampments all over the country and around the world. I love when moments like that happen, where young people are moving from their hearts [and] integrity, and from everything that we've been telling them: We want you to stand up for justice and what's right. I want you to learn about history so we don't repeat it. We want you to pay attention and to be the kind of human who intervenes. Then they do that and were getting [everything shut] down. I love that they’re like, “No, we're not going to be moved and we're not going to be silenced, and we're not going to be torn apart from each other.”
I've got a lot of young people, teenagers, kids, in my life, and I'm blown away by their fluidity and their sense of self. A lot of kids, especially the ones who came through the pandemic and had to be in lockdown at home, [had] to grow up really quickly… I see such nuanced, careful, smart, no-nonsense kids coming up, and that is incredible and exciting.
In some ways, this made me relax a bit, [like,] okay, I can really hold down the role of auntie…. I want to hold down the role of an intergenerational protector, [to] be someone who can look back and say, if you're a third or half my age, “I know some things that you might not know.” One of the biggest things is what you're doing is so important, keep doing it, and I'll flank you over here.
When you're young, [you're] supposed to spend the capital of bravery and courage…. You're supposed to be able to take these risks, because you haven't been bound down [by society] yet. As you get older, it becomes harder and harder to do some of the things you can do when you're 18, 19 years old — once you own a home, once you've got kids that you're protecting, once your elders start getting sick.
I want the people who are young and organizing right now to think about how they develop the best politic that can last them their whole lives…. What I've learned is to have a politic that can grow and adapt as you get new information, and as you learn new things. But I'm geeked. I'm excited about them.
TV: Another subject you identify as a place where loving corrections should be made is COVID-19, the end of mask regulations (or putting in place mask bans), and how those burdens are being carried by disabled people and the immunocompromised.
amb: [As] I'm touring this book. I've asked everyone to mask at [my] events. It's funny, you can feel a pushback of people, like, “We haven't been asked to do that; we're not being asked to do that in a lot of spaces.” If I'm touring and I want to be able to have my mask off and talk to y'all and let you see me and be with me, [that’s the] safest move I know, [the] way I can protect all of you who are coming to the space if I'm doing in person events — I'm asking all of you to risk your lives to come sit down with each other now. [We] have to take that seriously, [that's] what we're asking of people.
[Loving Corrections,] like all of my books, is me saying I believe that there's still a chance. I think that we could still do this, [that] there's a path, a course, that we could get on that would get us through the eye of this particular needle so that our species can coexist with the earth and with other species. It's really good practice to be in, it's really enjoyable practice to be in. But we have to survive Covid and we have to survive the viruses that come after it. We have to survive climate catastrophe. We have to survive genocide. We have to survive together. We have to survive these ideas that make us think we're divided and apart.
TV: Finally, a big piece of your work involves the role of science and dystopian fiction and art in imagining political and social alternatives to the present, like the writer Octavia Butler, who I initially learned about from you — who since has been heralded as predicting our future (something she would argue was easy if you looked at the signs.) Why do you think art has such a powerful world in making change?
amb: When you're watching a story, you're identifying almost every time with the revolutionary in the story. That's not an accident. That is what humanity uplifts. In the grand scheme of things, what we want is those who choose to be courageous and brave and move towards life and protect their people, those who are loyal [and] steadfast, those who are honest under pressure, those you can count on. Those are our main characters.
When you look at yourself in the mirror, look at yourself as a main character of a story about freedom and about justice and about loving yourself and about love.
The other thing I want to offer to young people is when you feel overwhelmed by grief or by fear or by despair about the conditions that have been left to you by those ahead, art is often the way you can get through that moment.
When I feel overwhelmed, when I am seeing the news coming out of Palestine, when I read about the latest climate catastrophe, when another Black person gets killed in the US, there's moments where my heart can't take another shattering. Then I'm able to turn that into a song or turn that into a story. Often I will just say, what is the song or the spell that would actually change this? What is the story I want to write in which this didn't go this way or went a different way? That keeps me connected to my heart, and it keeps me connected to the part of humanity that I think is the most interesting and the best: [We] can feel despair and we can know all these things, and then we can still choose to create.
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