adrienne maree brown grows healing ideas in public. Through her writing, music, and podcasts, adrienne has nurtured emergent strategy, pleasure activism, radical imagination and transformative justice as ideas, frameworks, networks and practices for transformation. Her work is informed by 25 years of social and environmental justice facilitation primarily supporting Black liberation, her path of teaching somatics, her love of Octavia E. Butler and visionary fiction, and her work as a doula. She is the author and editor of several published texts. 

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adrienne maree brown:

…that change is actually this constant force. And every successful species on the planet is adapting in relationship to those ongoing changes.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr:

Welcome to The Measure. I am your host, Leon Andrews, president and CEO of Equal Measure. At Equal Measure, we help foundations, nonprofits, and public entities advance social justice through evaluation, strategy and communications. On The Measure, you’ll hear conversations with leaders and practitioners about their social change work, and how to support more equitable communities through place-based systems change and centering racial equity. Today we are honored to be joined by Adrienne Maree Brown. Adrienne is an author, an activist, and facilitator whose work is informed by social and environmental justice in support of Black liberation. Welcome, Adrienne.

adrienne maree brown:

Thank you, Leon. Thanks for having me.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr:

Great to have you. And I’m looking forward to our conversation. And I like to start conversations on a personal level, asking about my guest’s background because at equal measure, our backgrounds matter. So I’d love for you to share with our audience your own personal journey as you think about place and how that has influenced your life’s journey.

adrienne maree brown:

Right now I live on the land of the Eno and Lumbee peoples known as Durham, North Carolina. And it’s really beautiful to be living here because all of my lineage is from the Carolinas. And my parents met and they both were raised in South Carolina, fell in love there. And then left South Carolina because they were not sure if it would be a safe place to raise their kids. My father is Black, my mother is white, and they both come from big families, lots of siblings, lots of cousins. But they come from families that grew up with no real knowledge of the other, no real knowledge of just what it was like to be something other than the race that you were. So they both were at odds in their own families, met each other, fell in love. And I grew up in Germany a lot. I was born in Texas, I lived in New York, Oakland and Detroit. And each of those places really shaped my sense of movement and community and culture. And I never expected to come back south.

But then over the past decade, I feel like as I got politicized on how important the south is to what happens in the US, I was really moved by that. I was really moved by the idea of returning to my own root system and exploring it. So place matters immensely to me.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr:

Thank you for sharing all of that and there’s so much I would want to follow up on. But one of the things that I don’t know if you can elaborate on a little bit in the context of place, is your decision to move south. That really stood out, and you made a reference to as you really thought about the politicized context of how the South has impacted the United States.

adrienne maree brown:

Well, I think one of the interesting things is really the south and this Atlantic coast are where the great wound of the nation began. So this is where colonizers landed on our shores and began the genocidal project of making the United States of America. And they didn’t know that then. They just knew that they wanted what was here and kept expanding and expanding, expanding into this space. So I think first is there’s a core wound that starts in this area, in this part of the nation. And then for those of us who have African ancestry, this is also where many of our journeys began on this continent. And so there’s something to me about being able to come and say with all the wounds that have happened here, the healing that can happen in the south becomes that much more important. With all the wounds that have happened here, the fact that Black and Indigenous and other communities of color are able to actually succeed in our organizing here is massive.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr:

Yeah, thank you for illuminating in the way you did on how you’re reflecting on the South. I also feel like it really speaks to a lot of the writing you do as you talk about intersectional topics, because you definitely wove in a lot of intersectional reflections as you were talking about place and the context of the South. As you talk about justice and how do we move towards justice. So there’s one of the areas of your work that you refer to as emergent strategy that asks how do we get in right relationship with change? So I’d love for our audience to hear how you talk about that when you use the term emergent strategy.

adrienne maree brown:

Honestly, I think it’s just my way of naming and interpreting the way of all things, which is that change is actually this constant force. And every successful species on the planet is adapting in relationship to those ongoing changes. So the word emergence, it means the complex systems and patterns that arise out of relatively simple interactions. You think of a butterfly flapping its wings, or you think of a bird, a sparrow flapping its wings, it’s one individual action, but when it’s done in community, it can all of a sudden become something quite complex and beautiful. And it becomes a pattern of survival. Fractals, for instance, is the concept of how patterns repeat themselves from the smallest scale to the largest scale. And there are some really gorgeous examples of these that have been studied, but there’s also gorgeous examples in nature. So if you look at broccoli for instance, if you look down to the smallest little piece of broccoli, that same pattern, that same shape is what the entire huge head of broccoli, the whole crown looks like.

And that’s the same thing that we see in the universe. If you look at the patterns of how air moves through our lungs, it looks exactly like how water moves through the delta as it’s moving from the Mississippi down into the Gulf of Mexico. It’s really gorgeous to start to notice these patterns of how life and resource move through the world. And I was noticing the study of biomimicry and permaculture. And folks who are starting to tune into how can we learn from the most functional systems in nature as we are trying to organize and transform our human society to be more functional and in right relationship with the planet. So I think emergent strategy, it works at that grand scale but it also works at the granular scale of if you’re in an organization, how do we make our organization function well? We have to get in right relationship with change.

And you can see the organizations that have come through this period of pandemic, how are they not just keeping their heads above water but actually serving their mission and serving their communities as they adapt to changes? That’s emergent strategy. Mutual aid that helps communities to come through the pandemic, that’s emergent strategy. In this moment, all these people trying to understand what’s happening in Palestine, that’s emergent strategy.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr:

Thank you. Love that. So many things I want to follow up on, but there’s one thing you did say I’m curious about unpacking. What are some of the functional systems that we can learn from?

adrienne maree brown:

One of my favorite functional systems or functional things to look at is mycelium and mushrooms and the way that mycelia works. So mycelium are the thread like structures that are underground and kind of connect an entire forest. There’s data, there’s resources flowing along these mycelial threads. They can produce warnings if there’s something that’s dangerous. Like one tree has been infected with some kind of rot, they can communicate to other trees to pull back and to save themselves from the spreading of that rot. To me, our human systems could really benefit from having more of the work of relationality, which is invisible work. Be honored and be seen for the importance that it brings to how we change in community, as opposed to what I think is right now our pattern, which is everyone wants to be on the stage, everyone wants to be in the spotlight, everyone wants to be the one who makes a definitive statement about any new issue that comes along.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr:

Yeah, it’s amazing. And how does that translate into the kinds of work that we do and that you do? We do a lot of our projects. We’re working with government, we’re working with nonprofit, foundation partners, and you often hear talking about the joys and pitfalls of pushing for lasting change in communities. And I translate that to, how do we create a functional system? How can we work toward that wholeness despite what can feel for all of us doing this work, like overwhelming injustice?

adrienne maree brown:

I’m a big believer in the use of imagination as a first step in being able to create systems change. So one of the things I talk about is we want to be able to look at something broken and see the wholeness in it. That is the first step of our healing behavior. So one of the first things I often do with an organization or a community is I ask people to explain to each other what it would look like if this was working, how would we know that it was functional? What would it feel like? Who would feel welcome here? How would we handle conflict? How would we make changes together? Who would be in leadership? Who would we pay attention to and listen to? And what kind of feedback would we receive from our community if we were doing things the way we needed to be doing them?

And I love even asking people to go out into the community and ask that same, how would y’all know that we were doing what you needed? How would you feel the impact of our work? So that it’s not just a bunch of us sitting in a boardroom somewhere saying, “Here’s our theory on what could work.” But always staying in direct relationship to the people that we aim to serve. We also have to figure out how we break out of the philanthropic cycle. That’s like, oh, change can happen in a one-year grant or change can happen in a two-year grant, and you’re going to spend the majority of that year writing reports for us. So a lot of what I’ve been thinking about is, how do we move away from extractive organizing? How do we move away from extractive funding? How do we move towards models that are generative and relational and visionary? That we start from a place of we understand what it could look like if this was whole.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr:

Yeah, I love that. Love the guiding questions that you offer as we think about the use of imagination to create systems change. And as we talked about philanthropy, we know that’s where capitalism, systemic racism and the other isms have also affected so many of our Black, Indigenous, Latin and other communities of color. And so in that space of imagination, radical imagination of a better future that you’ve written about and spoken about as transformative justice, I would love for our audience to hear how you see a different kind of world taking root.

adrienne maree brown:

Right now I’ve been looking around and being astounded, all the time astounded at what I see emerging, what I see possible. I call myself a post nationalist. And what I mean by that often is that I see us as one people, one species, one living organism on a planet. We’re all in this together. And what happens to us when we start to think of ourselves as only operating within the boundaries of a nation state, is that we cut ourselves off from the actual true interdependence that we have on this earth. So when we have these big opening moments where everyone is like, “Wait a second, there’s an injustice happening and we’re all going to turn and bring our attention to it.” I actually think of those as portals where we are actually recognizing the truth. And in the US we had a massive portal around Black life that opened up around 2013.

We had a massive portal around the economy that opened up, before that we had a massive portal around patriarchy and ending rape culture that opened up with the Me Too movement. These portals open at which we can feel our interconnection, our interdependence, and they don’t last forever. The pivot happens, the attention moves along to the next thing. But hopefully what we do in that portal is we create enough change, we plant enough seeds of justice that they can continue growing even as the portal shifts. And I look at the world that way because it helps me to not lose faith when the attention moves to the next thing. It’s like now it’s my job to be in solidarity in this moment. So part of also what I see in these portal moments is attending to the wounds. What are the wounds that have happened for people who are Black in this country?

What are the wounds that have happened for Indigenous people that get healed some during a moment like standing rock, not because the government responds appropriately but because of the solidarity of everyone saying, “We are with you Indigenous people, we see our fate and our future tied up with yours. I’m appealing to our collective moral center to do the right thing because we are the ones who actually have the power to shift this moment.” And it means we have to be able to look within ourselves and say, “What am I willing to do to stop the violence of my species in this moment?” There’s a portal in me and there’s a portal between us.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr:

I really appreciate you, Adrienne, and those reflections. I think we all find ourselves in this work where in the space of feeling overwhelmed, how do we continue to hold on to hope? How do we keep going and doing this work? And as you describe these portals that we are in… And I love that term because as we think about portals, it is like these are moments. We don’t know how long those moments are, whether we’re talking about the Black Lives Matter or the economy or the Me Too movement. But they planted enough seeds of justice. And I’m curious, what do you hold onto for yourself? Because as you do the work, all of us go through some highs and lows and not all of us can stay hopeful all the time.

adrienne maree brown:

That’s right.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr:

So I’m curious if you can share what are the things that keep you going or give you hope in those moments?

adrienne maree brown:

Two things come to me right now. One is grief ritual, and the other is directing my attention. So the first is grief ritual. I have found in spite of all my efforts of denial and dissociation, that denying the reality of what’s going on never makes me feel better in the long run. So that doesn’t mean that I go seeking the trauma, I don’t go looking for documentation of the trauma, but I do want to be with what is. And so I do grief rituals. So when I learned that another Black person has been killed by the police, or when I see that another hospital has been bombed, or when I see that there’s a drought happening, or when I see massive suffering, I let the grief move through me. That helps me and it feels like, especially in a moment like this where there’s so many things that need our grief and we have so little time for it.

And when people are in crisis, often they don’t have the time to grieve. So I think of myself as also doing solidarity work in that way. And then directing my attention is the other piece. So at any moment there are as many miracles as there are horrors unfolding. And I can bring my attention to the horrors and I can stay there as long as I can handle it. But then also, I intentionally bring my attention to the miracles. And I’m lucky because I put my ideas out in the world in such a way that they come back now and people will be like, “We just did this whole process with our staff where everyone was doing relationship building.” And I’m like, “That’s miraculous to me.” This time that we’re living in everything is actually changing quite rapidly. And to me, it’s miraculous to look around and be like, “Wow, if you do something now that is harmful, the chances of you actually having the light shone on that and having to break the pattern of that harm, are higher than they’ve ever been.”

That’s incredible. This is a great unveiling time. So I direct my attention to that. And the way I use my social media for the most part is to try to uplift these moments of love, these moments of connection, these moments of solidarity, these moments of celebration, these moments of risk and bravery. And that really helps me because even at the smallest level, even if it’s a small thing of seeing two children who have been raised in communities that hate each other and they love each other and they’re playing together, little things like that just remind me that there’s something other than these constructs. And fundamentally, we know how to be with each other. We know how to love each other. We actually do know that.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr:

As I hear you reflect so wonderfully on those two nuggets for us to grief ritual and directing our attention. And the way you framed it, I sit with in the midst of death and grief, there still is life, joy and miracles and we have to hold both right as we do the work. Thank you so much, Adrienne, for joining us on today’s conversation. Really enjoyed our conversation together.

adrienne maree brown:

Thank you, Leon. You held a really beautiful container.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr:

Thank you. To see Adrienne’s latest work, visit adriennemareebrown.net. And thanks to our listening audience for tuning in. Be sure to rate, comment, and subscribe to The Measure. You can also learn more about Equal Measure by visiting our website equalmeasure.org.