Photography by ANJALI PINTO
adrienne maree brown at her home in Detroit, Michigan
I never have a short answer, by the way. You will notice this. A funny thing to me about the book is that I meant to have the introduction be quite concise and the rest of the book be a toolbox. But, as it turned out, the majority of the book is the introduction, and there’s only a small toolbox.
I'm a writer and a facilitator. My facilitation work supports black liberation. And now I'm becoming a teacher too, which isn’t something I’ve really identified as before. Facilitating is very, very different from teaching. Facilitating is about creating a space for people to do something, while teaching is about passing knowledge directly. In my heart, I actually feel like I'm a fiction writer who is dabbling in non-fiction. I mostly write and publish non-fiction even though non-fiction is the hardest for me to read. I'm also auntie extraordinaire. I love being an auntie to many, many nibblings in the world. I sing sometimes and I'm a podcaster. I may be forgetting something, but those are the main things.
I'm also very explicit about the fact that a lot of what I do is magic, so it's not useful to try to teach it as if it's not magic. I think for a long time I was trying to do that, like, “Here's how you make an agenda,” but you can't really put magic on an agenda. Instead, one might say, “Here's how you can arrange an agenda so that magic can happen.” Magic happens through relationships and through faith. How do you build the trust so that people believe that magic is possible. You have to let people cultivate solidarity and love for each other, individually; almost anything can happen in a room where people have that level of connection with at least a few others in that space. That's all you need.
“Theories around being together are already acknowledging a kind of dysfunction in the social order. But does one need theories around how to be with each other?”
One of the ideas in Emergent Strategy is that birds coast when they can. Struggle is inevitable, so how can we find places to increase ease? Over the years I've kept sharpening my tools. Now I'm focused on working with black leaders or majority people of color groups, mostly around climate-related problems or issues that are connected to black people, such as police brutality and reparations. Facilitation is passion work for me, so I do it for those who I want to see win.
The texts that are most relevant in this political moment are The Parable of the Sower (1993) and The Parable of the Talents (1998). These two books were written in a trilogy, of which she had created eighty versions. We don’t yet have public access to the third book, The Parable of the Trickster. In these parables, there's a radical right-wing president who runs for office with the slogan “Make America Great Again.” She understood what was coming. She really grasped it. To me, Octavia is a north star and all of her characters are dancing with change, trying to figure out how we can act as guides in processes of change. How do we shape the changes we want?
I want to say one other thing about Octavia. There are more poetic, lyrical writers. She’s a very straightforward writer. There’s no extra fat on the bone. She’s like: “Here’s the story. This is the belief system. This is what happened. This is how it felt.” I think that's really important, too. She wasn’t precious; she was saying, “I need you to know this stuff. I’m sitting with it. I’m wrestling with it.” You could feel her pain in her work.
I don’t trust people who are alive and paying attention and don’t feel pain about what’s happening. As a writer, she earns my trust right away because I can tell that she knows we are all going to die and she’s terrified, just like I am.
Unearned hierarchy is where it becomes really harmful. White supremacy, for example. That's an illusion that only causes tremendous harm. I try to disrupt unearned hierarchies whenever I can, even if it’s a simple conversation with a white man who is expressing supremacy in which I maneuver the situation to force him to understand me differently.
“(…)we must figure out the intention that we’re moving towards. What must we do to survive? Some people articulate it as a goal or a vision. But how do we also make sure, as we’re changing, that we are actually good at it and that we’re not just changing in a reactive way(…)”
But for humans, we must figure out the intention that we’re moving towards. What must we do to survive? Some people articulate it as a goal or a vision. But how do we also make sure, as we’re changing, that we are actually good at it and that we’re not just changing in a reactive way, which is what I think often happens in our current political condition. Me hearing something and getting mad and posting about it on social media is a reaction, not an adaptation.
I love cows. They are so gentle and familial. I never knew that cows actually frolic and run around. They play. Some work that I do occurs in a dojo that’s up in rural Petaluma, California. It’s an old barn that's been transitioned into this dojo, and there’s a huge glass window on one end of it through which you can see cows out in their field. We’ll be inside weeping, crying, moving some trauma through, and six cows will be over there just watching us patiently, lovingly. I have fallen in love with cows.
Elephants are also familial. They’re massive and mighty and they could do so much harm, yet they’re often so gentle. They take care of each other.
I really wanted to have the cow and the elephant on my arm, because I’ve had a lot of insecurity around my arms. They have stretch marks, and they’re big, and they’re a part of me that I’ve never really been able to change. So, I loved having these unapologetically big creatures on my arms. It’s part of my healing process.
Then, I have a little turtle. I love the message of the turtle, which is that you have everything you need in terms of a home right there with you. Turtles also remind me to slow down.
My final tattoo is an octopus. The octopus feels like my facilitator self. I have all these different hands, all these different tentacles, so when I'm holding a space, I can really feel what’s happening in all parts of it. “Oh, it’s heating up over there; someone's crying over here; there’s a lot of love and laughter happening over there; lunch is running late here.” How many things can I keep in my mind at one time? I also love octopuses because they can escape from anything. They do it by relinquishing form. I think about that for us, often. It’s why I pull away from the institutionalization of things and from the idea that structures have to stay a certain way. In order to get out of capitalism, we’re going to have to move like an octopus; it’s going to be a small exit.
Anyway, those are some of my favorites, as well as nymphs, butterflies, dragonflies, and then caterpillars–transformational creatures. I also love the humility of the caterpillar.
Imagination collaboration is inviting someone to be part of an idea or to create an idea with you. I did this recently. There’s a woman who I adore, and I wanted her to be part of my work. I said to her, “I really want you to be a part of the work that I'm doing. I'm not going to move too far forward with imagining what that looks like because I want us to co-imagine it.” Part of why I want to work with her is because her imagination is very different from mine. She’s a builder. I’m more of a dreamer. I’ll imagine a house floating in the sky with waterfalls pouring off the edges. I could think that up, but she’d be like, “Right, so we need hover boards to lift it up, and we need a light, aerodynamic structure that could actually move, and then we need some way to catch and recycle the water.” She’s that next level. Her imagination is systematic and structural. When Deem talks about “Designing for Dignity,” I think about how much of imagination collaboration is about dignity and harm reduction. How do we make sure that the people who are most impacted by whatever’s happening in a place get to co-imagine how that place can be? How do we prevent those people from being excluded from the conversation because of someone else’s power dynamic imagining? Here in Detroit, we’ve been through this massive gentrification push. But who’s talking to the homeless about their ideas for how the city could work better? They’re the ones seeking shelter every winter. I bet they have brilliant ideas about how to meet the needs of divergent populations within a city. This is a big part of disability justice; if you don’t have people who use wheelchairs or people who are blind or people who are deaf at the imagination table when you’re creating a building or an event, then you will find out later that whatever you made is not actually accessible to the people it was intended to be for.
If you have privilege in an area, it’s very hard to see what is lacking in that area. I get caught in this all the time. You have to cultivate relationships with people who can see more than you and who can see differently than you, so that together your co-imagination becomes something that actually works for everyone.
If it’s a small group and you have a few hours for a conversation, just ask. What would be most useful for us to spend this time on? People always have ideas. Simply asking what is most pressing to talk about can really help. Asking, “What is the next, most elegant step we can take?” is a great question, because sometimes folks get overwhelmed by the scale of the problems that we're facing. How do we find the conversations that help us see our impact?
One of my favorite tools for a larger group is this Post-It synthesis process. Everyone writes the conversation they want to have on a Post-It and sticks it on a wall. Right away, similar conversations become one column. Then different conversations each become a new column.
We pair people up and ask them to discuss what the group should talk about for the next four days. What is crucial? Then they team up with another duo and compare notes. Between everyone involved, what are two conversations that would be super satisfying and nourishing to have as a community? This process sharpens as you add more people to it. By the end, you’ve got five, or maybe ten, conversations. When people get to talk about what they actually want to talk about, it’s mind blowing. Suddenly they get creative, generative, brilliant ...together.
“You have to cultivate relationships with people who can see more than you and who can see differently than you, so that together your co-imagination becomes something that actually works for everyone.”
I have, multiple times in my life, turned away from success because it didn’t align with my values. For Emergent Strategy, I didn’t promote it, I didn’t push it, I didn’t think of it in terms of sell, sell, sell. Actually, I did the opposite. I told people to take pictures of the pages that interested them or to borrow a copy from someone else. That’s the essence of the book. The rest is just an extended metaphor. But Emergent Strategy has sold. A lot of people have purchased it. It’s the highest selling book that my publisher has ever put out, and Pleasure Activism is close behind that. The lesson has been to keep putting my attention on how to be a channel of something larger than myself. That’s been my source of hope. How does the universe want me to make things better? How can I be a tool of something that’s divine? It’s kind of ridiculous to say it in polite company, but it is what I believe I’m up to and why I believe I'm successful. I believe that there is a rightness in the universe and that I am helping us align with it.
Right now, two very important individuals in my life are going through massive personal crises. There’s no hesitation in my system about wanting to catch and hold these sisters of mine that I love so much. A lot of what I mean by love is connected to mothering. Think about the way a mother looks at her child like, “you’re perfect.” I work as a doula so I see that look.
I definitely think movement work should be a space where love gets fomented. I think we should be working to love each other and to create spaces where people feel loved and sustained. Unfortunately, movement work is often driven by fear and scarcity. People are coming together just because they’re all terrified of the same thing or they’re coming together because there’s a deep, urgent scarcity. These conditions create burn out. There’s a place in Emergent Strategy where I talk about “moving at the speed of trust,” and I think “moving at the speed of love” is often what I actually mean.
I let people know that all the time. I'm like, “They tried to kill us; they tried to steal our joy; they did not succeed. Look how happy I am.” I’m happy yet I’m still connected to the great suffering of my time. But despite everything, despite the work, despite all the shit that’s going on, I’m still finding joy each day. I’ve received a lot of feedback from people who told me that they needed someone to tell them it was okay to experience some joy each day. I believe it’s a measure of my freedom to be able to experience the joy that’s available to me in this moment of my life.
I love your questions.
Fractals are a big part of Emergent Strategy: the idea that small actions replicated on a large scale create massive and complex systems. How do you personally transform yourself to transform the world?
Another crucial practice is asking for help. I have to unhook this from my perfectionist Virgo self. This could mean asking for feedback or admitting that you can’t do something on your own. I will often assume that someone doesn’t have any feedback for me because they didn’t volunteer it. Even when I get a lot of affirmation from my readers, I'm still thinking, “Okay, but I also want to know your critical opinion. What kinds of shifts come next?” Asking for the help you need will make you more able to perceive and offer others the help they need.
One of the important things about Emergent Strategy is that I didn't craft it out of thin air. I saw these processes happening around me. The parts about resilience and transformation are really about asking how we can design ways of being together that make it impossible for us to cause so much harm to each other. It’s not just about being more forgiving. We have to design structures; we have to design relationships; we have to design justice.
That’s where design gets really exciting and interesting to me. In Detroit, we recently acquired this new building for Allied Media. It’s been a struggle because there are some people already in that space and the pace at which they want to move out doesn’t align with the pace at which AMP and our partners need to move in. This has actually been quite devastating.
It’s also meant we have to get our hands in the dirt of being designers and developers in our city. It’s much easier to sit outside of that and be like, “Fuck developers, they’re all gentrifiers.” But, if we actually want to make a play for this city as a space that we still get to be in, what does place-based revolution work look like? We have to acquire land; we have to acquire property. We had a session with the building where we asked, “What would you want to do to design this neighborhood?” It was funny because there were people at the session who were community organizers and people who weren’t. All the organizers were like, “We could never know that. We need to go talk to all the people here and figure that out with them.” And then the folks who weren't organizers were like, “Well, we should have a coffee shop and we should definitely do this, this, and this too.”
While there was no lack of good intention, you see how quickly people will put their design over another person’s experience. We are trying to pull away from that and push towards a more socially responsible design. Furthermore, how can design be not just socially but environmentally responsible? How can we make sure our design has the right relationship to people who were here before us? How can we make sure our design has the right relationship to the planet? How do we serve folks who actually have a relationship to this place, instead of more same-ification. I don’t want people to ever be like, “I just landed in Detroit and it’s exactly like San Francisco.” I want it to feel distinct. New Orleans is like that—I feel protective over the distinct quality of that place. That quality requires a whole system of thinking and care.
Audre Lorde’s 1978 text Uses of the Erotic is the guide for Pleasure Activism. She talks about how we have been convinced that we don't deserve to feel joy, to feel pleasure, or to feel the erotic aliveness of ourselves and that this repression is intentional. As long as we don't think that we deserve these feelings, we will settle for self-negation, suffering, depression, and stagnation. After reading that over and over again, I was thinking about how I might put my attention, as a black woman, on my own dignity. How might I put my attention, as a black woman, on my freedom? How might I put my attention, as a black woman, on feeling good? I deserve to feel good. My hurdles have been convincing myself that I deserve to feel good as a black woman, as a fat woman, as a queer woman, as an organizer woman, and just as a woman.
Many communities are awakening to these ideas now. When it feels good, more people want to be part of it. We have numbers that say that we need to be fomenting an irresistible space that everyone wants to move towards. It should feel like home; it should feel delicious; it should feel caring. It should feel like a community. That’s also a design piece. Several of the groups that I’ve been working with are now co-creating their own spaces, which is very exciting to me. Imagine what our movement looks like in ten years if we focus on making it an irresistible and compelling space rather than a mine field, which is what my political work often felt like. I do also want to say that rigor has a big role in pleasure. There’s eroticism in having a high standard, in withholding, and in not pretending.
Emergent Strategy has a lot to do with decentralization, but when you start to be recognized for your work there’s an automatic centralization that happens. Some of that is fun. I can see how it can be used to move the work. But it’s also really important to me that readers understand that emergent strategy is being done by many people. If I’m not replaceable, then I haven’t done my job well. If other people can’t come in and do the work, then I haven't learned how to teach, to offer, and to hand myself over.
My plan is to pack a suitcase full of books with one swimsuit, one sarong, and a hat, and then go someplace where it works for me to be reading all day in a bikini. I’ll come home when I’ve read everything in the suitcase.
Renaissance thinker, creator, and author adrienne maree brown is best known for her work in social justice activism and facilitation alongside her ground-breaking books Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (2017) and Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (2019).
Futuring, Design Thinking, Community Design