adrienne maree brown

Day 19 of #BlackHistoryMonth Black Theory:

“I believe that we are in an imagination battle, and almost everything about how we orient toward our bodies is shaped by fearful imaginations. Imaginations that fear Blackness, brownness, fatness, queerness, disability, difference. Our radical imagination is a tool for decolonization, for reclaiming our right to shape our lived reality.” Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good

“Part of the reason so few of us have a healthy relationship with pleasure is because a small minority of our species hoards the excess of resources, creating a false scarcity and then trying to sell us joy, sell us back to ourselves. Some think it belongs to them, that it is their inheritance. Some think it a sign of their worth, their superiority. On a broad level, white people and men have been the primary recipients of this delusion, the belief that they deserve to have excess, while the majority of others don’t have enough … or further, that the majority of the world exists in some way to please them. And so many of us have been trained into the delusion that we must accumulate excess, even at the cost of vast inequality, in order to view our lives as complete or successful. A central aspect of pleasure activism is tapping into the natural abundance that exists within and between us, and between our species and this planet. Pleasure is not one of the spoils of capitalism. It is what our bodies, our human systems, are structured for; it is the aliveness and awakening, the gratitude and humility, the joy and celebration of being miraculous.” Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good

“E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G—is connected. The soil needs rain, organic matter, air, worms and life in order to do what it needs to do to give and receive life. Each element is an essential component. “Organizing takes humility and selflessness and patience and rhythm while our ultimate goal of liberation will take many expert components. Some of us build and fight for land, healthy bodies, healthy relationships, clean air, water, homes, safety, dignity, and humanizing education. Others of us fight for food and political prisoners and abolition and environmental justice. Our work is intersectional and multifaceted. Nature teaches us that our work has to be nuanced and steadfast. And more than anything, that we need each other—at our highest natural glory—in order to get free.” Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“This is relationship building. And this is building trust. And consensually understanding how to be moved and inspired by each other without sometimes assuming that energy has to be sexual. That maybe that’s just an erotic exchange that’s actually about sharing knowledge, memory, power, and that to me is understanding levels of intimacy in relationship to liberation.” Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good

“My intentions for readers of this book are that you recognize that pleasure is a measure of freedom; notice what makes you feel good and what you are curious about; learn ways you can increase the amount of feeling-good time in your life, to have abundant pleasure; decrease any internal or projected shame or scarcity thinking around the pursuit of pleasure, quieting any voices of trauma that keep you from your full sacred sensual life; create more room for joy, wholeness, and aliveness (and less room for oppression, repression, self-denial and unnecessary suffering) in your life; identify strategies beyond denial or repression for navigating pleasure in relationship to others; and begin to understand the liberation possible when we collectively orient around pleasure and longing. Bonus: realize you are a pleasure activist!” Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good

“Liberated relationships are one of the ways we actually create abundant justice, the understanding that there is enough attention, care, resource, and connection for all of us to access belonging, to be in our dignity, and to be safe in community” Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good

[in regards to Occupy Wall Street] “what I felt was the surge of energy I used to get at a march, realizing that there were so many people wanting change, people who had walked completely different pathways to reach the same conclusion that they were willing to give their precious lifeforce to changing the systems of our time. This has the potential to be deeper, because it feels less fleeting, less temporary, less spectacle. Marches have left me feeling so unheard for so long. Here, I noticed the wingnut messaging, and the whiteness…and yet I felt close to tears a few times, seeing unexpected diversity in the crowd, seeing the self-organized systems emerging for creation of art, sharing of information, health, and wellness. There was even a table of “coaches” to help people figure out what their role in the movement could be. No one is special, and everyone is needed.” Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“I share what I learn through experiences and experiments in and with communities I support. I do not, cannot, see myself through anyone else’s lens, but I can listen to what others experience, balance it with my heart, and widen, focus my view. I welcome your critiques when I am being unaccountable, or less precise than is appropriate for the content at hand—and I want you to know that whatever mistakes I am still making in these pages, in these years, are not without massive effort to do the absolute best I can do. I will not be perfect, I will keep learning. I will also not be silent, I will keep learning.” We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

“What we need is a culture where the common experience of trauma leads to a normalization of healing. Being able to say I have good reasons to be scared of the dark, of raised voices, of being swallowed up by love, of being alone. And being able to offer each other: I know a healer for you. I'll hold your hand in the dark. Let's begin a meditation practice. Perhaps talk therapy is not enough. We should celebrate love in our community as a measure of healing. The expectation should be – I know we are all in need of healing – so how are we doing our healing work?” All of Me: Stories of Love, Anger, and the Female Body

“If I can see the ways I am perpetuating systemic oppressions, if I can see where I learned the behavior and how hard it is to unlearn it, I start to have more humility as I see the messiness of the communities I am part of, the world I live in.” We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

“Here are some reasons we swallow our truths:

- Capitalism: we are taught that love is about belonging to one person or community, and we must contort in order to ensure continued belonging. We are taught that our value is in what we can produce, and emotions impede production.

- The oppression of supremacy: we are taught that, if we are not white, male, straight, able, wealthy, adult, etc., our truths don't matter. This starts very early, we are taught that our feelings and thoughts as children are unimportant, that we are to "be seen and not heard".

- The oppression of false peace: we are taught that our truths are disruptive, and that disruption is a negative act. This one is particularly insidious, and ties back into capitalism—only those moving towards profit can adds would create disruption, everyone else should be complacent consumers.” Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“…we perform solidarity for strangers rather than engaging in hard conversations with comrades. We are fearful of taking the time to be discerning, because then we may have to recognize that we aren’t as skilled at conflict as we want and need to be, and/or that any of us could be seen as harm-doers. When we are discerning, when we do step up to say wait, let’s get understanding here, we risk becoming the new target, viewed as another accomplice to harm instead of understood as a comrade in ending harm, viewed as an opposition in conflict instead of someone trying to find movement alignment.” We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

“The fragmentation that has resulted from colonial constructs of race, gender, class, and power has wounded many of us so deeply that we identify more with the wound than with any experience of wholeness or oneness.” Loving Corrections

Links:

Books -

https://adriennemareebrown.net/books/

PDFs -

We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ad0d247af209613040b9ceb/t/5db5a44b0e6ba42da976cce7/1572185168567/brown+2017-Emergent+Strategy+full+book.pdf

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ad0d247af209613040b9ceb/t/5db5a44b0e6ba42da976cce7/1572185168567/brown+2017-Emergent+Strategy+full+book.pdf

Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good

https://archive.org/details/isbn_9781849353274

Loving Corrections

https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/69414153/pdf-read-download-loving-corrections-emergent-strategy-book-12-andr