Adrienne Maree Brown

“Octavia's Parables podcast”

“Personal website”

“My most subversive joy is... that internal knowledge that I am not inferior to a man who is simultaneously thinking that he is superior to me.”

“I’m reading... Octavia, Ursula. Kiese Laymon. Mary Oliver. James Baldwin. China Mieville.”

“I appreciate the chaos of unplanned time. I find unorganized human time particularly intriguing.”

“My pleasure icons are... Marla Stewart of Velvet Lips. Rihanna, obviously. Lizzo too, the pleasure she gets from just confronting the world with her excellence and then laughing.”

“I remind myself I can't be good at something I'm doing for the first time, and that reminder helps me humble into learning mode.”

“I had to surrender so many wrong thoughts to begin to see.”

“If you are born into an abusive identity, there's another way possible. If you were shaped into being someone who is driven towards conflict, causing harm to other people, there's another way possible.”

“(White supremacy) is a fundamentally mythological state. Human beings are not supreme to each other based on the vagina we came out of. That’s not what determines our worth and our well-being or miraculousness.”

“I think ultimately that mutual aid is going to teach us a ton about how to be in communities that can be accountable to each other, because mutual aid only works when you're able to say, "I have a need," [and someone else says] "I have something to offer to that need. Being in conflict is just another need.”

“I want to lift up the book Mutual Aid by Dean Spade”

“Each of us is going to have to start to say, in my own life, can I navigate and operate as if no one is disposable?”

“One of my other teachers, Danielle Sered, said that no one experiences harm for the first time when they're doing harm. As a society, as a species, but specifically in our communities, we have to start asking ourselves those questions like, what caused this? Can we get to the root system?”

“I look at my community: When is it my turn to mediate? When is it my turn to show up for someone who needs to get out of an abusive dynamic? When is it my turn to show up in community as someone who names that I have caused harm and takes accountability for something that I've done?”

“I think that transformative justice is something that happens at an intimate level. It happens in a community that knows each other.”

“I think we are very aware now that a ton of people who are in the prison industrial complex actually need mental health support.”

“The first interactions I had with the ideas of abolition work were around the system of slavery. [For people living during that time,] it felt impossible that that system could end and there could be some other way of functioning that didn't rely on Black people being enslaved. And I think we're in a similar moment now. It's impossible to imagine what our societies would do, what cultures would do, what communities would do if we didn't have prisons.”

“This pandemic has unveiled for a lot of us just how small our reliable communities are, and how much we need to deepen those relationships so that they can hold change and conflict and differences.”

“White supremacy has a certain view of who the villain is. Patriarchy has a certain view of who the villain is. Capitalism has a certain view of who the villain is. Ableism has a certain view of who the villain is. And throughout history, we have notoriously been wrong about who the villain actually is, or what concepts are actually villainous concepts to our species.”