adrienne maree brown: Cancel Culture is Solvable

from influencer fame due to questionable actions. It seemed by some as a way to hold public figures with power accountable for their actions, while others see it as the new mob mentality. But people have been canceling other people through the ages. Think back to the nineteen fifties with Senator Joseph McCarthy blacklisting folks he deemed on a mark,

and even further back to the Salem witch trials. These days, comedians, politicians, authors and actors have been canceled for unacceptable and problematic behavior such as racist tweets, inappropriate comments, jokes, allegations of sexual misconduct or violence, transphobic and homophobic opinions, and more. While the reasons for canceling vary. The quick and indignant anger and the mob's desire for swift action hasn't changed.

But is it right to cancel people? Actually, we don't want to cancel people who want to cancel ways of thinking. Adrian Marie Brown is the author of We Will Not Cancel Us and Other Dreams of Transformative Justice. The culture of disposability is a solvable problem, Adrian. You first made your thoughts public on cancel culture through a post on your website, and that post was entitled Unthinkable Thoughts call out culture in the Age of COVID nineteen. What made

you decide to write that then? Well, I had been away, I was on sabbatical, and I've been doing like movement related work, organizing for social change, environmental change, economic justice for like twenty five years, And when I came back, I was inundated with all these messages from people calling for the cancelation or deep platforming or something else. Of all these people, and none of them were people that

I necessarily knew. None of them were people that I was like, Oh, I understand how to hold this person accountable.

They weren't people of massive power, and so I got concerned about that, you know, I was like, well, what's happening inside of movement that we are not engaging in healthy conflict with each other and figuring out what these differences are about, and you know, just having the conversations with you to have what's happening that our main way of engaging with each other when we do disagree or when harm happens is to do a public call out.

I was worried about that on a lot of levels, so I started writing about it, and the very idea that I felt nervous to write about it, even that felt intriguing to me as someone who you know, I'm like, we're trying to fight against people who don't want us to live, and in that scenario, I should never feel worried about trying to be in any conversation like we've got to figure this out because we have to survive.

I posted the initial blog, which was quite long, and the feedback made me convinced that it would be well served as a book. The book is We Will Not Cancel Us. Who was us to us? That I was really thinking of was people who are in social justice movements, people who are in space or they've said we are abolitionists,

we are a feminists, we are post capitalists. We're trying to figure out a different way of being in a relationship to this planet that is respectful, that will sustain us, particularly inside of that pocket, the abolitionist space, you know, those of us who believe that there is a way that we can be on this planet as a human species that doesn't involve prisons and policing, which is in

the lineage of slavery. Right, there's this body of us who believe that, and we're trying to hold down movement and create movement to be a space where that's the practice. But we're still actually doing these highly punitive measures with each other. And so that was the call. We have to figure out how to do this some other way so that we can break this pattern of disposability. Talk a little bit about how you envision transformative and restorative

justice being a way to replace punitive justice. When someone does something wrong, we punish them in any number of ways, corporal punishment. We take away their freedom, we take away their right to vote. We sometimes physically injure them with the death penalty, you know. And it is this binary where people are good or bad, meaning that they are

deserving or not deserving a punishment. If that worked, if that worldview worked, then especially with the amount that we have, in particularly the US invested in the prison system, we should be crime free without harm. Because we punish so professionally and so thoroughly, it doesn't work, It doesn't actually stop harm from happening. And if you focus on how would we stop the harm from happening, then these models of restorative justice and transformative justice emerge or can be remembered.

A lot of these are ways that people long before capitalism and colonialism took over the way the world functioned. There have been cultures that had other ways of dealing with harm when it happened, dealing with conflict when it came up. And those ways are both old and ones

that we need to relearn, and they involve mediation. Being able to sit and be held in a conversation that you can't handle one to one, have someone else there to help move it along, and find the places where there's an opening when it feels like it's all a wall.

There's community circles, community accountability processes where an entire body or community can sit and hold both are all members of a conflict or a harm and find out what is the right move forward, what would actually bring some closure and allow healing to begin in the circumstance being able to truly hear each other, being able to truly listen, and the idea that people can change. People are always

changing everything that you're saying. It makes sense when you talk about in movement, when you're talking about marginalized folks, when you're talking about folks fighting for justice within the community. But cancel culture is something that it's been coming up a lot recently, and there's been a prominent comedian, there's been a prominent wrapper, there's been prominent folks. Yeah, there's

been some prominence out there. How do we reconcile the members people who are members of marginalized community but in some ways are not necessarily fighting on our teams the teams of folks that are fighting for justice to us. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that gets teased out with this is how non monolithic we are, And I think that's always important for people to understand because then the people that we are organizing amongst and

with and for are also non monolithic. And what we have to do is beat in the conversations if we care about them, you know. So to me, there's always a question of are we calling for this person's cancelation because they're causing harm to us? What's actually happening? You know? So I look at and R Kelly and I'm like, the call there for a cancelation or amusing R Kelly is related to staunching the economic flow that supports him

doing ongoing visceral harm to young girls. And because of the resource is that he has access to, he can just continue to act. So something else has to stop him, right and right, right now, the only move we have to stop someone at that level is actually prison, Right, it's not cancelation because what we see when people get canceled is in a lot of ways, it feeds them.

It's like more and more attention moves towards them. It allows the people who are also staunchly ignorant in the same ways, right, like emotionally ignorant, spiritually ignorant, you know, economically ignorant, whichever one it is, transphobic, right, it's whichever thing they're sitting in. It allows the people who also believe that to flock towards them and for them to gather together. So that's part of it to be as I'm just like, it doesn't work, It doesn't work the

way we would want it to work. And I have seen it work when we're talking about corporations where there's a specific ask that's meatable. You know, when that Chappelle special came out and everybody's like, whoa you know, having this response, Ashley Marie pressed it is this incredible black trans organizer, and she was just like, we don't actually want to cancel anyone. We want to have a transformative conversation. We think that it is possible to move from here

beyond this. We don't want the conversation with him, We want it with Netflix. We want it with the entity, the structure that is upholding the culture that allows for these decisions to happen. So just the like moving from the very specific, you know, the way cancelation makes it seem like one person is responsible for an entire system of behavior. We never get at the system, and it allows us to be off the hook that we are

all participating in the same systems. Right, So what I'm interested in is something that says we're all actually responsible for these behaviors, all of them. Child sexual abuse happens because many of us look the other way when we

need to look more closely. Right, rape, sexual assault that happens in our communities because we don't listen to the survivors because we can, I reckon that the person that we love, these men that we love, these people that we love, are also doing these things that we hate. You know, we participate, we uphold, we look away, we're quiet. And so this error that we're living in me too, and Black Lives Matter putting a pressure on this pressure

means actually, we don't want to cancel people. We want to cancel ways of thinking. I like it makes sense when you say it to me, like it makes sense, and I support it. I really do. I wholeheartedly support it. And I think the hardest part of this is to look in the medium and to listen to someone say, oh, they're trying to cancel me, they're trying to do this all that, and avoid the actual responsibility that you have to engage these conversations. So how do we get there?

Because we know I know that like the most of the fuel behind somebody like Dave Chappelle, most of the fuel behind them comes from a lot of transphobia, a lot of homophobia, and nobody wants to engage those conversations. How do we get them seated at the table? Yeah, I mean one of the things is, and I'll say this, I was really politically shaped by Grace Lee Bogs in Detroit, and one of the things she taught me was that

we must transform ourselves to transform the world. And this kind of blew my mind because I was very much oriented towards like, when we see that someone is acting out of alignment, we have to fix them. We have to get them together right. We have to get them right. And the harder work is we have to get ourselves together. We have to figure out why the person thinks it's

okay to behave this way around us. Right, Like when we witness racism, even we're like, I didn't do the racist thing, but it's like you witness the racist thing, and something in the way you responded made it okay for that racist thing to continue and to persist. Right with Same with homophobias, same with transphobias, same with all of these patterns of behavior, Same with sexual harassment. So many places we allow it. So a lot of the practices,

you know, in some dream World. Yeah, it would be great to get Chappelle to sit down with trans people and really hear and really take in the way that it hurts. You know. I heard him say, you know, I'm not going to cause any more harm. I'll stop telling his jokes until we can laugh together. Right, It's like, okay, so you knew that and you did this whole thing. Anyway, we can't wait for that. If we wait for that,

we'll be waiting forever. Right, We're waiting for someone who is in a position of privilege and power to of their own volition relinquish that. Yeah. Right, it's never going to happen, like any move will be to protect that space that they've achieved. Instead, we have to have the conversations amongst ourselves that make it impossible for the people

to be up on such pedestals. Anyway. We have the conversations amongst ourselves that are like, how we practice with each other is what allows trans phobia to persist or not persist. So when we feel our friends saying, oh the special was fine, great, let me have the conversation with you. Let me have the conversation with you, right, and to be like I'm going to get in the boat with you, and I'm not going to say you're wrong. I'm going to say here's how it felt for me

and listening to it. Yeah, right, we model something different where it's like, I'm not interested in canceling everyone in the world who thought that specialists fine, I'm interested in reaching into that place where their humanity is disconnected, you know, and they're not able to see trans people inside of that. Yeah, I want to feel like, how do I use this as an opportunity to reconnect that that humanity, that little

piece right there. And that goes back to what you're saying about being restorative and bringing them back into exactly because we are actually a one entity no matter where in human time and history. We are like the species. What we understand about all species is we function together. The bees. It's not like the bees are just like, oh, five of us will go extinct. No, it's like, you know, the conditions work for all of us, or they don't work for us. And that's the thing our species has

not mastered. We still think that somehow we'll do hierarchy and any of us will survive. We have to survive together or we won't make it. And so it's constantly trying to get people to understand, to remember that which we already knew, and then there were wounds and wounds and wounds. If we restore enough, we'll understand we're all together. And I think that's when the aliens will call us and be like, Okay, I'll figure it out. You are humans.

You're humans, got it? Finally some adventures for you that. Yeah. So there's a quote from your book and it says, I want to invite us to get excellent at being in conflict, which is a healthy, natural part of being human and biodiverse. And I like this quote because it does invite for challenging conversations and for us to have tension.

My question about this one is there are people who are going to say this in defense of harmful statements, in defense of a people, you know, doing things that are enacting harm in the community, And how do we not let them weaponize conflict in a way that's not healthy. I think that's really I love this question because I feel like if I hadn't seen it in nature, I don't know that I would understand the answer to it.

And I feel like it's only by recognizing, like humans our nature, and nature has some fundamental rules amongst them. That difference is actually one of the things that creates a healthy ecosystem. The differences in an ecosystem nourish each other. Symbiosis emerges, and that's when life really is popping. Like those are the that's they're like, oh, we rain for us, Okay,

you know, like it's exciting right to be there. But if there's something that is toxic to that system, then literally the entire ecosystem organizes itself to protect itself and to really keep that toxic substance out. And I think we have to look at it that way. It's like I, for me, I don't think that a person can be that toxic substance, but I think people's ideas and behaviors can bring that toxicity into community. And I think that's where then we have to be able to say, hold on,

we don't allow that behavior in this space. Can you let that behavior go? We see in nature all the time things can be restored. There is healing that is possible. This is one of the ways that humans used to be in a much more symbiotic, wholesome relationship with Earth, is that we used to for instance, when we were gathering wood, we would cut a portion from the tree, not cut down a tree, so that the tree remained and it gave what it could give and continue growing.

If we think of it that way, where it's like, Okay, everything can handle some portion being taken away, what is it for us? I think that we get lost in this. I feel like, as humans, we think our biodiversity is a weakness, and that if we are in spaces where many of us or many ideas thrive, we're gonna we're going to fight with each other in a way that's so uncomfortable we can't bear it. But I'm like, we should at least try it. We should try being uncomfortable.

The discomfort is usually because there's an old idea or an old way of being that is too small for who your spirit and soul actually want to be. We constantly expand over the course of our lives. Our minds, our comprehension, our ability to handle difference expands more and more. That's the beauty of our species. So that to me is what's inside of it. Is like, the idea is to have as much biodiversity, as much difference in the community as possible. But not to allow harm to persist

in the community, because the harm impacts the entire ecosystem negatively. Adrian, one of the things I really enjoined in your book was that you talked about when a callout can be useful.

You say callouts can feel most powerful full when they are used with their tactical intention for those with less positional political, economic, or other power to demand accountability to stop harm or abuse, which I appreciate, and I think you laid that out perfectly with the way that you were talking about r Kelly, how do we make the distinction between call out, cancelation, and consequences because I hear all three of them being used interchangeably, especially in media

and especially by people who are trying to get themselves out of consequences. Oh, I love it. I think we're still in the birthing stages of figuring out what all these things are. And that's why people are like, it's a whole culture of this, it's a whole culture of that. I'm like, yes, this is in the culture. You know, we are in some ways. Cancelation is in the culture, right,

and the culture is steeped in a punitive culture. So it's like cancelation is just the peak of a certain kind of wave that's happening in the culture, but it's not the only thing that's happening in the culture. And I think what we actually need is an accountability culture or a culture of consequences where it's like, oh, it's true that you actually did this thing. We know that it's true, and here's something, here's what a consequence can

actually look like. When I think of a call out, the call out functions as an isolating tool instead of a tool of community. And I think that's where when some people use the terms call in, the idea is like it's actually supposed to be bringing people deeper into community, into a space where they can actually be held, versus, you know, something where it's like we actually don't want

this person have access to community. I think a consequence though, to me, a consequence is when it's like, oh, I can draw a direct line, like I really can see this consequence makes sense based on what happened. You know what this person did. And I think a lot of times what we're missing is there's no veracity around what actually happened. We don't know, right, and then there's no clarity on like, what is the consequence. Is it taking one year out of the spotlight? You know, is it

taking a year off of Instagram or whatever? Because that's about you know what I've been noted sing as the patterns people kind of dip out for a year and then you see them come back like everything's great, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, we don't talk about that other thing. Yeah we don't, you know, and a lot of and they just move on. So I'm like, we need I'm always interested in like what actually works. If that strategy worked, you know, if it was like dang, we called these people out and

rape just stopped, like it's not happening anymore. This really worked? You know. Miriam Kabba is someone that I always point people towards. She is an incredible teacher around abolition, particularly prison abolition, and she really talks about that long, long pattern of harm doing continues in spite of this system of punitive justice, you know, in spite of all those efforts, and she's like, we should just be focused on how we end the harm. That's the only measure. Did the

harm end or did it not end? And I think that helps in a lot of these conversations because people get into some moral high ground space, and I'm like, it's not working, you know, like fundamentally it's not working, so it can't be the right way. I can talk about this with you or I really appreciate you writing this book. Adrian Murrie Brown, thank you so much for being with us today. Wow, thank you for having me.

This is a great conversation. Adrian Marie Brown is the author of We Will Not Cancel Us and Other Dreams of Transformative Justice. She's the co host of the podcasts How to Survive the End of the World, Octavia's Parables

and Emergent Strategy Listeners. If you want to learn more about the solutions we talked about today, I highly recommend Adrian's book We Will Not Cancel Us, and you could find links to her other books, as well as articles on conflict resolution, restorative justice practices, truth and reconciliation, non violent communication, and to more information about the leaders and mentors Brown mentioned in this conversation. They're all in our

show notes. Solvable is produced by Jocelyn Frank, research by David Jah, booking by Lisa Dunn, editing help from Keshelle Williams. Very special thanks to Tanzina Vega for pointing me to Adrian Marie Brown's work. Our managing producer is Sasha Matthias, and our executive producer is Mio La Belle. I'm Ronald Young Junior. Thanks for listening.