Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

by Adrienne Maree Brown

Again, there are times when that kind of calling out is the only option—particularly in relation to those of great privilege who are not within our reach. But if you have each other’s phone numbers, or are within two degrees of social-media connection, and particularly if you are in the small, small percentage of humans trying to change the world—you actually have access to transformative justice in real time. Get mediation support, think of the community, move toward justice. Real time is slower than social-media time, where everything feels urgent. Real time often includes periods of silence, reflection, growth, space, self-forgiveness, processing with loved ones, rest, and responsibility. Real-time transformation requires stating your needs and setting functional boundaries. Transformative justice requires us, at minimum, to ask ourselves questions like these before we jump, teeth bared, for the jugular. I think this is some of the hardest work. It’s not about pack hunting an external enemy, it’s about deep shifts in our own ways of being. But if we want to create a world in which conflict and trauma aren’t the center of our collective existence, we have to practice something new, ask different questions, access again our curiosity about each other as a species. And so much more.