Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

by Adrienne Maree Brown

“Dii Nvwati (Cherokee). Translation: Skunk medicine. The skunk asks us to defend ourselves effectively, without causing further conflict. Self-protection but do no harm. Gangsterish peace-making. That is the kind of masculinity that I try to embody. With my leadership, with my poise, with my privileges. As my body continues on a journey of thickening, muscle hardening, limbs lengthening, Ayurvedic drying, shorter synapse pathways, fuzzier intuition, and choppier verbal articulation all facilitated by weekly testosterone injections these are poignant lessons to forward. The objective is for men and masculine people to not yield our power to others… Women and femme people don’t need our paternalistic sickle to swath as we ‘tap out.’ We must figure out power without domination. “Just as our body mass of people of color in the United States continues to grow and we inch near the time of outnumbering the current White majority in population numbers it will be imperative that we use our people power strategically. Numbers alone won’t ensure justice and liberation. The skunk asks us to use our powers effectively, without wiping ourselves out. Without recapitulating top down, give-less-to-get-more social structures. Just as the skunk does not seek to be the bear, let us not attempt to trade places with the oppressor. Let us navigate a road of paradigm shifting that seeks to salve both current social and economic injuries, but also prepare a sustainable method of being for seven ge...

Nothing in nature is disposable. Part of the resilience of nature is that nothing in nature is wasted. The earth swallows it all through mouths or soil or water. This is such a simple beautiful truth. Everything is food, fuel, compost, a home for some other creature.

Transformative Justice: Acknowledges the reality of state harm. Looks for alternative ways to address/interrupt harm, which do not rely on the state. Relies on organic, creative strategies that are community created and sustained. Transforms the root causes of violence, not only the individual experience.

No one is disposable and yet—we have a right to make boundaries.

Safety, Healing, and Agency For All Safety, Healing, and Individual Agency for Survivors. Accountability and a transformation for people who harm. Community action, healing, and/or group/org accountability. Transformation of the social conditions that perpetuate violence.

The harder things are to say, the more necessary they are to say.

Here are a few signs that you may be in an abusive movement, work, family, friendship, or romantic dynamic: you make agreements or set boundaries and they get crossed or broken, and/or you can’t hold the agreements/boundaries yourself. you can’t communicate directly with the person/people about issues or concerns (culture of gossip usually grows here, in the family, office, group). when you raise the issue that agreements or boundaries are not being held, there is no accountability (the other person or people deny the transgression, say they forgot the agreements, say it is your fault, ridicule you, continue the transgression—and/or you can’t see your accountability in boundary crossing, and/or diminish the harm). there is a culture of blaming or dishonesty that breaks down trust over time. you don’t feel comfortable processing the issues of the dynamic with friends, coworkers, allies (you feel ashamed, or like it will upset the other person/people in the dynamic). arguments are really confusing and/or repetitive—you can’t tell what you are arguing about, the arguments have no boundaries or containers, you keep returning to issues you felt were resolved, or you keep losing track of your own values and center in the process. you feel dismissed, hidden, or disrespected, and/or like you can’t acknowledge reality, be transparent, or respectful. you feel like a core part of yourself is compromised or not welcome, and/or you want to change a core aspect of another person or grou...

You do not have the right to traumatize abusive people, to attack them personally or publicly, or to sabotage anyone else’s health. The behaviors of abuse are also survival-based, learned behaviors rooted in some pain. If you can look through the lens of compassion, you will find hurt and trauma there. If you are the abused party, healing that hurt is not your responsibility and exacerbating that pain is not your justified right.

“I remember as a small child seeing the geese flying south. Firefly season. A cicada that lived for a while in the cracks of the cement bricks that made up our porch wall. A flash flood sweeping cars away while we were huddled under an overhang on a picnic. Lightning felling a tree in our backyard. I guess I learned that everything will pass. “But also, and equally true, it will all come back again.” —Karen Joy Fowler

Radical honesty. No omissions, no white lies, no projections. Ask the questions you really want answered, speak your truth, and let the relationship build inside all that reality. Just a note from experience, the small lies can be the hardest to stop telling. “No I don’t want to get on the phone right now, can we just text?”; “I’m busy catching up on my reality TV show”; “Real cow milk ice cream”; or “I know I said I didn’t want to ___, but now I do.” However, the more you practice this, the more you will find yourself spending your waking hours in the ways you want to, the ways that honor the miracle of your existence, which was not given to you to waste in polite avoidance of hurting people’s feelings. You will find that you can be honest and kind, you can be honest and compassionate.

In my mediations, “Why?” is often the game-changing, possibility-opening question. That’s because the answers rehumanize those we feel are perpetrating against us. “Why?” often leads us to grief, abuse, trauma, often undiagnosed mental illnesses like depression or bipolar disorder, difference, socialization, childhood, scarcity, loneliness. Also, “Why?” makes it impossible to ignore that we might be capable of a similar transgression in similar circumstances. We don’t want to see that.

“The world we want is one where many worlds fit.” —Zapatistas

“When forced into a binary, you always choose wrong.” —Jelani Wilson

In my observations of the natural world, there are examples of scale that offer another way—when we think about snowflakes, grains of sand, waves in water, stars—there is evidence that many possibilities exist for how we manifest inside our potential. Then there are wavicles—entities that are simultaneously waves and particles. Then there is quantum mechanics, which examines the smallest units of our universe and shows that everything we think of as solid and singular is actually fluid and multitudes.

Blackness cannot be integrated with quantum mechanics at very high energies. At lower energies, it is ignored; to address energies at or higher than the Planck scale, a new theory of quantum Blackness is required.

“As a part of our liberation, the Earth teaches us that everything—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.” —Dara Cooper

In our work for Octavia’s Brood, Walidah and I articulated that “all organizing is science fiction,” by which we mean that social justice work is about creating systems of justice and equity in the future, creating conditions that we have never experienced. That is a futurist focus, and the practices of collaboration and adaptation and transformative justice, are science fictional behavior. We didn’t create this understanding, we observed it amongst the afrofuturists and sci fi writers and creators we grew up loving and being liberated by.

“There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.” —Octavia Butler, Parable of the Trickster79

to focus on afrofuturists in the Black social-justice tradition, I would note that: Africans leaping off of slaver ships were afrofuturists. Slave-era parents teaching their babies a foreign alphabet in the candlelit dirt were afrofuturists. Black women dissociating themselves through to tomorrow while being raped into motherhood were afrofuturists. Those who raised the children of violence, and those who chose not to, all were predicting the future and articulating their choices. Slaves who ran to freedom, and slaves who ran to their deaths, were afrofuturists. It is the emphasis on a tomorrow that centers the dignity of that seed, particularly in the face of extinction, that marks, for me, the afrofuturist.

Harriet, Sojourner, Frederick, John, Malcolm, James, Ella, Martin, Nina, June, Toni. Octavia.

“All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you.”

My colleague Eugene Kim has this great tool called the Strategy / Culture Bicycle. He says that developing an effective strategy and culture is about asking the right questions: Where are we now? Who are we today? Where do we want to go? Who do we want to become? How do we get there? What I love about this is that where we are going and who we need to be to get there are married. We can’t get to a new destination without shifting who and how we are.

I have words for sitting, mindfulness, and meditation. But I remember—my grandmother died when I was seven, and I fully remember going on errands with her and she would close her eyes while we were waiting and I would say “Gram, why are you sleeping?” and she would say, “I’m not sleeping, I am resting my eyes.” I think many people meditate—they might not call it that or see it as such. But most of us have a way of opening up to what’s happening around us, turning inward, not engaging in every stimulus. Not everyone calls it meditation and that’s fine.

We spend our lives in unconscious practices, practices that make us deny our true selves, our true power, our collectivism. It takes three hundred repetitions for muscle memory and three thousand repetitions for embodiment.89 What do you need to practice?

Did I thank the prolific and joyful Canadian rapper Drake yet for bringing the term “woes” to my attention? Woes stands for “Working On Excellence,” and I’ve reveled in it as a way to note those people in my life with whom I am intentionally growing.

I have been really aware of the power of coevolution through friendship as I have been in what feels like a growth spurt. Babies do this, suddenly overnight become taller, fuller, using new words, more confident in their bodies and complex in their communications. It’s pretty incredible to watch—and to feel that the growth doesn’t end even if it changes form.

Life is not happening to us. We are learning to be in the actual current moment, to recognize where we have choice… In a terrifying twist, it turns out we always have it.

Another participant-teacher in the community of practice, Jane Sung E Bai, asked us to consider, “What if I am responsible for everything?”

What I am noticing is that it is not a privilege to practice coevolution through friendship—it is the deepest work. I believe it is how communities have survived. I believe it is Harriet Tubman going back to free others, because it wasn’t enough to free only herself. I believe it is Ubuntu91 active in my life. I believe it is the freedom that we are longing for, which will never be given to us, which we have to create, the pulsing life force of the collective body we are birthing, the rhythm of a shared heart.

Art is not neutral. It either upholds or disrupts the status quo, advancing or regressing justice.

We are living now inside the imagination of people who thought economic disparity and environmental destruction were acceptable costs for their power. It is our right and responsibility to write ourselves into the future.

All organizing is science fiction. If you are shaping the future,...

Visionary fiction is neither utopian nor dystopian, instead it is like real life: Hard, realistic… Hopeful as a strategy.

Cultivate fiction that explores change as a collective, bottom-up process. Fiction that centers those who are currently marginalized—not to be nice, but because those who survive on the margins tend to be the most experientially innovative—practicing survival-based efficiency, doing the most with the least, an important skill area on a planet whose resources are under assault by less marginalized people.

In teaching basic meditation at my Windcall Retreat, Black Zen teacher Angel Kyodo Williams once said that our access to the global scale of suffering has become immediate, through technology, but we have not developed the capacity to be with that increased awareness of suffering.

What my meditation teachers have shared with me is that meditation is about choosing where my attention goes. Training my attention. And that when I am overcome by sadness, loss, anger, joy, desire, restlessness, or other emotions, it helps to be able to drop into myself and choose—to be with the emotions intentionally, to listen for what is needed.

Ursula Le Guin speaks to this: “To sit and be fully aware of the air going in and out of your nose, and nothing else, this sounds really stupid. If you haven’t tried it yet, try it. It is really stupid. Nothing your intellect can do to help you do it. This must be why so many people for so long have used it as a way towards wisdom.”

I used to think I was supposed to be NOT thinking, and then I learned that many people who meditate, even those who have done it for years and do long silent retreats and stuff, are actually in the tug of war between thinking and being the whole time. Being aware that one is thinking, noticing when thought is happening, can be liberating. The content of the thoughts becomes less important, it is the choice to be thinking vs. breathing.

I have actually found the shivasana position in yoga is best for my body for meditation—laying flat on my back, palms up, sinking into the floor or bed. After years of trying to meditate sitting up and spending the entire time in pain, I noticed that the times I felt most capable of meditation were at the end of yoga classes.

One tool she offered me is the “Insight” meditation app, which I use on my phone. Timed meditation is a must for me, and the app marks beginning, end and interim time with bells. This allows me to relax into the meditation, not opening my eyes and looking at the clock desperately every thirty seconds. I had to start very small, setting the timer for three minutes, which felt like forever. I have built up to a regular practice of forty-five minutes,

Somatics is the study of the soma, a Greek word that means “the living organism in its wholeness.”

Somatics talks about the body as three billion years of evolutionary wisdom. It’s really more than the body in the “Cartesian” view—body as object or machine. Somatics brings an understanding and way to work with us as whole—mind, beliefs, emotions, relations, resilience, adaptations, biology, meaning, and actions… All within and through the body. And, that we are collective bodies as well. We transform both individually and collectively.

Somatics is about being a fight for, rather than a fight against.

daily self-portraits with each other in the spirit of Frida Kahlo (I was somewhat inspired by a picture of her, painting, that is floating around the Internet with the words “Never Be Ashamed of Your Selfies”).

Do you know how enough you all are?

“If you do not trust the people, they will become untrustworthy.” —Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

There are four universal tools—Trust the People, Principles, Protocols, and Consensus—that just feel foundational.

One of the primary principles of emergent strategy is trusting the people. The flip of Lao Tzu’s wisdom is: if you trust the people, they become trustworthy. Trust is a seed that grows with attention and space. The facilitator can be a gardener, or the sun, the water.

1. Goal setting/intention. Why are we meeting? What can this group uniquely accomplish? There are always a ton of relevant conversations that could happen, but there is usually a very small set of conversations that a particular group, at a particular moment in history, can have and move forward, given their capacity, resources, time, focus, and beliefs.

“Don’t thingify,” Taj offered me recently, when I was in a moment of pressure to produce “outcomes” at a large gathering. “Humanify! Shifting our way of being is our tangible outcome. Systems change comes from big groups making big shifts in being.”