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

by Adrienne Maree Brown

in this age of 24/7 punditry, there are a lot of generalists who take up space with what they don’t know, or only know a little bit about. That brief, surface-level expertise is a pet peeve of mine—I’d rather know what I know and point to others who know what I don’t know.

If the racialized system of capitalism has produced such inequality that someone is hungry and steals a purse to resource a meal, returning the purse with an apology or community service does nothing to address that hunger. These teachers brought me to transformative justice, the work of addressing harm at the root, outside the mechanisms of the state, so that we can grow into right relationship with each other.

With each of the pieces in this collection, my goal is to bring transformative justice to life within our movement spaces—not as a futurist theory we are demanding from the larger world, but as a practice we are rigorously in with each other as believers, growing the capacity to invite others into.

We won’t end the systemic patterns of harm by isolating and picking off individuals, just as we can’t limit the communicative power of mycelium by plucking a single mushroom from the dirt. We need to flood the entire system with life-affirming principles and practices, to clear the channels between us of the toxicity of supremacy, to heal from the harms of a legacy of devaluing some lives and needs in order to indulge others.

As Maurice Moe Mitchell said, we have to have a low bar for entry and a high standard for conduct.

We find ways to bond that aren’t limited to pettiness, gossip, cliquishness, which can be so fun and then so destructive. We get skilled at critique that deepens us, conflict that generates new futures, and healing that changes material conditions.

I have a vision of movement as sanctuary. Not a tiny perfectionist utopia behind miles of barbed wire and walls and fences and tests and judgments and righteousness, but a vast sanctuary where our experiences, as humans who have experienced and caused harm, are met with centered, grounded invitations to grow.

Holding this vision inside of movements right now has meant feeling not just for what is punitive, but for where there is gleeful othering, revenge, or punishment of others, particularly when these things deepen our belonging to each other, usually briefly, until we too fuck up. It means paying attention to where we feel and/or practice policing and surveillance outside of the state.

It has meant longing for more collective clarity on what we mean by conflict, what we mean by harm, and what we mean by abuse. We need to get more precise about the language we use collectively.

It has meant slowing down our initial collective reactions such that violence is not met with more violence, but with alternative and satisfying consequences that result in the reduction of harm.

In a nutshell, principled struggle is when we are struggling for the sake of something larger than ourselves and are honest and direct with each other while holding compassion.2 It is when we take responsibility for our own feelings and actions and seek deeper understanding before responding (by asking questions, or reading the referenced materials). It is when we consider that a given organization, formation, or space may or may not be the space to hold what we need to bring, and that side conversations within that space should be for the sake of better understanding rather than checking out of the work.

As I was writing the piece, part of my issue was that our collective response to…everything…is collapsed. Call outs elicit both a consistent negative and dismissive energy, and a pleasurable take-down activation, regardless of what the call out is addressing. It has started to feel like every kind of dissonance in movements is understood through a lens of violence, abuse, and victimization. I believe that my collapse of these distinct but interconnected states of breakdown between people is indicative of a collapse of these states and needs within movement. We are in the mud together.

The U.S., as a nation, does not choose, or love, life. Not in our policies, in our safety practices, in our relationship to the planet and other nations. Not yet, and possibly never before.

Instant judgment and punishment are practices of power over others. It’s what those with power do to those who can’t stop them, who can’t demand justice. This injustice of power is practiced at an individual and collective level. What concerns me is how often it feels like this instant reaction is happening within movement. It feels like a feeding frenzy. In nature, a feeding frenzy happens “when predators are overwhelmed by the amount of prey available.… This can cause [them] to go wild, biting anything that moves, including each other or anything else within biting range.”

Underneath this logic I hear: we are good and we are getting rid of the “bad” people in our community or movement. We are affirming our rightness and power.

Which isn’t to say that a public accounting of harm, and consequences, isn’t necessarily the correct move. In cases of rape, sexual assault, intimate partner violence, and abuse, the callout can be the only move that stops the immediate harm without engaging the state. Shaming behaviors of abuse in a culture where they have been normalized is, and has been, a necessary survival technology.

Call outs don’t work for addressing misunderstandings, issuing critiques, or resolving contradiction. Call outs feel most powerful 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.

We have to recognize that we are on dangerous territory that is not aligned with a transformative justice vision when we mete out punishments in place of consequences, and/or when we issue consequences with no inquiry, no questions, no acceptance of accountability, no process, no time for the learning and unlearning necessary for authentic change…just instant and often unsatisfactory consequences.

The truth is, sometimes it takes a long time for us to realize the harm that has happened to us. And longer to realize we have caused harm to others. The truth is, it isn’t unusual to only realize harm happened in hindsight, with more perspective and politicization.

The additional truth is, even though we want to help the survivor, we love obsessing over and punishing “villains.” We end up putting more of our collective attention on punishing those accused of causing harm than supporting and centering the healing of survivors, and/or building pathways for those who are in cycles of causing harm to change.

I want us to let go of the narrowness of innocence, widen our understanding of how harm moves through us.9 I want us to see individual acts of harm as symptoms of systemic harm, and to do what we can do collectively to dismantle the systems and get as many of us free as possible.

This is not a case against call outs. There is absolutely a need for certain call outs—when power is greatly imbalanced and efforts have been made to stop ongoing harm, when someone accused of harm won’t participate in community accountability processes or honor requested boundaries, the call out is a way of pulling an emergency brake. But call outs need to be used specifically for harm and abuse, and within movement spaces they should be deployed as a last option.

Transformative justice is relational, it happens at the scale of community. Call outs now often happen at the scale of viral threads amongst strangers. The consequences of being called out in this hyper-connected age can be extremely dire and imprecise—facilitators and mediators like myself often get the call after, when someone accused of harm is struggling to stay alive after losing their reputation, community, and/or work. If we are lucky we can connect them to therapy or support community accountability. But often we are overwhelmed, and people slip through the cracks to cause harm to themselves, or leave movement and continue their abusive patterns elsewhere.

Right now calling someone out online seems like first/only option for a lot of people in the face of any kind of dissonance. We need to have the skills to be able to discern what kind of dissonance we are we dealing with or being asked to help with, what kind of support is actually needed, and the capacity we have to meet that need without calling on or informing the state.

Too often, we are using call outs to avoid direct conflict. Call outs are also being used to tilt public opinion about organizational or sectoral conflicts. Conflict, and growing community that can hold political difference, are actually healthy, generative, necessary moves for vibrant visions to be actualized.

I can’t help but wonder who benefits from movements that engage in public infighting, blame, shame, and knee-jerk call outs? I can’t help but see the state grinning, gathering all the data it needs, watching us weaken ourselves. M...

This piece is crucial to me. If the kind of call outs currently sweeping through online organizing space and spilling into real-life formations actually stopped harm, resolved conflict, ended supremacy, transformed people, I’d be a gung-ho call-out machine! I love functional tools. But what happens more often is that people step back, move through their shame, leave movement, or double...

I long for more people to experience the satisfaction of the processes I have been in and held—not perfection, but satisfaction. People getting to name what caused hurt, where the conflict is, what is needed; people receiving an authentic apology; people getting ...

It doesn’t make sense to say “believe all survivors” if we don’t also remember that most of us are survivors, which includes most people who cause harm. What we mean is we are tired of being silenced, dismissed, powerless in our pain, hurt over and over. Yes. But being loud is different from being whole, or even being heard, being cared for, being comforted, being healed. Being loud is different from being just. Being able to destroy is different from being able to generate a future where harm isn’t happening all around us.

Online, 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.

Knee-jerk call outs say: those who cause harm or mess up or disagree with us cannot change and cannot belong. They must be eradicated. The bad things in the world cannot change, we must disappear the bad until there is only good left. But one layer under that, what I hear is: We cannot change. We do not believe we can create compelling pathways from being harm doers to being healed, to growing. We do not believe we can hold the complexity of a gray situation. We do not believe in our own complexity. We do not believe we can navigate conflict and struggle in principled ways. We can only handle binary thinking: good/bad, innocent/guilty, angel/abuser, black/white, etc.

Cancer attacks one part of the body at a time, I have seen it—oh it’s in the throat, now it’s in the lungs, now it’s in the bones. When we engage in knee-jerk call outs as a conflict-resolution device, or issue instant consequences with no process, we become a cancer unto ourselves, unto movements and communities. We become the toxicity we long to heal. We become a tool of harm when we are trying to be, and I think meant to be, a balm.

I want us to be particularly rigorous about holding complexity and accountability well for Black people in our movement communities who are already struggling to keep our heads above water and build trust and move towards life under the intersecting weights of white supremacy, racialized capitalism, police brutality, philanthropic competition culture, and lack of healing support.

I want us to ask who benefits from our hopelessness, and to deny our oppressors the satisfaction of getting to see our pain. I want them to wonder how we foment such consistent and deep solidarity and unlearning. I want our infiltrators to be astounded into their own transformations, having failed to tear us apart.

We must learn to do this before there is no one left to call out, or call we, or call us.

I say “we” and “our” intentionally here. I’m not above this behavior. I laugh at the memes, I like the apoplectic statuses, the rants with no named target that very clearly critique a specific person. I’ve been examining this—why I can get caught up in a mob on the Internet in a way I rarely do in life (the positive mob mentality I participate in for, say, Beyoncé or Björk feels quite different, though I know there is something in there about belonging…eh, next book). I have noticed that at the most basic level, I feel better about myself because I’m on the right side of history…or at least the news cycle.

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 call it “transformative justice” when we’re throwing knives and insults, exposing each other’s worst mistakes, reducing each other to moments of failure. We call it “holding each other accountable.”