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

by Adrienne Maree Brown

Another dynamic occurs when people begin to see you as a teacher—you have to be more careful with your questions, with your emotional explorations…they might emerge from you as inquiry and land with another as gospel.

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.

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.

In this sanctuary we feel our victory, where winning means a mass and intimate healing. Where winning isn’t measured by anyone else’s loss, but by breaking cycles of abuse, harm, assault, and systemic oppression.

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.

I will not be perfect, I will keep learning. I will also not be silent, I will keep learning.

My dear friend Malkia Devich Cyril teaches me that there is the fear intended to save your life, versus fear intended to end it.

As soon as I acknowledged I was afraid I was able to move into discernment.

We are afraid of being hurt, afraid because we have been hurt, afraid because we have caused hurt, afraid because we live in a world that wants to hurt us whether we have hurt others or not, just based on who we are, on any otherness from some long-ago determined norm.

We are afraid, and we think it will assuage our fears and make us safer if we can clarify an enemy, a someone outside of ourselves who is to blame, who is guilty, who is the origin of harm. Can we acknowledge that trauma and conflict can distort our perspective of responsibility and blame in ways that make it difficult to see the roots of the harm?

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.

The first and biggest thing is that call outs never feel powerful to me as a move to resolve conflict, especially when that conflict is unveiled without the consent of both or all parties in the dispute. Call outs don’t work for addressing misunderstandings, issuing critiques, or resolving contradiction.

I believe we have a responsibility to be in principled struggle and transformative justice—to seek consequences in a context of ancestral, generational, and present-day trauma, to unlearn the pleasure of punishing each other with public humiliation and shame.

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.

To expect a coherent authentic apology from someone who has been forcibly removed from power or credibility feels like a set up.

The truth about sexual assault and rape and patriarchy and white supremacy and other abuses of power is that we are swimming in them, in a society that has long normalized them, and that they often play out intimately.

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 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.

“Instead of asking whether anyone should be locked up or go free, why don’t we think about why we solve problems by repeating the kind of behavior that brought us the problem in the first place?” —Ruth Wilson Gilmore

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.

I want us to see the difference between the human and the disease, to see what we are afraid of, in others and in ourselves, and discern a path that actually addresses the root of our justified fears.

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.

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?

what happens more often is that people step back, move through their shame, leave movement, or double down and return with even more egregious acts of flagrant harm and/or unprincipled struggle methods.

I don’t find it satisfying, and I don’t think it is transformative to publicly call people out for instant consequences with no attempt at a conversation, mediation, boundary setting, or community accountability (which often happens in a supported process with a limited number of known participants).

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 ge...

Online, we perform solidarity for strangers rather than engaging in hard conversations with comrades.

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.

We need the people within our movements, all socialized into and by unjust systems, to be on liberation paths.

Not already beyond harm, but accountable for doing our individual and internal work to end harm and engage in generative conflict, which includes actively working to gain awareness of the ways we can and have harmed each other, where we have significant political differences, and where we can end cycles of harm and unprincipled struggle in ourselves and our communities.

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 mus...

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...

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 see ourselves as larger than just individuals randomly pinging around in a world that will never care for us.

I want us to look at each other with the eyes of interdependence, such that when someone causes harm, we find the gentle parent inside of us who can use a voice of accountability, while also bringing curiosity—“Why did you cause harm? Do you know? Do you know other options? Apologize.”

That we can act towards accountability with the touch of love. That when someone falls behind, we can use a parent’s voice of discipline, while also picking them up and carrying them for a while if needed.

I want our movement to feel like a vibrant, accountable space where causing harm does not mean you are excluded immediately and eternally from healing, justice, community, or belonging.

I want us to ask who benefits from our hopelessness, and to deny our oppressors the satisfaction of getting to see our pain.

In cases of conflict, what resolution is possible? What are the visible and invisible power dynamics? Do I have the necessary information to form an opinion? Do I have the time to seek understanding?

Did a conversation/process already happen? Is a conversation/process possible?

What will end the cycle of harm here? What will help us find a way forward?

In most cases, very complex realities get watered down into one flawed aspect of these people’s personalities, or one mistake or misunderstanding. A mob mentality takes over then, an evisceration of character that is punitive, traumatizing, and isolating.

is this what we’re here for? To cultivate a fear-based adherence to reductive common values? What can this lead to in an imperfect world full of sloppy, complex humans? Is it possible we will call each other out until there’s no one left beside us?

I have also had experiences where I absolutely wanted to take someone down, expose them as a liar, cheater, manipulator, assailant. In each of these situations, time, conversation, and vulnerability have created other possibilities, and I have ended up glad that I didn’t go that route, which is generally so short-term in its impact.

These takedowns make it seem as if massive problems are determined at an individual level, as if these individuals set a course as children to become abusers, misogynists, racists, liars.

How do I hold a systemic analysis and approach when each system I am critical of is peopled, in part, by the same flawed and complex individuals that I love?

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 o...