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

by Adrienne Maree Brown

These teachers also helped me see the limitations of restorative justice—that it often meant restoring conditions that were fundamentally harmful and unequal, unjust. 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.

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.

I want to bring our attention to what generates healing for those survivors who receive and those who cause harm…and the majority, who do both.

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.

In the longest term vision I can see, when we, made of the same miraculous material and temporary limitations as the systems we are born into, inevitably disagree, or cause harm, we will respond not with rejection, exile, or public shaming, but with clear naming of harm; education around intention, impact, and pattern breaking; satisfying apologies and consequences; new agreements and trustworthy boundaries; and lifelong healing resources for all involved.

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.

When we aren’t mindful about principled struggle, we can end up caught in the kind of reductionist group-think that proliferates online but is rooted in, and heightens, our offline discomfort with gener...

Critique doesn’t need resolution but acceptance and discernment—you won’t please everyone, take what can grow you and keep it moving. Critiques are part of how we sharpen each other.

Movements are often tense with the contradiction between what we believe and are fighting for and what we feel we must practice to navigate current conditions.

Another contradiction is to be an abolitionist but call for the arrest of those who hurt us. Contradictions can be handled by widening our perspective, acknowledging that these oppositional truths co-exist.

I think everyone chooses each day to move towards life or away from it, though some don’t realize that they are making the choice. Capitalism makes it hard to see your own direction.

What would it be like to organize and apply pressure to a government committed to adapting such that the majority of its citizens stay alive, rather than the stubbornness to stay the same?

Under our blustering exceptional patriotism, our nation has a tendency towards its own destruction, a doubt of its right to exist, which is rooted in our foundation. It’s a shame-filled foundation. Can we heal all the way down to the roots of this nation, especially if it’s the only way we will want to go on?

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.

Supremacy is our ongoing pandemic. It partners with every other sickness to tear us from life, or from lives worth living.

As movements trying to break cycles of harm and abuse, how do we hold survivors and those who cause harm as community members once they speak up?

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.

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 tools of swift and predatory justice feel good to use, familiar, groove in the hand easily from repeated use and training, briefly satisfying. But these tools are often blunt and senseless. Unless we have an analysis of abolition and dismantling systems of oppression, we will not realize what’s in our hands, we will never put the predator’s tools down and figure out what our tools are and can be.

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.

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.

We are better than…someone. We might experience supremacy due to race, citizenship, gender, class, ableism, age, access, fame, or other areas where we feel justified to cause harm without consequence. Sometimes we don’t even realize we have caused harm, because supremacy is a numbing and narrowing disease.

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.

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

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. Meanwhile, the conflicts are unresolved, and/or harm continues.

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.

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

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. But lately, as the attacks grow faster and more vicious, I wonder: 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?

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.”

By making these public attacks on each other, we are engaging in the same disposability politics of capitalism and the prison industrial complex that we purport to be against while feeding into state surveillance tactics that are monitoring how we are tearing each other down.

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.

Demonizing is more efficient than relinquishing our world views, which is why we have slavery, holocausts, lynchings, and witch trials in our short human history.

If the only thing I can learn from a situation is that some humans do bad things, it’s a waste of my precious time—I already know that. What I want to know is: What can this teach me/us about how to improve our humanity? What can we learn? In every situation there are lessons that lead to transformation.

in the age of social media, where we can make our pain viral before we’ve even had a chance to feel it. Often we are well down a path of public shaming and punishment before we have any facts about what’s happening. That’s true of mainstream takedowns, and it’s true of interpersonal grievances.

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.

Canceling is punishment, and punishment doesn’t stop the cycle of harm, not long term. Cancelation may even be counter-abolitionist… Instead of prison bars we place each other in an overflowing box of untouchables—often with no trial—and strip us of past and future, of the complexity of being gifted and troubled, brilliant and broken. We will set down this punitive measure and pick each other up, leaving no traumatized person behind. We will not cancel us. But we must earn our place on this earth.