We Will Not Cancel Us Quotes

“Movements tend to become the practice ground for what we are healing towards, co-creating. Movements are responsible for embodying what we are inviting our people into. We need the people within our movements, all socialized into and by unjust systems, to be on liberators paths. Not already free, but practicing freedom every day. 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 struggles in ourselves and our communities.”
― adrienne maree brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

“I will not be perfect, I will keep learning. I will also not be silent, I will keep learning.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

“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.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

“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.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

“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.”
― adrienne maree brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

“The call outs generally share one side of what’s happened and then call for immediate consequences. And within a day, the call out is everywhere, the cycle of blame and shame activated, and whoever was called out has begun being publicly punished. Sometimes, there are consequences—loss of job, community, reputation, platform. Sometimes there is just derision, and calls for disappearance. The details of the offense blur or compound as others add their own opinions and experiences to the story.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

“I have learned the difference between intolerable feelings and intolerable conditions.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

“While all harms are not equal, even the most heinous require a way home.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

“Accountability isn’t punishment, though it is frequently wielded as such.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

“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.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

“destroying a person doesn’t destroy all of the systems that allow harmful people to do harm”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

“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?”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

“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.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

“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.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

“Online, we perform solidarity for strangers rather than engaging in hard conversations with comrades.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

“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.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

“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.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

“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.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

“Instant judgment and punishment are practices of power over others.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

“Right now, call outs are being used not just as a necessary consequence for those wielding power to cause harm or enact abuse, but to shame and humiliate people in the wake of misunderstandings, contradictions, conflicts, and mistakes.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

“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.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

“the fractal nature of our sacred design teaches us that our smallest choices today will become our next norms.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

“Regardless of what is happening, my role is the same—how do we move forward, given the presence of this breakdown?”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

“I have felt a punitive tendency root and flourish within our movements. I have felt us losing our capacity to distinguish between comrade and opponent, losing our capacity to generate belonging.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

“Abolitionists know that the implications of our visions touch everything--everything must change, including us.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

“I want us to do better. I want to feel like we are responsible for each other’s transformation. Not the transformation from vibrant flawed humans to bits of ash, but rather the transformation from broken people and communities to whole ones.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

“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 set boundaries that don’t require the disappearance of other survivors. 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.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

“Having quickly identified who I blamed, I was less able to feel any agency in myself. I froze and delayed and froze until I was overwhelmed.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

“My dear friend Malkia Devich Cyril teaches me that there is the fear intended to save your life, versus fear intended to end it. What I mean by discernment is the set of noticings, fears, wisdoms, deductions, and gut tremblings that want to save, or even just improve, my life, versus the fear that makes me unable to do anything, that makes me unable to draw on my life force to take action.
Do I think I am being discerning when I am actually frozen in place, scared to change?
Am I too scared of standing out from the crowd to pause and discern right action?”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

“The hopeful news is that we have the teachers… But will we prioritize learning?”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice