Ayana Young Hey For The Wild community, Ayana here. Welcome to the first episode of our new book study series, Earthly Reads, where we'll learn alongside some of our most beloved authors. After listening to this shorter conversation, head over to forthewild.world/bookstudy to learn more and to purchase access to the full course. We'll be offering significantly more content and access to live recorded conversations with the authors on our website. We hope to see you there.

adrienne maree brown  Like right now, we're in all of these conundrums that are about our relationship to the Earth, and there's something we truly have to figure out. We have to choose this Earth, and we haven't done so yet. Some of us do so. And I think one of the big lessons of my adult life is it doesn't work if only some of us choose to live here, if only some of us choose to love this place. We have to reach a tipping point of people who really want to be here on this Earth. 

Ayana Young  Welcome to For The Wild. I'm Ayana Young. Today we're talking with adrienne maree brown, author of Loving Corrections. Oh, adrienne, it has been a minute. Thanks for coming back on For The Wild for so many years now.

adrienne maree brown Well, thank you, sweetie. It's wonderful. I love the conversations we get to have here. 

Ayana Young  Me too. They have definitely shaped me and tumbled me over the years. And just trying to make sense of this, I want to say crazy world, but that just seems a little silly to say. I don't know. It's an intense place to be,

adrienne maree brown  I think,of it is like an unfurling world or an unraveling world, like there's a lot of systems that have been woven really, really tightly around our imaginations and our hearts that are now crumbling and unraveling, and we're having to figure out who we are again.

Ayana Young  Yeah, the unfurling world. I'm gonna note that one. Well, I am so grateful and excited for your new book Loving Corrections, and I found it really profoundly relevant to so much of what I've been thinking through and to what I feel like the world really needs right now, for those of us who are in this quandary consciously.

adrienne maree brown   Yeah.

Ayana Young  You know, maybe unlike other interviews we've done, I really want to go slowly and deeply into the text if you're open to doing that with me today?

adrienne maree brown  Of course I am!

Ayana Young  Okay, cool, great. So maybe as we start, I just want to give you some space to talk about how the book is sitting for you right now and what types of conversations you hope it prompts. 

adrienne maree brown  Well, you know, I just...I don't know if you know this, but I just came off of a Southern Regional driving book tour, so I've gotten to be in a lot of gorgeous conversations about the book, and what I'm finding is it's giving me room to talk about the things that matter to me right now and to talk about the things that, you know, have been breaking my heart. You know, I have a tender heart, and a lot touches me and moves me. But I'm really excited about it, because I think that what I've noticed is that people are really hungry to be having a different kind of conversation, but feel like they don't know how. And I'm like, these are not mysterious things. There's a long history of us having difficult conversations as humans, of having differences and divergent opinions and having to make community with each other. And in some ways, this is a course correction and a reminder, you know. 

Let me just remind you that we actually don't have to go backwards, we know some things. And we have worked hard to understand and build shared analysis and build shared practice around being with each other. And then we've been in an onslaught of cruelty — a cruel minded politics, a small politics, you know? Confrontational for no reason. You know? Confrontational where we need collaboration. You know, that's been happening and I think if we're not careful, we fall right into those conversational patterns and lose sense of our values. So it's been really beautiful to get to have these conversations with people like, Oh, wait, that's not who we are. We actually care about this, you know. And we don't have to surrender our care of each other in this time. That's not...I don't think, going to help us get where we're trying to go. So I've been loving the conversations, and I'm loving sitting with the book. It feels very practical and covers a lot more ground than I've necessarily gotten to cover in one book before. So yeah, I'm really enjoying it. 

Ayana Young  Thank you for that. I like the idea of collaborative rather than confrontational, and I notice in my own organizing work in rural Alaska for the last few years. There's actually so much that people, myself included, in that 'we.' And 'we' is a hard word to use a lot, but I've noticed that there's actually so much more in common with those who I thought were the quote opposite of who I was. And when the space opens up to move out of the confrontation and into the collaborative, the love is there. The sparkling eyes are there, looking back at you, excited about the thing that you love. And so I've really been noticing that in my own life.

And I'm just thinking about the language of your book, and I'm really intrigued by quote "loving corrections." And I just want to dive more into a quote you write in the introduction to the book, where you say, "Ideas that are oppositional to my survival, ideas I have come to overtly disagree with as I have developed my own politic have still shaped me and are rooted into me. Only loving corrections have helped me become intentional about who and how I want to be and grow." So I would just love to hear more about this concept of disagreement and maybe about how we come to know about ourselves through interaction with the other.

adrienne maree brown  Yeah. I mean, I think that, like many people, I sometimes when I come across something that I'm like, Oh, that's ridiculous. My instinct is to completely dismiss it. My instinct is to say that's ignorant, that's dumb, so much so that I'll be like no one could even possibly believe that, and so I won't engage it seriously as something to wrap my mind around. And instead of engaging and staying in relationship, I just let myself drift away from it. What I think is happening right now is we're living in a country that a lot of people have drifted away from each other or pushed each other away, built fences, built walls between each other. So these ideas, like white supremacy, like patriarchy, things that I was politicized by people who cared about me to understand that those ideas didn't go with my survival, didn't go with my sense of self. But those ideas have taken hold, again, of a new generation of people, and we haven't been contending, I don't think in the way we need to. We're not contending as if we want to be in relationship with each other and have a future together. 

 Again, it's satisfying, you know, just be like, What's wrong with you for still being a white supremacist? You know, what's wrong with you for that? Instead of saying what's wrong with the world? What systems are in place? What desperation is in place that has allowed this to become such a loud, central way that people are trying to build community with each other? Because underneath it all, that's still what's happening is people are looking for belonging and looking for someone who will say, "The way you are is okay." 

In my own world, I notice, where do power dynamics show up? Where is my patriarchy? Where is my power over? Where is my capitalism? You know, for me, it shows up as this sense of needing to be in comparison or competition with others. I'm like, that's not my true nature, and that's not how I truly feel about most of the people I'm in relationship with, but it can still show up. And I think one of the things that happens under pressure is that those ideas, they kind of hook onto behaviors, and one of the behaviors is moving towards antagonism and division and attack. At the moment we most need to reach out and grab each other's hands and deepen the relationship and deepen understanding. On a large scale, it's not just rejecting the ideas. That's part of why I wanted to show models of what it looks like in relationship in the book because it's not just having idea supremacy. It's actually saying the ideas are tied to practices and tied to culture that we're all swimming in and all embedded in. And if we want to contend with these ideas, we have to not just point our fingers at people who are living the most loudly, but we have to also eradicate them as practices we're engaging in.

Ayana Young  Yeah, I've really seen myself in the other in the last few years, and it's been a challenging process. I think I won't go too far into this story, but for those listeners who know I've been an anti old growth logging activist for years and have been fighting the good fight, and anti mining activist on salmon habitat anyway. So I'm getting to know this logger, and he's in my house, and, you know, I'm kind of feeling all sorts of feelings about this interaction, and he's pointing out the old growth beams that hold up my little cabin. And, I am wanting to feel defensive and, Well, it wasn't me who cut those trees and it wasn't me who built the cabin, and you know, every way I could to not be with him in that truth, and that has worked me like a river stone for a long time. And so seeing myself in the other in all sorts of ways, even the the most disgusting, is too strong of a word, maybe. But even, like, No, I'm definitely not that!

adrienne maree brown  Yes, that's right.

Ayana Young  You know, just Oof, like, No, no, no. And then when I came to the Yes, I am in my own ways, and can I still love myself and forgive myself and move through that and come to some other form. Not to say I can escape it because I can't escape the world, this one reality that we're inhabiting, but I can change. Maybe not, you know the big, the big sea change of...but maybe we'll get into the big sea change. But, yeah...There's another quote—

adrienne maree brown  Before you jump to another quote, there's something I want to say about that experience you just shared with your logger companion, which is, you know....One of the things about these ideas, to me is that they're the water that we're swimming in. And so one of the things that people try to do. And there's like, How can you say something like you're also complicit, you're also participating in the same system? And it's like, exactly: it's the water we're swimming in. Part of why I stay in relationship with people that I might otherwise not want to be in relationship with is because I can't get away from these ideas simply by moving away from those people because they're all around me. It's the structure that we're in. So my liberation is then tied up with those who I would identify as other, because those are the ones who are gonna... It's like we all have to get free together. We all have to get as many of us to tip the scale away from causing that harm as possible, because it's the water we're swimming in.

Ayana Young  HmmmMmmm.

adrienne maree brown  Right? And so if someone looks at me and says, "You're wet." I'm like, "Yeah, I'm also in the same water." And that's part of why it matters to me. That's part of why it's urgent. You know, these things are urgent to me because I'm like, I can't get out of the world of white supremacy by myself. I had to get out of it because all of us, or as many of us as possible, decide we're all gonna set down these practices of supremacy and pick up something else.

Ayana Young  HmmmMmmm. Yeah, I'm with you. I'm in that water. 

[Musical break]  

Ayana Young  This quote that I want to read now. It continues on this flow. Quote, "What does it mean to intentionally decide to stay in relationship with humanity, to not count anyone out based on identity? What if I didn't take it all personally, what if I saw the patterns that most offended me as instigation for my own growth? What if these patterns helped me to set better boundaries and increase my own self adoration? What if I wanted to maximize my potential to be in right relationship with everyone I meet?" End quote. I want to hear more about this focus on relationality and how we can turn to love when confronted with opposition as a practice?

adrienne maree brown  I went through a long period of study of somatics, and something included in that is Aikido. Aikido is one of the fundamental practices inside of the lineage that I learned, and part of it is always figuring out, how do I harness the energy that's coming at me so I can let it be even more powerful as a part of me, rather than moving up against it? And that's part of what's happening for me in these moments where I'm like, Oh, something is coming up that I feel opposition to, or that is identifying itself as being in opposition to me. How could I harness this energy to be a part of my liberation? Because I know moving against it...You know, in most of the situations I've been in in my adult life, in most of the struggles I've been in in my adult life, we are in movement.We have less resources. We have, like, material resources, which means we have less time, which means we have less people. Often we can't afford to just buy a ton of folks who are going to show up and do this work. So that means I have to be really strategic about my own energy and the energy of the people that I'm working with, and that harnessing it becomes liberatory. It's like, Oh, I can harness this for my own work. This sense of like, I don't want the world to have white supremacy, great. How do I eradicate that in myself? How do I learn and unlearn? What do I need to learn and unlearn? So I think that's maybe the first piece of it. 

I think the second piece of it, which feels tender to me, is that often the opposition is holding up the mirror of something that is really true and deep in us. And part of why we go so hard against it is that we're like, I don't want to be a part of this deep wound. You know, I look at what we're living in right now, how we treat the earth, how we treat each other, I'm like, we're living on open wounds. The wound...You know, I live in the US. It's just like the way this country was created, the country this country was founded...it's a terrible wound, and it's never been healed, it's never been accounted for, and we keep moving forward and keep moving forward and just building on top of it. So when I come up against this opposition, I'm like, Okay, if I can't get the white supremacist in front of me to heal, how do I begin to heal that wound? Because I know the wound is still there, and I know it's festering. I know it needs healing, and that takes a different kind of work.

It's really different to point at someone else's behavior, their wounds, their shortcomings. It's very different to point than it is to receive, to receive feedback, to ask for feedback, to consider that these things, these wounds, are also festering in us. But it also makes me hopeful because I'm like, I can't control what anyone else does. You know? I can absolutely change and transform what I do. And I think that's part of what we're here to do, is to be agitating each other and helping each other grow, helping each other learn to love, helping each other learn to change.

Ayana Young  Yeah, I want to talk more about that idea of pointing the finger. Throughout the book, you make a key distinction between loving corrections and judgment. And I think this is really important. And for instance, in "Writing Imagination: Celebrating Ursula and her Loving Corrections," you write, "I was thinking about this as an adjacent problem for social justice workers. We are so great at judgment. We are great at coming up with the detailed plans for how everyone else needs to change, what society needs to do, how everyone else is a mess, flawed, failing. We love to tell people about themselves, invite them to be told. And I am naming this tendency with love because in this political moment, even for optimists, it can seem that there's not a lot of good going on. Yet it's not enough to spend the time listing out how our opposition is horrible, deplorable. We've done that. How do we instead start to take on the responsibility of calling things out in real time as they happen, naming the society we want, flexing the muscle of imagination and applying it to everything we practice?" 

I just love that you bring this up because I really feel this, this crossroads that I think justice movements are at, and I want to really hear you flush out the difference between loving corrections and the type of judgment you're describing here a bit more. 

adrienne maree brown  Yeah, so I think to go there, I want to go back a little bit and say...But part of where I started to be politicized, to learn, by politicized, I mean just to learn about the world as it is, you know, like, what is, what is the history of the world? How did it come to be this way? As I was learning those things? 

One of the first places I landed was at something called the Harm Reduction Coalition in New York, and it was working with people who are active drug users, sometimes sex workers and other folks, but most of the learning that I was doing was around active drug users, and this idea that judging people and shaming people and humiliating people and thinking that you can control other people is not what actually helps people navigate their addiction. Trusting them to find within themselves the life that they want to live, the quality of life that they want to have, and then supporting them to move towards it: that's what actually does it. And you have to honor the sovereignty in someone but offer them options. You know, offer them safety. Offer them possibilities for their own liberation. So that's what's flowing into my non judgment practice. 

I've been in it for a long time now, but I've seen it in my own life that I'm like, Oh, what if I come at someone, and my stance is I am so much better than you, and I'm so much smarter than you, and I have so much more to offer the world than you do. And in other ways, just, you know, downplaying their humanity and their miraculousness, it doesn't help them get any freer, and it doesn't help me get any freer. It doesn't help us get any closer. It has helped us build better community so...

And you know, I'm a pragmatic person, if something works, I will usually try to figure out a way to work with it, but judgment doesn't actually work as a tool for transformation. So if you set it down, then all of a sudden you have to find other options, and you have to see what are the other possibilities. And so I look at myself. I love reading about Octavia. I love reading about Ursula. I love reading about Audre Lorde. I love reading about James Baldwin. Something that these writers that I look up to, these thinkers and and and visionaries that I look up to, something they have in common is that they were willing to look back at themselves, to consider where they might have been wrong, to consider where they wanted to change, and what they wanted to ask other people to join them in changing. And so then you come to discernment. 

 Discernment is, to me, this thing that is so different from judgment, but really, really helpful, which is finding out what is right for me? What is my work? What is my capacity to come into that work? And when you're in a relationship with someone where you're like, I see something in you that's really hurting me. That's a different place to start the conversation. Rather than I'm judging you, you're a lesser person. It's a different thing to sit down with someone and say, "There's something that is happening between us that's pulling us apart. It's keeping us from each other." 

One are the risks of this, or one of the maybe realities, is just a better way to say it, is that you might lose people. And when we're judging people, you know we're losing them anyway, whether they act lost or not because sometimes people will stay around those who are judging them, but they'll be withdrawn or withholding actual intimacy withholding actual relationship. I think there's so many formations that I look at where there's a lot of lonely people in and around each other with no clue about how to talk with each other because they don't know how to discern and they don't know how to fight. You know, they don't know how to just have an argument, hold a political difference. 

Taking the judgment out of it allows for a cleaner fight. it's also, again, I'll keep coming back to this piece around pointing to where the harm is actually coming from. When we act like the harm is coming from that person. That they just woke up one day, and it's like, I hate Black people. Or I just woke up one day and, I hate the Earth. Like that buries so much of the truth of how we end up in these situations, and what we want to do is actually come into accountability with how we end up in the situation so we can actually change them. So once judgments out of the way, I feel like I'm able to clear my mind and see what's actually happening.

Ayana Young  Yeah, I used to think that shame and judgment were good tools. And maybe because of the way that I grew up, and so I would actually inflict it on myself before I was an activist, but wanted to see the truth of the world and felt it before I started understanding it more intellectually, definitely in my earlier activist life. I remember even my...And sorry for those who came to these talks, but I was really, gosh, I just love to shame humanity and myself in that like there was a lot of hatred, and I think I felt very righteous in that shame and hatred. We quote, “deserved it.” I deserved it. Yeah, look at how horrible we are. I am. We are inflicting ecocide. We're killing ourselves. We're killing each other. We're killing everything we love. Look at us, just like really. 

I actually thought that was accountability. I thought if we could truly see how deplorable we were we would have to change because we wouldn't be able to stand it. We'd feel so bad that we would even consider doing things that killed whales. That we would just say, "I can't do this anymore,” and we would get up and completely change.

But obviously realized over many years that it didn't change me or anyone, and it actually, I think, really halted change and created more wounds on the wounds on the wounds on the wounds that you know you were referring to. And so, yeah, I just feel very connected to this thread. Even with my own family, thinking if I just shamed them, then they would change. These people are close to me, and I could really get to them, you know?

adrienne maree brown  Yeah, I can shame them real good.

Ayana Young  Yeah, I could shame them real good. I think I'm sitting with this word ‘accountability’ that you brought up. I almost was scared when you said that word. Maybe it was my addiction self that heard accountability and almost got defensive. Is this even possible without shame, without judgment, even the invitation of love? Maybe the fear came up for me because it's like, Could I? Could we really surrender the things that we hold so tightly? 

adrienne maree brown  Yeah. Well, you know, a few things I want to say here. One is that for many of us, we are still living inside of or recovering from being part of organized religion spaces where correction and and telling someone that something they did wasn't right or wasn't okay was in direct relationship to their their sense of of being worthy of God, worthy of something holy, worthy of aliveness, worthy of belonging to a divine entity, a divine force, and that they were dirty, that they were doing things that God would find shameful. I want to say that because on one level, for a lot of people, what comes up when I start having these conversations, whether they realize it or not, is that they're up against the corrective practices of organized religion and of ultimate authorities. 

And I think there's something really beautiful about any community space that's like, hey, we hold on to each other and we help each other figure out how to be human together. But I think there's something really painful about religious practices of accountability that have been punitive and that have made people feel fundamentally bad, fundamentally unlovable, fundamentally not worthy of the gift of of life or community, you know, which is what it is when you cancel someone right? When you push someone out. And we start that very early, like, from a very young age where, like, if you did something bad, and again, for a lot of people in a lot of cultures, school and church were very fused, right? Being in school being in relationship to authority, had a religiosity to it. It had a holiness to it, like you listen to what this person says because they are imbued with some aspect of power that feels almost divine in its nature. So I want to name that because I think what happens for us is then, when we are like, Oh, I get a chance to shift from being the person being held accountable to the person holding accountability, then it feels like, Oh, that's power. Power is you get to be the one who tear someone's life apart if you need to, but you hold them accountable. 

And I think the other piece, and when you said it felt kind of scary...I think this is a scary conversation. What I found in the book tour experience was a lot of people just being like, this is scary. It's scary to even imagine accountability that's not punitive, that's not out to destroy. And that also makes sense. We live in a punitive justice world. We live in a world where, you know, when you were a kid, you would get spanked or hit or stuck in time out. And then you went to school, and in school, you had a different kind of experience of accountability, where you might get put to detention or put or suspended, or, you know, like, it's all punitive, and it's all a certain kind of punitive where you're you're being removed from community because of the way you function. 

And then as adults, we have now found more and more ways to do that faster and faster. So I just want to name that like the fear around it is really... It's grounded in ancient practice is grounded in modern practice is grounded in like, what our practice has been in terms of of how accountability is happening on the internet. It's in our organizations. There's so much punitive disappearance energy, and so then to step in and be like, I'm going to try this out. I'm going to try to be accountable for myself, for my life, and for how I'm moving with community. You're up against a lot, you know, up against a lot of practice and up against a lot of history that says that when you do this, it's going to really fundamentally destroy some part of you. 

So compassion, right, is to me the way I respond to systems like that, of moments of noticing, Oh, this is, this is much older than me. The reason I feel scared to be accountable is much older than me. At the same time, because we do social justice work because we care about people, we know that, like, the accountability is actually needed. It's not really negotiable. We have to figure it out, because we have to be able to change. And for me, accounting for is just the first step of something. You know, being able I can account; I can be accountable for what I've done. That's the first step, is that you would acknowledge that that's a possibility, and then, and then you actually get to practice it right? And what I'm hoping is that people read this book and they're like, Oh, I can understand how I could account for this in my own life and in my own relationships, and I can see how I don't have to be destroyed in order to grow, in order to have community, in order to belong. I don't have to destroy myself. I don't have to let myself be destroyed and I have to destroy anyone else. That's where we want to be, right? I can actually be in a relationship where I'm seen as someone who's constantly changing, and I change.

[Musical break]  

Jackson Kroopf  Thank you for listening to the first episode of For The Wild book slow study, Earthly Reads, featuring adrienne maree brown, Tricia Hersey, Marcia Bjornerud, Celine Semaan, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Prentis Hemphill. To join the book club, where you can engage directly with the authors, visit forthewild.world/bookstudy. 

The music for this series is from the compilation Staying: Leaving Records Aid to Artists Impacted by the Los Angeles Wildfires. The artists featured in this episode are M.A. Tiesenga, Hundred Waters, Alia Mohamad and Arushi Jain. 

For The Wild is made by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Julia Jackson and Jackson Kroopf. Thanks for listening.