Emily Race-Newmark: [00:00:00] Welcome to This Is How We Care, a podcast where we look at what it means to embody care.

Not as an individual practice, but a collective one and to see what kind of world emerges from this place. Thank you for being here. I am your host, Emily Race.

Today we are joined by adrienne maree brown. 

adrienne maree brown: How do we have systems that allow us to care for each other and be cared for?" I think then that produces very different systems. And I'm in that practice right now in my own life of building those systems organizationally and interpersonally.

Emily Race-Newmark: Informed by 25 years of movement facilitation, somatics, Octavia E. Butler scholarship, and her work as a doula, adrienne has nurtured Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, Radical Imagination, and Transformative Justice as ideas and practices for transformation.

She's the author and editor of several published texts, co generator of a tarot deck and a developing musical ritual.

adrienne maree brown: One of the ways [00:01:00] that I got here is that I have parents who believe in me as a creative being. When I was very, very, very young, before I could necessarily make coherent sentences as soon as I was learning the alphabet, I was writing. I was trying to write things down. I was trying to tell stories on a page. My mom said that she was trying to get me the alphabet as quickly as possible because I wanted to communicate so much. 

There was a moment where I was like, I'm about to be a superstar. I'm about to be a singer. I'm about to do all this other stuff.

My dad was in the military and we got stationed to move to Germany when I was maybe 14. And the place we were going to move to had no choir. It had no performing arts program. There was a journalism program. And my mom was just like, "well, you're a writer, so you're going to be able to find your way here." 

Multiple times after that, every time I come up against an obstacle, my parents remind me that I'm a writer [00:02:00] and that that's there for me.

Who I am today in the world, I feel like I'm a gardener of big healing ideas that want to move into the world. And the way that I do my tending, my gardening, is with my pen. 

My job is to figure out, first of all, what is the seed? What is this that's been given to me? What is possible for what it could grow into? What are the other ideas that are nourishing to have in relationship to this idea? And then how do I make it accessible? How do I make this a community garden? How do I make this something that when people walk by they're like, "Oh, I understand that I can eat from this place, and I feel moved to tend this place. Or I can carry some of the seeds from this place back to where I call home, or to whatever project I call home or whatever community I call home." 

That's what I do, but it's all happening through that gift of writing. And that gift was not just given to me, but it was cultivated by the people who I was [00:03:00] given to.

Emily Race-Newmark: Mhmm. So beautiful. I have love for your parents in this moment without knowing them. 

adrienne maree brown: They're pretty awesome.

Emily Race-Newmark: I was first introduced to adrienne maree brown in a very serendipitous way. I was sitting at a communal table at a restaurant in San Francisco when I overheard the woman next to me talking about the organizational change work that she does for companies.

We ended up striking up a conversation. Fast forward a couple months, and she was down in L. A. for work, so we met up for a coffee. She had a copy of the book with her called "Emergent Strategy, Shaping Change, Shaping Worlds", by adrienne maree brown.

I had never heard of this book, or adrienne's work before, but this new friend of mine insisted that I get a copy, that it was life changing, especially for anyone who was in the facilitation space, or who cared about making the world a better place.

To say that this book became my Bible is kind of an understatement. I'm pretty sure I've underlined every single page within it. I've traveled with it to many, many states and many, many phases of my life, because so many of [00:04:00] the poems, quotes, messages and metaphors were so resonant with me.

If you're not familiar with the book, let me give you a flavor. At the beginning, there's a chapter called "Principles of Emergent Strategy", where adrienne lists out the core principles that have emerged and guided her in learning and using this idea in the world. 

For example: 

"Small is good, small is all. The large is a reflection of the small." 

Or, " There is a conversation in the room that only these people at this moment can have. Find it." I literally repeat this sentence to myself all of the time.. 

Or, "Trust the people. If you trust the people, they become trustworthy." I think this is a great one for parents as well. 

And "Move at the speed of trust. Focus on critical connections more than critical mass. Build the resilience by building the relationships."

There's a few more, which I'll leave it to you to read if you haven't already picked up a copy. And of course, we'll get into some of these topics with adrienne in our conversation today.

[00:05:00] Since initially discovering this book, I have of course continued to follow adrienne's work, I devoured "We Will Not Cancel Us", and "Pleasure Activisim" in a similar fashion.

When I got the confirmation that adrienne was willing to be on the show, it felt like a true moment of alignment. One where my work in the world was really lining up with those whose work in whose worlds I've admired I've resonated with and I've learned so much from.

All of my personal story aside, I'm really excited to share this conversation with you all because through adrienne's work, the way that she weaves words and therefore worlds, she has the ability to paint this picture of what could be, in ways that both feel familiar and possible, even in the midst of what may feel seemingly impossible.

Whether you're already familiar with adrienne's work or not, I hope that this conversation brings some nourishing new perspectives to you and your role in change making. 

This conversation was originally recorded in September of 2023.

I would love for you to speak about and [00:06:00] define Emergent Strategy, both from a lens of: if someone never heard of that before, how would you talk about that? And also for those who are familiar, what else is there to discover? 

adrienne maree brown: The fundamental understanding of Emergent Strategy is how do we as human beings get in right relationship with change? Since it is the organizing principle of all of existence. That everything that exists is constantly changing, is going to change. And if we are mindful about that, then we get to shape that change.

 Big picture. That's what Emergent Strategy is. 

In terms of breaking it down. The word emergence, the definition that I use comes from Nick Gobulinski, and his emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of relatively simple interactions. A bird flaps its wings. Multiple birds flap their wings in relationship to each other, and then all of a sudden we have this complex murmuration where birds are flapping their wings at a certain distance and proximity to each other to avoid predation. [00:07:00] And they are following the birds in the immediate circle around them. It's quite complex. And what gets produced in the sky, when you see a murmuration of starlings moving, that looks like magic. It looks like music. It looks like fluidity. It looks like blood moving through our body. It's so beautiful, but really it's these relatively simple interactions and protocols that allow for that.

To pull that into strategy for humans, we're often looking at strategy without an eye for change. We're looking to build institutions or build plans or build structures that we're going to make one way. We're going to make a five year plan. 

Part of what I was seeking when I was working on Emergent Strategy was: What would it look like to recognize the emergence and this constant changing and this unfolding from simple to complex, simple to complex? What would it look like to bring those cycles into how we think about changing the world and organizing with each other? And so that's what the book Emergent Strategy is exploring, and [00:08:00] all the different iterations of experimentation have been about.

Emily Race-Newmark: One thing that I found that it's so helpful in rooting us in this mindset of "Where can I enact change?" Or what power do I have?" When we're so used to this "power over" dynamic or this sense that it's like, oh, we can't do anything about the problems or the challenges of our time. And, this podcast is meant to serve a bit of a role in that idea too. It's like," Where can we begin?" And I love that there's the connection to nature of which we are a part of and is us. And this idea that these simple interactions, like you mentioned, are almost in our nature to gravitate towards. 

I also want to connect the dot to your background and present moment in activism. How would you actually define activism in your own words? What does that actually look like to you?

adrienne maree brown: I came up inside of the context of organizing. Which was, you have a political commitment of the vision of the world that you want to see. And you are moving into the world to recruit people to participate in helping build that vision. You're going door to door, [00:09:00] you're finding out what the needs of the community are, and building that vision with them. That's the school of thought I came in from. 

For me, activism was a sort of step back from that which was looking at the things in the world that need to change and saying, "I'm going to take different actions in the world." I might go out and do direct actions in the world. But I'm also going to use the space that I have as a human being, possibly social media spaces that I have, and other places; if I'm at a dinner table, I will use those as spaces to bring information and shed light on different possibilities for how the world can be. 

I often think of it as the organizers are all up in the meetings with each other, trying to wrestle and figure it out. And the activists are like, "Okay, now that you've figured some stuff out, my job is to help broadcast, that my job is to help get it louder, get it wider."

With Pleasure Activism, the text that I wrote, I was like, 'In some ways, a lot of the organizing for all of these things has been happening, and Audre Lorde has done a lot of the thinking about what this meant." 

How do we [00:10:00] become a broadcast system to people that says, "You actually deserve to reclaim your right to pleasure. Your pleasure is not a frivolous thing, but it's a measure of your freedom. Your oppression is directly linked to your idea that you're not allowed to feel good." And the things that make us feel good can actually be aligned with justice. And in fact, if we could make justice and liberation the most pleasurable activities we engage in as human beings, it would be a lot easier for us to be in a just liberated society. 

Emily Race-Newmark: It's really interesting to me to understand how each of the guests on the podcast would define the problem of our time. In this moment, what do you feel is the greatest challenge or problem of our time?

adrienne maree brown: I think the root of it is hyper individualism amongst humans, I guess maybe I'm like, the biggest problem of our time is humans. 

And within that, within like, why are humans such a problem? I think it's because we are a species that is actually meant to be [00:11:00] interdependent, but we have politicized ourselves to be hyper individualistic. And we have structured our economy and our political realms and everything else around this hyper individualism, right? So even the act of, "I'm going to go make the top secret vote that no one knows about, as opposed to sitting in community and reckoning with a conversation around what is the kind of leadership we need."  Just things like that.

I think that individualism means that we're not tapped into community. It reduces our empathy, and then it allows for things to happen like never ending war states. A constant investment in weapons. I'm just always like, "Huh, we think that we can just deploy weapons around the world and it's not gonna all come back 'cause we're completely interconnected."

So whether the response is in the form of acts of warfare that come back from smaller nations in the form of what we call terrorist acts or whether the response is, we have literally changed the quality of the water or the [00:12:00] quality of the air because of the things that we have put into it.

There's all these responses that come back. If you are sitting in an individualistic isolationist mindset, it's fine to deploy these weapons. If you're in an interdependent, interconnected mindset, you're like, "We have to think about all the impacts that are going to happen here, now, for us, and in the future."

Many indigenous places have that worldview of thinking seven generations back and seven generations ahead; interdependence is not even just a present moment thing. We don't want to isolate out the present moment and privilege that over every other time. But we want to say, "We're just responsible for stewarding a world that we hopefully hand off to others who steward the world do we hopefully hand it off." So I think that's the biggest problem.

Emily Race-Newmark: Emily here taking a quick break to remind you about our Patreon page. All contributions, no matter what the size, are a massive help to fund the production of this podcast. As a thank you, you'll receive extra bonus content from this interview, such as:

The role that our identity may play in pleasure and pleasure activism, 

[00:13:00] adrienne's answer to the question, do we all hold queerness?,

adrienne's distinctions between representation versus relationship, particularly important when looking at diversity, equity, inclusion initiatives across organizational work,

the evolution of community in a digital world and what we can learn from a younger generation,

 and lastly, how the Emergent Strategy Institute started, ended, and learnings from this experience.

Once again, we really thank you for being a part of this community, for sharing and supporting conversations like this one. Our Patreon page is a great way to support us to keep this podcast going. So thank you for considering, for checking it out and for hopefully joining as a member.

Now, enough from me, let's head back to adrienne as she shares her vision for the world. 

I'd love to spend time visioning with you because, again, I feel like that's a space that you also enjoy being in one of my favorite spaces in the sense of, if we can imagine what's possible, then we may be able to get there. But it's also a process of connecting to the here and now. And so, I like to go back and forth. 

If you had a magic wand and [00:14:00] just could create the perfect world in your mind, how would you sense that I guess with all senses? 

adrienne maree brown: I feel pretty blessed because I've been steeped in visionary community for my whole adult life. So I've been around Movement Generation and Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity and other organizations that really have informed this.

But for me, if I was painting with broad strokes, everyone would have a deep, deep, deep relationship to the land that they live in, the water that they're dependent on a relationship to, and to the other people who share that space with them. 

And there'd be a lot more migration, most likely, than we currently feel comfortable with. But it would be like, "Where are the fertile places? And how do we move in right relationship to that in the Earth?" Rather than being like, "We're going to stay in one place and we're going to milk it for all it's worth." That would be a big part of it.

 And then there would be a real importance on being a part of a community, part of your maturation. I'm of a community. I grew up in [00:15:00] a community. And then as I get older, it's not like I just leave that community and go by myself. I might leave that community and return to it, or I might leave that community. But the goal is to find another, but the norm for humans would be, "Yeah, I am in community. I am in relationship with others." 

It's something I wrestle with in myself because I'm so comfortable with immense, immense amounts of solitude. And I'm like, that's socialized, right? It's also great for me as a writer. I imagine that in this dreamy future I've got my nice little shed, and I've got my space to do my writing, and then I bring that writing and I get to read it every night to people and community and there's other people who are creating songs and they're singing them every night and other things like that. 

 This is a more recent feeling, but I think that I would do away with celebrity culture and I think I would try to figure out.

adrienne maree brown: Yeah. 

 If there was a way to just notice when someone does something on behalf of the whole and just be like, "Oh, that's amazing." If you're Abby Wambach and you're like, "I just [00:16:00] played soccer and I was so incredible." And it's not like, "Now you're better than everyone." It's more like, "Wow, you did that for all of us. You carried the body through that." 

adrienne maree brown: And then whoever delivers the mail, it's like, "Wow, that's so important. So necessary." And  hat we start to think of all of our lives as figuring out what is our essential offer to the world.

 Conflict would necessarily arise because we have difference. From a very young age, one of the things we would be learning about is how to restore from conflict. How to turn and face conflict. How to set boundaries. How to have discussions about what you really want, and structure your relationships that way. But there would be a culture of when things break down, it's the community's responsibility to help it restore.

Emily Race-Newmark: There's been something that's come up a lot in this season of folks referring to composting analogies. So I'm curious, do you see that also? Like, if we talk about things breaking down and also if, can we just talk about transformative [00:17:00] justice inside of this? 

adrienne maree brown: Yeah, I mean, I identify as an abolitionist, meaning I want to abolish the systems of punitive justice and systems that require us to dehumanize people in order to deal with what they've done. 

To me, transformative justice allows us to say, "We don't rely on the state to resolve things, we figure out ways to resolve it in the community." And the goal is to get back to right relationship, even it's not, "Oh, these two people are best friends again." It's more like we found the right relationship for them and that accountability can happen." 

I often think of it as punitive justice sets us against each other and transformative justice is trying to set us next to each other, looking at the world together and figuring out how to move forward. 

I love composting as a metaphor and as an activity. It's one of the things that I'm like, "Yes, I am a composter in every possible way." I'll say, I noticed this in my intimate relationships now that when something comes up, that's like, "Wow, this is causing dissonance or this is causing dis-ease between us." [00:18:00] Then the act of composting is really the act of fully processing it. So rather than being like, "Oh, I don't like that, I'm running away from it." Or, "Oh, I don't like that, let's ignore it." Or, "I don't like that, you have to change." Instead it's like, "Ooh, shit just got dropped in the middle of the garden. And how do we process this shit so that it can actually be good for our garden?" Because it can be good for our garden. But not if we don't handle it correctly. 

We can't keep walking around, everyone step over the pile, right? That's not going to work. Instead of " I'm going to put it through this composting process. I'm going to let it turn into soil, and I'm going to let it become some of the richest most fertile soil because it's true. It's made of what is. There's nothing fake. There's no synthetic thing to it. This is the real deal." 

I love the idea when I'm out in my backyard, that part of what is nourishing, what's growing out there, is what nourished me. That we're in current relationship.

I think when it comes to conflict, [00:19:00] we rarely understand that conflict can be one of the most nourishing things that's happening in a relationship. When it's healthy conflict, I'm allowing you to truly be a different person for me, and I'm allowing the fact that I still want to be in relationship with you. Those two things concurrently mean, let's get into this and let's see what we can figure out. And let's agree together how we both get to move forward in our dignity. What does that look like? 

There's this beautiful document, I think it's still up online, that Generation Five put out that was like in five generations, if we were to end childhood sexual abuse, what would that look like? A lot of my vision for the future entails us having done the work to stop the patterns of harm. I don't work from the assumption that like, "As long as there's humans, there's just going to be people raping babies." I'm like, "No, I think that that is a sign of our dis-ease." So I don't think that we need to build for a future in which we always need to be able to punish monsters. I challenge that, right? I'm like, I think so much of that [00:20:00] is about what happens from the moment someone is born. 

I think a society in which we are really intentional about who gets born, and how they get held and treated, and how much they are loved by their community, and how their differences and neurodivergences and how all those aspects of themselves are held. And if they need support to manage the chemicals in their mind, they get that support. If you think of a society like that where no one was trying to survive out on the edges. No one was building up resentment out on the edges. No one was feeling misunderstood and oppressed and like their mind was something that no one else could handle seeing, you know?

Emily Race-Newmark: Right, right. 

What's coming up as you're speaking about the moment we enter this world and like the influences that can shape us from there, now that I've become a parent, like literally have given birth...

adrienne maree brown: Actual parent. 

Emily Race-Newmark: Yeah, but I also see how we are also all parents. There's like something to get rid of the isolation or being this individual family mindset and looking at the larger community that [00:21:00] raises children. 

Maybe you can answer this from the lens of the support that your parents received or how they nourish themselves in order to give you that space, I'm curious around your vision for how we hold one another as we hold others. 

adrienne maree brown: I love this question. When I think about my parents, they both had to strike out from everything that they knew to find each other, to fall in love with each other. They fell in love in the mid seventies in South Carolina. White woman, black man, it was like, "You do not belong together, you cannot be together like no, no, no, no, no, no." 

But they loved each other and they centered love, as that was the organizing principle around which they had built their lives and thus our lives. So my vision for the future is very much shaped by that. 

My parents are not perfect people. They didn't make perfect decision after perfect decision. They made hilarious, wonderful mistakes. They made mistakes that weren't so funny. You know, they spanked us as kids. Which now they look back on and they're like, "Oh, we would never do that now. But at the time it was the culture that we were raised in." 

The [00:22:00] beautiful thing about being in relationship, the way I am with my parents even, is when the time came to be accountable for that, we were able to do that. I'll be able to have that conversation and we were all able to come and sort of be like, "Hey, here's how this impacted us." And they were able to hear it. To me, that's a functional system. 

I think of my family as a very functional family. My sisters and I, we have a practice called "sister check in" where, when something breaks down between us, when there's a misunderstanding, which used to take us out, like it used to be like, " I don't even fuck with her anymore." Or maybe she's just overwhelmed this week and she misunderstood what I said. And so we do these sister check ins to just tune in and be like, "Where are you right now in the world? How are you doing?" 

It amazes me how much conflict and misunderstanding happens because we don't have our empathy turned on and empowered to use, and we come into spaces with no sense of how someone is. 

In my vision of the world, how people are actually matters. And the stuff we do emerges [00:23:00] from how we are doing and we figure out how to manage that. 

There's a lot of it that I don't fully understand yet, but I'm faithful.

I feel very faithful that, you know, I'm a post nationalist. I think that a lot of the things we take for granted right now are going to collapse because they are not adjusting and adapting for the people that are in them. And then I think we get to see what's beyond that.

Emily Race-Newmark: So on that point, I wanted to speak to you about systems and, do systems even exist in your ideal world or are we moving out of system language into relational language? And specifically what I'm referring to is, I look at breakdowns within educational systems, health systems, like currently, right? All these different systems that could be used re like innovation and reimagining. But that now I'm questioning the idea of the system itself. So what's your thought on that? 

adrienne maree brown: I love systems, I'm a Virgo sun. I love a functional system. The thing that I'm always interested in is, "How do we create functional systems? And when systems are dysfunctional, how do we tune [00:24:00] into that and either make the adjustment?" Or just say, "Hey, the system's not working anymore we need to let it go, and we need to create something new." 

I feel like I've had to do that in my own life several times and be like, "Oh, I can fix this!" And then be like, "I can try to fix this and it will take everything I've got, plus some stuff I don't have." Or we could let it go and let these resources become available in a composty way. Let these resources become available for other experiments. And I wish that there was a lot more of that. 

This is where my interest in socialism has been coming from. That I'm really interested in systems that allow humans to be good to each other. I think that's so much of how our systems have been constructed so far, these meta systems, are like, "How can humans hold power over each other? How can we control our fear of each other? How can we protect our greedy sense of resources that should just be ours." And so we have systems that are designed to do that. And [00:25:00] all of those things are designed to keep us from each other. 

Instead, when you're like, "Oh, how do we have systems that allow us to be in right relationship with each other? How do we have systems that allow us to support each other? How do we have systems that allow us to care for each other and be cared for?" I think then that produces very different systems. And I'm in that practice right now in my own life of building those systems organizationally and interpersonally.

In my post- nationalist future future, I imagine lots of small groups of people, smallish groups, 100 to 150 maybe, of people who care for each other and who have systems that really work for them. And the things that we can agree on as a planet are like, "Do no harm to this planet. Do whatever you want to otherwise in terms of your systems, but whatever you do, you don't hurt the homeland, this home place that we have here." Just having that basic agreement would be a complete transformation for our earth.

Emily Race-Newmark: Yeah, for sure. I wanted to bring more curiosity to something you said in the beginning around your vision [00:26:00] for migration. there's like this tension I feel. So maybe you can clarify, that one, we're connected to the land that we're on and the people and the animals and the beings that are connected to that, right? 

But then for me, I too have felt at times a resistance towards being in one place. I just don't want to buy into that dream of finding my place. 

adrienne maree brown: My root system feels pretty nomadic, or has felt pretty nomadic at different points of my life. So there's part of it that's just like, "Oh, for the parts of us that are full of wanderlust, how do we get to move?" 

The way I do it now is I have different friends and family who I think of all of their homes as mine, and I think of mine as a home that they can access. So when I'm traveling, my home is almost never empty. There's other people who come and they live in my home as if it is their home. And there's other places that I know I can go land and I can just feel at home in that place . 

So that's one way, but then I also think there's something about being able to tell when the land needs to [00:27:00] recover. Even part of the migration might just be like, we're only doing all of our growing in the fields to the East this year. And next year, we'll do it to the West. 

But then I think there's also stuff where, for instance, one of the places that I have received much of my healing in life is the Yucatan in Mexico.

The past couple of times I've gone down there, there's this algae that because of climate change has basically taken over most of the coastline and it smells sulfuric, and it's basically saying don't come in here. It feels like a very clear boundary from the ocean. It's like, "Can you chill? Don't come in here. Don't bring your suntan lotion and your oils. We need to recover." 

What's interesting to me is that there is a reef that runs along the Yucatan that has been one of the vibrant reefs and that has been going under the pressure of tourism has been dying. And so I think the ocean tells us this, "That there are places that the recovery need is a little longer. Can you guys all go over to a different [00:28:00] coast and be in a different part of the ocean or different part of the world right now, this part needs to recover." 

I think that happened with Burning Man this year. The land has been saying like, "I need a break. I need a break." So this year it's like, "Okay fine, fuck you guys. Swim in the mud." And not, "Fuck you, guys." Because I don't think the earth really talks like that, but I do think there's a sense of like, "I need a break." And if you won't give it to me, then I will make it untenable for you to be here. I think that's how the earth communicates. One of the ways that she communicates to us. 

So that's what I mean. Can we hear when it's like, "Oh, LA is exhausted." What would it look like to have a period of migration for people so that that part of the world can recover a little bit? Or other places where we have major cities. Cities are exhausting for the land that they're on. What is the shifts that actually allow some balance to happen? 

I love the proximity of cities. I love the commutality of cities, but I also think it's very rare for a city to be in right relationship to this nature.

Emily Race-Newmark: That just [00:29:00] reminds me of COVID actually. I was outside of LA at the time, and I remember the stats around the smog layer being the lowest it ever had been. I remember writing about that. Nature is basically giving the needed break. 

And then I'm also connecting a dot to this personal path I've been on around and understanding inflammation in my own body. And it's like that algae example feels like the inflammation, outside of the body. How can you even just be attuned to that message? 

Something else I just want to focus on, on the vision, just the tangibles of movement building and how we organize. It's great to have the vision, but then I'm hearing a lot around the importance of relationship. Are you envisioning a world where we're constantly building new movements?

adrienne maree brown: There's this beautiful book, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, that has an essay in it called "Are the Cops in our Heads and Hearts?" by Paula Rojas, and it talks about movements in Latin America and how they emerge in response to a need. 

And when that need has been met, they shift, they [00:30:00] dissolve, and something else emerges.

Emily Race-Newmark: Mm.

adrienne maree brown: I would love to think of movement more that way, globally. I'd love to think of, "Okay, what's most needed and how do we tune to that?" But my vision vision is that those people who right now put a lot of their energy and time into movement because they're trying to push against oppression, those people would actually get to pour a lot of that brilliance into governance and into actually getting to hold and participate and shape and maintain functional systems of society. 

I really feel like we've reached this very sad place where it's so rare that the people that we have as options to elect into roles of governance are actually the kind of people who have the skill set that works for governance.

Again, we have a lot of people who are celebrity culture. It is the only reason that people know of them. They're good at getting up in front of people and talking. But they're not necessarily good at managing, creating systems, facilitation, mediation. All of these things that like, I [00:31:00] know all these bad ass organizers who are great at all that stuff. 

But the humility it takes to walk the path of an organizer very rarely overlaps with the bombastic public nature you have to be willing to take on in order to do politics. And so that we end up in this bind where we have politicians. 

And there are some incredible politicians. I really look up to Stacey Abrams. I really look up to AOC. There's folks that I'm like, "Oh, I see what you're doing. And you're up at this belly of the beast and thank God you're doing that." 

But for the most part, what you're getting with a politician is someone who's been trained to be dishonest and performative and who's focused on just getting elected rather than on governance. And what we need is the humility that leads to good governance. So I would love to see a future in which the same people who would have been building movements are actually building the infrastructures of society and they are part of helping figure out when is it time to migrate? [00:32:00] And what is the best way to do that? 

Emily Race-Newmark: I'm so accustomed to the current version of governance that we have that it's almost hard to imagine like another way. You mentioned that the group sizes of 100 to 150, is it smaller and more localized in that sense? Like governance itself?

adrienne maree brown: Yeah, I mean, I think that it's smaller and interrelated. When I look at like my own friend group friends, if we were like, "We're able to function with each other and we take care of each other, and we live in this close proximity to each other." I live in Durham, maybe there's 500 groups like this that make up the society of Durham, and there's a way that those groups can work together to make decisions that serve the whole, but the day-to-day work of tending a piece of land and nourishing the community around it, that happens at a smaller level. 

A lot of what I'm talking about is there's nothing new about it. It's the way indigenous communities existed for years and years and years before this land was colonized. And it's the way indigenous and aboriginal peoples have lived for years and years and years around the world.

So a lot of what I'm [00:33:00] talking about is a decolonized future, right? Which is, let's remember that there was a nature of tribalism that actually seems to be part of the design of how we're supposed to be in relationship to this place, but there is a need for modernizing that because we have now tasted the global connectivity and how incredible it is to have access to all of that. So the thing we have to figure out now is. What does it mean to be in right relationship to the place and people we are of, and in right relationship to all the other things that we could be in a relationship to? 

I think that's a good problem, but I think it would be such a more interesting thing to, to deal with from a place of, I come from a community that I'm accountable to. 

I think the fact that it's so easy for people to move through the world without anyone who checks for them, and who helps them think through potential harm that they're causing, I think it just leads to a smorgasbord of harm.

Emily Race-Newmark: Yeah.[00:34:00] 

adrienne maree brown: Yeah.

Emily Race-Newmark: My last question is on the role of leadership, if there's anything explicitly to name around your vision for how leadership might evolve or how we might experience it in ourselves and other people.

adrienne maree brown: I think that leadership should not be an act of performance, it should be an act of experience. That doesn't mean it can't have some performative. I really love a funny leader. I really love a leader with charisma. I really do. There's a reason for all that. I'm not saying I just want folks who have none of that, but I do think it should be rooted in like, "I've done something and I learned how to do it. And that's the place from which I can lead you. I can lead you because I have spent some time learning this." 

When I was first becoming a doula, I was an apprentice. I didn't just jump in and be like, "I'm the doula in charge of this birth." And at no point in the process as a doula was I like, "I'm the leader of this." I was like, "I'm an apprentice and now I am in an assistant role to this birthing parent." And the leader was the person who was actually going [00:35:00] through the biggest thing, the hardest change, and had all of it happening within them.

When I did harm reduction work, a lot of it was trying to talk with how do we help drug users to reduce the harm of drugs in their life. Can we look at them as the leaders of that shift rather than as something that we need to manage or control or fix? 

Something happened in you that leads you into this addiction, and you are the only one who's going to be able to lead yourself to something else. What would that look like? 

I think of leadership in that way, there's something about humility. There's something about experience. There's something about being the person who's actually impacted by the conditions. There's some combination of those things to me that dictates who can be leading. 

I also think it should be much more fluid than it currently is. I love to be in situations where I'm leading something because it makes sense and then the next breath, someone else is leading the thing because that makes sense. 

Emily Race-Newmark: Yeah, it's a dance.

adrienne maree brown: Like trust. 

Emily Race-Newmark: I just like to briefly touch on actions that folks can take. One being [00:36:00] in an immediate action. So if they were to pause the podcast right now and take an action that supports some or all of this vision that you shared, what might that be? 

adrienne maree brown: The main action I tell people to do is walk outside and put your feet in the dirt. Find someplace where you can actually put yourself in relationship to a tree or to nature and really ask what the relationship could be here? 

For most of us, getting into a better relationship with the place we're in and from is a thing. 

If folks were like, "I'm done with the podcast and now I'm doing an action." It would be to find something in your community that needs your support and give it, as a volunteer. Just give it because it needs to be given.

Emily Race-Newmark: Beautiful. Well, I am endlessly grateful to everything you shared. Thank you for giving us so much to think about and act upon and dream around. I appreciate you.

adrienne maree brown: Thank you so much. This was a pleasure to do.

Emily Race-Newmark: Thank you all for listening. To stay connected with adrienne,, you can follow her on her Instagram, @adriennemareebrown, or check out her website, adriennemareebrown.net, to become a member and support her writing [00:37:00] there. 

Both of these things will be linked at our website in the show notes. And of course, check out her books if you haven't already.

There was so much more to this conversation that we couldn't include in the final edit. So if you're craving more, head over to patreon.com/thisishowwecare to support the show and hear more from adrienne. 

Thank you for all the ways that you support this podcast, whether that's through your Patreon contributions, listening, leaving reviews, sharing episodes with the people in your life, or subscribing to our newsletter and Instagram to be part of the conversation.

This episode was produced by me, Emily Race, co produced by Kimberly Anne, with audio by Andrew Salamone and music by Eric Weisberg.