We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice (Emergent Strategy) by Adrienne Maree Brown

We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice (Emergent Strategy) Reviews

• 
  Emily May

  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?

  
  This little book felt like a healing balm. I hope so very much that others will listen to Brown, even if they don't necessarily agree with her beliefs on everything.
  
  What I like most about
  Adrienne Maree Brown is her love and empathy for other humans, and it comes across in everything she writes and does. Here, she asks us to question what we are really achieving when we "cancel" a person, especially when we do it quickly, gleefully, without asking any questions. She points out the contradiction between activists fighting to abolish or reform the way we punish criminals in society, while simultaneously dealing out unquestioned, unrestrained public shamings online.
  

  often things are turned into public campaigns of shaming and humiliation before it is even clear if the thing is a misunderstanding, mistake, contradiction, conflict, harm, or abuse.

  
  Many of her observations here are a huge part of the reason I have been drifting away from social media and Goodreads over the last couple of years. I've gotten so tired of it, guys. So tired of this wonderful open-minded liberal pro-LGBTQ+ pro-BLM community just fucking eating itself over a desire to be perceived as the most moral. Salivating with excitement over the latest call-out, often of queer bloggers, or those of colour. Performing for a crowd, basking in the shares and likes as we take down a fellow blogger or reviewer.
  
  Is it improving our lives? Is it making us happy? I truly wonder.
  
  Brown is not the first person to critique cancel culture, but her perspective on this is especially important because it comes from a "Black biracial queer fat survivor". She understands the necessity of call-outs. She acknowledges the importance of using your voice online to hold someone accountable when society's justice has failed you. BUT.
  

  I have felt us losing our capacity to distinguish between comrade and opponent, losing our capacity to generate belonging.
  
  ***
  
  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.

  
  Brown wonders, as do I, why we seem to be enjoying it so much. When it gets to a stage where we are reveling in a takedown, enjoying seeing another person humiliated, are we really in the right? She spoke with many people who admitted they avoid speaking up or defending someone out of an unspoken fear: "when will y'all come for me?" And nobody should be afraid of speaking up for what's right, or asking questions, out of fear for themselves. That's not liberation.
  
  Who knows if Brown's words will penetrate the din? I hope so, but for now it was enough to hear such a prominent amazing black woman echo some of the thoughts giving me anxiety each day, in a far more eloquent way, of course.
• 
  Zara

  I appreciate the author's stated intention to work through and reflect on criticisms from survivors of abuse that came in response to the essay as it was initially posted in July; I won't rehash those criticisms here. However, the rush to publish without taking time to deeply consider and incorporate those criticisms made this book unhelpful at best and actively harmful at worst. Including lines like "I am not speaking of survivors naming their abusers" isn't the same as integrating our experiences into the analysis, and if anything, it created many new contradictions in the book. The use of "we" ("we are afraid and we think it will assuage our fears," "we love obsessing over and punishing villains" -- we who?) leads to many projections and assumptions about the experiences and goals of survivors and others who have used callouts to organize for accountability.
  
  One of the most triggering parts of this book is when the author compares those who use callouts as a strategy to organize for accountability to COINTELPRO. This is particularly painful when reflecting on the fact that multiple leftist organizations doxxed survivors this year in retaliation. Doxxing organizers feeds the state and harms our movements, and it seems worthy of condemnation and more comparable to COINTELPRO than people speaking about their experiences of abuse. And yet survivors' organizing work toward building safer, more accountable movement spaces is not seen as valuable and impactful. Instead, the same trope ("but they do good work!") is used to excuse patterns of oppressive behaviors by organizers with large platforms and more established organizations. The book contains no specific examples of situations that escalated to callouts and demonstrates no curiosity about the reasons why or the outcomes sought.
  
  For survivors who might stumble upon this review: There are many resources that I found helpful in navigating healing, safety and accountability after abuse. Some are anarchist zines like "What about the rapists?" and "Betrayal." I also worked with comrades to create the zine "Learning to Exhale." All of these zines are available for free online. Some books that I found helpful are: The Revolution Starts at Home and Beyond Survival -- both anthologies that gather different experiences, strategies, reflections, and considerations in navigating interpersonal violence in organizing spaces. For more resources specifically about finding our own agency, which comes up as a theme throughout this book, I recommend Shannon Perez Darby's work and writing on self-accountability.
• 
  K

  I decided to read this book finally so I could really see if my thoughts aligned with AMB. I feel conflicted because I do think we are experiencing a crisis on the left with how we handle conflict. I don’t see callouts as inherently bad or good, I see them as a strategy that organizers and oppressed people use to get them closer to their goals. But I also can’t lie and say when I see a callout my first worry is, will I be next? I think that has to deal with being part of a harassment campaign this summer that was framed as a “callout” by a stranger online. Anyways I have a lot to think about in regards to this book, and I don’t think it was poorly written. The reason I’m giving it three stars is because I’m confused as to why this is a book.
  
  The bulk of the “book” is the ending written by another person, an intro, than an intro to an okay-ish essay filled with a lot of disclaimers. The book doesn’t define terms like transformative justice for the reader or make the connection between TJ and abolition. This is an easy connection for me to make, but not for others. Also there isn’t really an explanation for how RJ is not TJ which I think is what leads to watering down these movements. For most people new to this work they will have no idea what is being discussed within this book. I also didn’t like the analogies to disability, “x is like a cancer” “y is like a disease.” And I’m troubled by people throwing around capitalism without it meaning anything for example what does it mean to acknowledge the horrors of the US and capitalism then provide trainings to people within the Obama foundation?
  
  This book is basically like “I’m worried about callouts, but not with instances of actual abuse.” “Damn.” What happens next? AMB admits she doesn’t have all the answers which is fine, but again why wasn’t this a series on a blog instead of a book/booklet?
  
  I have more to think through and will as I research for my book and talk to other abolitionist survivors but for right now it’s 3 stars.
• 
  Carrie Poppy

  "We Will Not Cancel Us" is an argument for trying other things before we call one another out about our missteps, especially publicly. The theme of this book is extremely welcome in this cultural moment, for obvious reasons I won't even bother itemizing.
  
  The author is a conflict mediator who works within social movements to help people get through interpersonal problems among peers. Though she doesn't list the exact movements in which she works, she makes it clear that we are talking about left-wing movements broadly. It is comforting and reassuring to read the words of someone who has chosen this specific role, of building up instead of tearing down. There are some very quotable moments in this little booklet, which started out as a viral blog post. Brown is talented with words and -- I suspect -- talented at spotting where conflict can turn to compassion.
  
  Where the book is limited, its limits seem intentionally self-imposed. The author happily labels herself many times over, often reminding us that she is liberal; an "abolitionist" (in this context, that appears to mean she believes in abolishing the formal legal-justice system); a "Witch" (I'm not certain what that means here, but it's brought up a few times) and "a survivor" (again, I am not certain of-what she survived, and I don't assume a right to know, but the word is mentioned many times, and without that clarity, I wasn't sure what I was supposed to take from it).
  
  I always worry about labels. When movements label themselves, they limit themselves. Each label is just another axis against which you might judge me as someone-other-than-what-you-are, which just gives you more ingrained biases for me to work against. I eat vegan food, but would rather not call myself vegan. I don't believe in God, but derive no identity from the word "atheist." I think critical thinking is the central driving force of a more-moral world, but I hate the word "skeptic." I find these conversations are infinitely harder to have when someone views me as a member of some group of people already taking a stance with which they don't already agree. I would rather the guy next to me at Subway try the veggie patty because a girl he relates to is also trying it, rather than put him off by a VEGAN hoodie.
  
  Why do we feel this need to name our movements and the people within them? I don't get it, and maybe that's just me. But as I am the one reading the book and writing the review, just me is what you get.
  
  From a writing analysis standpoint, this little tome lacks the kind of specifics and examples that could really drive the points home. She speaks almost exclusively in broad generalizations, bordering on philosophy, while rarely giving a specific example and breaking it down. I fear everyone could read this book and say they basically agree with the principle, then go about doing all the same things they did before, because there are no particularly challenging examples to stack ourselves against.
  
  A bigger problem is that small asides and exceptions are peppered throughout the text. Asides and exceptions which seem to undo the bravest parts of this book. And it is clearly intended to be brave. The author calls her thoughts "unthinkable," and expresses the harrowing fear of being publicly shunned by your movement peers (a feeling I and many of my friends know well). She essentially tells us she is being brave, and so I believe her that she is (what is courage accept overcoming your own internal fears no one else can really know?). But that courage seems undone when she spends a sentence or two nodding to the times when (she says) social outcasting is a perfetctly legitimate way to handle things.
  
  In particular, she states that publicly acknowledging your abuser or rapist is a perfectly legitimate way to handle having been raped or abused, and that circumventing the legal apparatus is not a bug, but a feature, of this approach. This is offered as such a quick aside, it reads as a given: "of COURSE we all know THIS kind of call-out is fine." But do we? One of the lessons of the last several years seems to be not just that rape and abuse are everywhere (I am of the mind that these things are, indeed, extremely common) but also that they can be extremely grey areas of human interaction, wherein a rapist may not know they are a rapist, and an abuser may not know they are an abuser.
  
  Likewise, human memory is notoriously horrible, and a single person's word can't be taken and "believed" with no outside corroboration. Yet this author says we should "believe survivors." How will I identify them? How will I spot survivors of abuse without knowing they were abused, so that I might then believe them? Doesn't that just set us back where we started?
  
  The only way I see to support survivors -- at least the ones who want to name their attackers -- is to help them document what happened. Blindly believing them seems, at best, condescending. I recall once sharing something that had happened to me, and receiving a chorus of "I believe you"s in response. I felt not held or supported, but sinking. I didn't want to be believed because I had spoken; I wanted to be asked, to be understood, to be questioned, so that we could figure out together what is really happening in this society in which we can harm one another so easily. Blind belief made me feel invisible.
  
  I don't have a solution for this quicksand of a situation. But as I finished up this book, I felt that the author didn't either. To her credit, she says as much somewhere in the beginning. That she is about asking questions more than answering them. With this, I identify more than anything else in the book. Questions are often more useful than answers, especially in the early stages of figuring things out. But the way those questions are written, at least here, makes them sound like answers. And that's its major downfall.
• 
  Bren fall in love with the sea.

  “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.”
  
  
  We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice
  
  I did not realize how short this was w hen I went to read it.
  
  This book was a Christmas present. I had been wanting to read it. As you may have guessed, it is about today's "cancel culture". And how damaging it can be.
  
  I really do not want to do a long review on this one until I have read it a second time. I want to mull it over a bit.
  
  I am sure most people who are internet users have laughed at or even participated in memes or jokes about various hapless victims of this culture. I freely admit I have.As a never Trumper I have been a bit wicked about it too.
  
  But this short book is more about the pervasive nature of cancel culture in regards to how we , as a society, allow ourselves to enjoy or even revel in, someone else's misfortune. And how the whole herd mentality and group think behavior can turn us into people we'd perhaps rather not be.
  
  As someone who loathes sheeplike behavior I can say with confidence, that does not negate the fact that I too have participated in some of these behaviors. I thi nk this book is quite educational and though it is short, one can really get much from it . I will add on to this review when I have read it for a second time.
  
  But I do want to strongly recommend it. You do not have to identify with everything in it. I didn't. But it is fascinating and not only pushes the reader to look at othe rs but also themselves. Excellent read.
• 
  Derek Minno-Bloom

  This book could heal our communities and the left and bring us together to fight for collective liberation! I couldn't recommend it more!
• 
  Sasha

  This was a great, quick and informative read! By no means comprehensive nor claiming to be, but great musings on accountability and abolition. I really appreciated the distinctions made between abuse, harm, conflict, misunderstandings, mistakes, differences, and contradictions - super helpful for conceptualizing a variety of difficult situations that sometimes get collapsed. Also appreciate the description of when call-outs can be effective, as well as explaining when, why, and how they can be harmful.
• 
  Ryan

  Really suffers from a lack of examples. We're told call out culture and cancel culture is reasonable sometimes but not others and the confines are terribly unclear as to which is which.
  
  A single example of this happening and what should have happened instead would have elucidated the argument a lot but instead it was so general as to not make a big impact on me.
• 
  Traci Thomas

  I really enjoyed this book. It gave me lots to think about. I need to discuss with a person and work through the ideas. Really good though slightly self conscious.
• 
  Allison

  WE WILL NOT CANCEL US is a small booklet borne out of adrienne maree brown's essay over the summer grappling with cancel culture and abolition dreams. I love seeing how thinkers think, learning their process, their missteps and edits, and so I appreciated the way she tackled this book as her thoughts and language surrounding cancel culture are emergent. I'll say firstly, I don't believe cancel culture actually exists in the way that the right talks about it, but I have seen internet and intrapersonal criticism taken very far, in ways that brown and I share a discomfort with. She writes that if no one is actually disposable, we have to ensure that folks are held ACCOUNTABLE for their actions while not feeding into carceral attitudes.
  
  As a white woman reading this, it resonated a lot with the way I see white people tackle racism on social media - esp the past summer. I think its good and its our job as white ppl to call out others who we see engaging in harmful behaviors AND it's also our responsibility to collect our white people, so how we "call out" matters. I've seen a lot of what I call "white on white crime," where white ppl get REALLY INVESTED into fights with other white ppl on what they've determined is and isn't racist. Now, it's good & necessary to call out other white people. But what I see in some of these online examples is a white person, the person doing the call out, who has not grappled with their own internalized whiteness. Perhaps they are feeling shame that they see, in the actions of the problematic white, something they would have done 3 years ago. brown writes about the "am I next?" fear that comes from call outs online. This also prevents people from actually engaging in a dialouge where they could learn because they're so scared of saying the wrong thing. I see a vitriol level that is really rooted in trying to "look like one of the good ones" but to me like someone who doesn't actually critique or engage in dialogue with the white people in their own life. I'm not saying don't call out racism that you see online if you are white. I'm saying, engage in dialogue and ensure your learning and work happens offline too. It is a lot easier to call out strangers for a racist or problematic post than it is to call out your own family. WE WILL NOT CANCEL US looks at the complexities of community call outs and accountability. I loved reading this book and discussing with @angiesreading and @suzyreadsbooks.
• 
  Katie ♡

  “We hurt people.
  Of course we did, we are human.
  
  We were traumatized/socialized away from interdependence. We learned to hide everything real, everything messy, weak, complex. We learned that fake shit hurts, but it’s acceptable (...) We disappointed each other, at the level of race, gender, species…in a vast way we longed for more from us. But we will not cancel us (...)
  
  We will not cancel us. But we must earn our place on this earth.”
  
  A powerful book which acknowledges the flaws and ongoing problems with humanity, yet it encourages readers not to lose complete faith and hope in the people. The right way to go, according to Adrienne Maree Brown, is constant co-learning and mutual understanding.
  
  ”Conflict, and growing community that can hold political difference, are actually healthy, generative, necessary moves for vibrant visions to be actualized.”
• 
  Joshua Serrano

  What started off as thumbing through the pages ended up with me spending the whole morning reading this book. She spoke with such clarity and thoughtfulness that I couldn't put it down. In fact I will read it again, and again, reminding myself of the call she put forth.
  
  I worry about call out culture. I am often disappointed with how it materializes both in myself and in others. So, reading this books is a breath of fresh air.
  
  
• 
  Annaelle Clara

  a lovely lovely book.
  i think one of the things that was new to me in this book was the idea of hopelessness being something that the oppressor wants. like it’s very intuitive but i has never thought about it. our despair and our nihilism about our oppression is something the oppressor wants. they don’t want us to challenge these systems they want us to give up.
  i am so happy that transformative justice entered my life when it did. brown talked specifically about emergent strategy and how we should use these big ideas we have , like abolition and TJ, in our daily lives. we have to create the world we want to see at an interpersonal level and on a small scale before we are capable of expanding these systems.
  this book made me think a lot about call out culture and how we operate within our communities.
  i also like that this book took the time to define abuse, harm, and conflict as three distinct but related things. i think a lot of the time we attempt to respond to these things in the same way but it’s important to understand that they are different & we should respond to them based on the context of each situation.
  i think everyone should read this. it’s a very quick read that supplemented a lot of the ideas i already had after being exposed to transformative justice.
• 
  Rhea

  Absolutely transformational. This summer I had several experiences that convinced me that cancel culture is not the way to go when airing grievances. I have been following the writing that has started to spring up, from Kai Cheng Thom, Tada Hozemi, and Clementine Morrigan about how we can be more effective and simply more human in our conflicts with each other. This booklet by adrienne maree brown is vital to those efforts. She creates a lot of definitions, which is very helpful in a world where everything is conflated and nebulous. She gives people a road map for call outs without punishment, and also humanizes our desire for revenge. I felt seen on all sides (and the up and down) of her writing. Mandatory reading for being a person on the internet, or in any community.
• 
  Ryan Hartman

  I got a ride from adrienne maree brown (name drop!) back in 2008. Although I don't remember much of our conversation from the two and a half hour drive, I do remember how comfortable I felt around them and how easy it was to have a conversation. It's twelve years later and I've read every book she's published; like our conversation, I appreciate the way she tackles tough topics using language that just about anyone can understand. Many other folks have spent hundreds of pages trying to get across what amb accomplishes in under a hundred.
• 
  Luca Suede

  There are some very welcome framings of transformation in this text, and the intentions at the beginning of the work were beautiful and helpful. A lot of this writing felt more like it was for adrienne than for the public, and there was too much explaining motivations for the piece, definitely in an effort to be accountable. I’m grateful for adrienne’s work as a mediator and author, but I was hoping for less generalizations about transformation work + the left, and more specifics about the mechanizations of practicing transformation in community.
• 
  Quinn Monleon

  Dear Vancouver,
• 
  Bob

  Summary: A plea to those within the modern abolitionist movement to not use “cancelling” or “call outs” against one another.
  
  I picked up this book online, intrigued by the title. On reading the book, I discovered that I was overhearing a conversation among an “us” of which I am not a part. I say this at the outset to explain my approach in this review. It is simply to listen and, hopefully, learn, and reflect in my description of this book an accurate rendering of its message. adrienne maree brown is a leader of the modern abolitionist movement. One description of this movement states, in part:
  
  Modern abolitionists see it as our mission to provide the models of community safety, security, mutual aid, and harm reduction that are needed, and to do the political education, relationship-building, and movement work to bring others into demanding transformative economic and social change for abolition.
  
  The author self-identifies as “a Black biracial queer fat survivor, witch, movement facilitator and mediator.” I am a white, cisgender male, straight, Christian, and (hopefully) recovering racist. It is a certainty that I don’t understand everything in this small book. I am learning that often, I don’t even know what I don’t know. So, unlike some reviews, I do not want to engage or critique but try to listen and reflect what I am hearing. Too often, we have critiqued and judge what we don’t even begin to understand.
  
  The book is an enlargement on a blog post titled “Unthinkable Thoughts: Call-Out Culture in the Age of Covid-19.” The first part of the book describes the response, both positive and critical to the blog post and what the author learned. She learned she needed to make distinctions between harm and abuse, in general more clearly define terms and ideas, and offer appropriate content and trigger warnings. She goes on to offer definitions of terms: abuse, conflict, harm, contradiction, misunderstanding, and mistakes.
  
  The central chapter, a revision of the blog post, speaks from our current time, amid the pandemic and a pervasive sense of fear, both of the pandemic, and the wider pandemic of white supremacy. It speaks out of the observation of cancelling or “call outs” being used in conflict situations within the abolitionist movement. She warns of the danger of “no one left to call out, or call we, or call us.” She does not disavow the use of call outs in the wider culture with those whose status, power, and unresponsiveness warrant the use of this technique (often by widespread social media campaigns focused on a statement or act causing harm). She notes the personal impacts of a cancel–job loss, status loss, harm to family and emotional distress. She expresses concern that within movement, other, prior steps need to be taken to pursue harm reduction, including, where possible, personal conversation. She also notes that the use of call outs may become cathartic and make the use of this tool more tempting.
  
  In a follow-up essay, she speaks about the aim of movement being transformative justice. Yet she questions the ways some people have been eviscerated because small, as well as larger transgressions. In turn, she proposes three questions to open up conversations leading to transformative justice:
  
  1. Why? Listen with “Why?” as a framework.
  2. Ask yourself/selves: What can I/we learn from this?
  3. How can my real-time actions contribute to transforming this situation (versus making it worse)?
  
  One concern the author expresses is that her honest processing in this book of her “unthinkable thoughts” will be weaponized by those outside the abolitionist movement. The truth is, any of us who have been involved in any movement have experienced the same phenomenon. We are often each other’s harshest critics and if we are not careful, we can self-destruct. I would hope that no one would use this review as a weapon, because rather recognize the authenticity, aspirations, and growth as a movement leader it reflects.
• 
  Juliane Roell

  I found this really difficult to read. The author speaks in "we" and I was left wondering who that "we" is. In some places, it felt relatable. In many others, it didn't. The argument is presented in broad generalizations rather than based on personal experience and opinion.
  
  

  The use of "we" ("we are afraid and we think it will assuage our fears," "we love obsessing over and punishing villains" -- we who?) leads to many projections and assumptions about the experiences and goals of survivors and others who have used callouts to organize for accountability. (
  Review by Leila)

  
  
  The writing is also very repetitive. There are some powerful points at the beginning and I took lots of notes, then it devolves into a repeated (but not very deep) argument for transformative justice and against call-outs. The argument for the former is clear (though not very nuanced), the one for the latter rather vague.
  
  

  The book contains no specific examples of situations that escalated to callouts and demonstrates no curiosity about the reasons why or the outcomes sought. (
  Review by Leila)

  
  
  

  From a writing analysis standpoint, this little tome lacks the kind of specifics and examples that could really drive the points home. She speaks almost exclusively in broad generalizations, bordering on philosophy, while rarely giving a specific example and breaking it down. (
  Review by Carrie Poppy)

  
  
  Why the author constantly calls her thoughts "unthinkable" remained a mystery to me - the basic argument appears straightforward and not very problematic to me.
  
  

  There are some very welcome framings of transformation in this text (...) A lot of this writing felt more like it was for adrienne than for the public(...). I was hoping for less generalizations about transformation work + the left, and more specifics about the mechanizations of practicing transformation in community. (
  Review by Luca Suede)

  
  
  

  The basic premise of the book (...) is that if we are interested in building a better world we have to be better with each other. We have to understand that the world we want to change is a world whose abuses have infected us, and if we don't work through our shit and get more skilled at addressing interpersonal conflict, our visions won't become realities. If that sounds like "wow," then you'll probably enjoy the book. If that sounds like "yup, been thinking that for a while now" and you've already engaged with resources and in conversations on the topic, this might not have much new to offer you. (
  Review by Scout)

  
  
  As someone already acquainted with Transformative Justice, I resonated with the intensely articulated desire for community accountability and against perpetuating further violence. There is a place for call-outs and "cancelling" though (and much more to say about the role of trauma), and while the book touches on this in a few side sentences, I never dives into the argument. It left me feeling very dissatisfied.
  
• 
  Joy B

  Reading this was a sigh of relief. It clearly analyses many of the things I've seen happening in the past and not fully understood, it also points to a way forward. An important read (especially for marginalised people) that I can't recommended enough.
• 
  Jocelyn

  Part of adrienne���s theory of emergent strategy is that the small choices we make every day about how we treat each other and conduct our movements lay the foundation for the future world we are building. This is a little book holds so many rich questions about how we approach conflict, harm, and hope in our everyday lives/movements in ways that align with a politics of abolition.
  
  I read adrienne’s initial essay last summer and followed a lot of the critique that was offered then, and I appreciated the reflections on those ongoing conversations and edits to the essay printed here. This book doesn’t have all the answers, but it offers a start to a conversation I hope to continue with my own communities.
• 
  Corvus

  Might write more later, but
  this reviewer has said most of what I would say. A lot of AMB's books feel unfinished or unedited to me. This one could have functioned as two medium posts just fine. This book has a very small target audience as well- very far left movement members who are part of a connected community.
• 
  Sarah Koppelkam

  This is really just a collection of three essays, with forward and afterward materials. I do think amb is doing some of the most important, complex thinking on the topic of “cancel culture”/accountability. I also appreciate her willingness to learn in public - the core essay of this collection is offered as a revision of one she earlier wrote which made some mistakes. Overall, I continue to follow brown wherever she goes, but like Pleasure Activism, this one felt a little rushed to publication
• 
  alexis

  I feel like if you’ve read one AKpress book preface by adrienne maree brown you’ve kind of read them all, but there’s still a lot about her attitude and mindset that’s worth reinforcing through repetition.
• 
  Dustin Rose

  as someone who has/does fall into the trap of either internally or externally "cancelling" someone because of something they say/did--i really appreciated this book's perspective.
  
  Does a feeding frenzy of judgement and public humiliation ever allow a perpetrator of an offense room to grow/learn? Or does it support the building of defense mechanisms that create even more barriers to positive growth?
  
  "Accountability isn't punishment, though it is frequently wielded as such."
• 
  Meg

  There is a lot of good and powerful language in this small text, rewritten by adrienne maree brown from a blog post that went viral, posted in June 2020.
  
  It is a call to action for activists, specifically, to not burn down our own houses.
  
  Boiled down, it is "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her." In an age of group-think and dog-piling on offenders of sins big and small in the social media Wild Wild West, brown calls upon activists to think first, before reacting. To be discerning and able to hold complexity, instead of being trapped into binary thinking of good and bad. To whit, one of the most powerful insights I gleaned is that individuals who cause harm (which includes all of us, to various degrees, inevitably, because we are human after all) operate inside systems. And that in order to be true practitioners (or comrades, in her vernacular) of transformative justice (not merely restorative), we need to find ways to heal, and to allow everyone a way to be held accountable, not canceled.
  
  This book could have used specific examples, as others have noted. It was very broadly worded, as if written as a rousing call-to-arms rather than a toolkit for people and organizations to do better by one another.
  
  I have some nuggets and passages that I will write down in my journal, to use as seeds in my work. It was worth my time - she is a thinker and writer au courant in my circles, and teachings. I look forward to reading more of her work and then reassess how this text holds up.
• 
  Lauren Jenkins

  Puts words to so much of how I feel but haven’t been able to articulate myself. Yet!