How to Fight
It can be tempting to let yourself stew in some X beef you might be having with a random reply guy, or allow yourself to hold a grudge against a colleague who publicly disagreed with you in a meeting. But in Adrienne Maree Brown’s latest book, Loving Corrections, the author provides an antidote to the shame-based discourse that social media has boosted. “I was able to hold moments of tension, moments that were really hard, with softness and with care, but also with some rigor,” she says of writing the book, which consists of essays, conversations, and spells. According to Brown, we’d be better off if we tried to solve conflict by imagining ourselves holding someone’s hands while talking about the hard stuff instead of jumping to conclusions and firing off angry comments: “There’s a course correction that needs to be made, but I don’t need to destroy anyone in the process.”
The author has published a radical self-help playbook, written about pleasure activism for the masses, and curated meme dumps that center joy alongside grief, and it was important to write about a way of learning, of becoming politicized, that felt closer to her own experience. The “corrections” Brown proposes in Loving Corrections are equally as wide-ranging as the topics she’s covered before, relating to everything from responsible cannabis use to checking her own ableism to movement solidarity online and in person. She’s also been heavily involved in the movement for a free Palestine, and in her online work, she tries to stay present without falling into despair. “I spend a lot of my life in pleasure practices that are very intentional, because I want to remember why to be alive,” she says.
The gleeful cruelty with which corrections are often handed down online doesn’t offer much nuance or guidance on how to come into “right relationship,” to borrow a term from Brown. In Loving Corrections, she shares experiences and conversations that remind us that we aren’t starting from square one when we get into it with someone. The book even includes a conversation between Brown and her two sisters, in which they discuss their long-standing practice of holding regular check-ins, especially at the start of in-person visits. ”Especially in this age, where so many relationships are digital or virtual or long distance, this practice is a game changer,” says Brown. “I don’t know what it’s like to be around you when your mood shifts, and I want to know what you need. We often say, ‘What are the headlines of your life now?’ And ‘How can I be supportive to you over the next few days while we’re together?’ It’s amazing how those two simple questions will transform what’s possible.” More than anything, says Brown, she understands her life and her work as a garden, growing abundantly with music, poetry, and long vines of literature.
The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin
I think that everyone on earth, and everyone who cares about being alive, should read The Dispossessed, and in this moment, should read a short story by Ursula called “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” The Dispossessed is this incredible novel where there’s a very Earth-like planet that is capitalist in nature, and then there’s this moon that they have colonized. Anarchists are up on the moon, and they’ve created an anarchist world, and they’re figuring out how to share resources and share power. I think Ursula is brilliant at being a world-builder. She gives us everything you need to know. I don’t think you can go wrong by reading any of her other books. Especially for people who are thinking about gender, go read The Left Hand of Darkness. They visit a world where people don’t have a gender, except when they’re mating once a month, and then they come into one gender or another for the sake of the sexual experience and procreation, and then they go back to being genderless. It’s so dope. She has a lot of books that play with what marriage structures could look like. I always get excited that this white woman who lived in Oregon imagined a lot of the things that I’ve imagined and wrote them very beautifully.
Living for Change, by Grace Lee Boggs
Grace Lee Boggs was a Chinese American woman who threw down with the Black Power movement. She fell in love with James Boggs, who was a Black labor organizer in Detroit. I think she moved to Detroit when she was 38 years old, and she was there until she died at 100. I got to meet her when she was 92, and she was in my life for the rest of hers. Living for Change is her autobiography, in which she tells so much of where she came from, how she created her ideas, why being in solidarity with Black power and Black labor felt like the most strategic use of her brilliance. Jimmy died, and she lived another 20 years, and I think while he was alive there was a way that she was standing just behind him and to the right. That happens sometimes in intellectual pairings and intellectual couples where patriarchy is still slightly present. But then she lived this life where she stepped into the light herself and started writing her own books and sharing her own theories. Some of the biggest ideas that I walk around with are ones that came through her.
She said, “We have to transform ourselves to transform the world,” which I find constantly daunting and also relaxing.
If I’m not willing to transform this in myself, I can’t expect it to change in the world. I learned from Grace that the practice of conversation is the greatest way to create change — really sitting with people and being willing to move from point A to point B together. So much of my time, I would go sit in her house and sit in her living room, and she would tell me what was on her mind.
Games/Game Nights
It’s a huge element of pleasure activism. For me, it’s been very important to recognize that I want to be in relationship with people, not just in conference rooms and movement meetings and crises and rallies and protests. I want to know what people are like in gameplay. I want to know if people collaborate well. I want to know if people are trustworthy. I want to know who’s really ambitious, who’s a good winner, good loser, sore loser. How do the people who are trying to win liberation play?
Going through that initial phase of the pandemic made me hunger for things like this. This is so simple, but now it’s also so sacred to me to be all together in my house. Every single day, I play Mancala, I play Tetris. One of my sweethearts is a big Mancala player, so our love language is playing Mancala all day, but I play Tetris or Water Sort for myself and my brain.
“22nd Century” by Nina Simone
Nina Simone is one of my favorite artists. She’s a jazz singer who was also a revolutionary and a really brilliant thinker. I have been moved by her work. I got to see her perform live in New York at the Beacon Theater. Her song “22nd Century” makes you feel like, Oh my gosh, we’re barreling toward the future. She talks about gender fluidity, about different relationships to the earth and different structures for marriage and different ways of understanding. Even your brain is not your brain. It’s science fiction as a jazz song. I’ve never quite heard anything else like it.
Can you imagine what could change? What changed between the last century and now? In the tunnel of change, I think right now we’re in the birthing canal. We can only just see right ahead of us — can we just get one more inch toward the light? I think it helps sometimes to remember that we were an embryo. We’ve come a long way. We’ve got arms and legs and a brain and eyes and stuff. We don’t know how to use it all. I think we’re so much younger than we understand ourselves to be as a species, and I think we still have so much further to go. But that song always gives me a deep breath and a sense of hope.
What It Takes to Heal, by Prentis Hemphill
Prentis’s book just came out this year, but I’ve known Prentis most of my adult life. To now have this book is an immense gift, and one of the lessons Prentis taught us was, “Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and myself simultaneously.” The book really speaks about boundaries and love and embodiment, and what it looks like to move from being an embodiment of traumatic systems that we’ve been socialized in to becoming an embodiment of love and justice and freedom. What It Takes to Heal is about landing back in the body and then landing back in right relationship, and Loving Corrections is absolutely that. One of the greatest loving corrections we can make is to understand that healing is the ultimate victory. It’s not winning and dominating some opponent. It’s actually healing our relationship with ourselves, each other, the earth. So these two books feel like they should be on the bookshelf touching.
Fumbling Towards Repair, by Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan
It’s a community-accountability workbook that Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan created. They also created something called Just Practice, so they have done trainings around this workbook, and they have held spaces for people. I hear a lot of people asking, “How do we hold each other accountable? What do we do when someone’s done egregious harm, sexual harm, abusive harm, or other things in our community?” This workbook is the answer. I give it to so many people.
Part of my abolitionist dream is, instead of having to call the cops to potentially shoot us in our homes when we’re asking for help, we have to have another option. I think this other option could include mediation — I’ve written about mediation in We Will Not Cancel Us and in Holding Change. But I think there’s a next level from mediation, which are these community-accountability processes and circles. And this workbook is step-by-step, here’s how you actually do it. There’s nothing that we need to know right now that we don’t already know. So it’s really just getting the resources distributed to everyone.