Carolina QuotesSome of the things that have most astounded me that have come to pass in our recent history have been the ways we have galvanized and changed the culture and conversation around sexual harassment, harm, assault, and violence through the #MeToo movement and understanding that that change was made possible because of a lot of people at a relatively small scale being willing to tell their stories, tell their truths, and begin to make interventions for themselves by stepping out into the light. Concurrently, we've seen a major shift in the culture and the conversation around abolition and prison systems and the preciousness of Black life through the work of Black Lives Matter and the Movement for Black Lives. And with both movements there have been massive learning edges.
adrienne maree brown Carolinian
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- work
- Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility (2023)
- year
- 2023
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“Some of the things that have most astounded me that have com…” adrienne maree brown. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-F6B26803B1. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/f6b26803b1
More from adrienne maree brown
I don’t avoid the “activist guilt” that’s tied to devoting yourself to justice, but... I certainly examine it. I believe it's tied to the truth that, as an individual, I can never do enough in the face of all the intersecting injustices of my life and time. But I sometimes look at how far I've come, in my lifetime, in my lineage. How much repression I have cast off, how much oppression I have negated, how I went from homophobic to pansexual, from military brat to post-nationalist/post-capitalist. I feel free a lot, I surround myself with good revolutionary people...and I think, ok padawon. This may be an insignificant life in some grand epic scape, but in the scale of my life, I am doing my best and really getting a lot done for a lazy weed lover.
Can we be honest — at least honest that there’s not love in the way we’re doing it now? Because I think that was also what was hurting my heart, was people being like, Yeah, we just have to love each other — and then we’re doing the most awful, awful dismissals and disposals of each other.
The first interactions I had with the ideas of abolition work were around the system of slavery. [For people living during that time,] it felt impossible that that system could end and there could be some other way of functioning that didn't rely on Black people being enslaved. And I think we're in a similar moment now. It's impossible to imagine what our societies would do, what cultures would do, what communities would do if we didn't have prisons.