Aaah so good. She is the voice we need for the future we want.
adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy is the best book I’ve read since bell hooks’ Will to Change. I’m not sure what it says about me – a straight white man – that the writings that I find most personally and deeply relevant are authored by black gay or bisexual women… but there you have it.
It’s an absolute masterpiece: deeply thoughtful, beautifully self-aware, tender and assertive, confident and curious. It’s not for everyone: one of the things I love about Goodreads is a book can wait contentedly in my “to-read” shelf until the time is right. For me, that time is right now.
I picked the book up four weeks ago, and carried it with me to and from work and various events without opening it. Last week I finally broke ground, and was immediately captivated: yes. This woman is speaking to me. Then I had a challenging and productive conversation with a thought partner, a woman of color. She pushed me and my thinking, in ways that I found provocative, frustrating, and very much consonant with the concepts I was encountering – or better, recognizing as my own inchoate yearnings – in brown’s’ writing. So I returned to it, finishing the book on consecutive flights. And it really is one of those books that I already know will stay with me for the rest of my life.
Reading it transported me back to one of my favorite classes from undergrad, a comparative literature course on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. We read Invisible Man in dialogue with the many referents Ellison was engaging: each week a new book (Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, etc). Each week brought new and deeper insights, a greater appreciation for what Ellison was trying to say.
Emergent Strategy does the same thing: brown brilliantly introduces us to her own literary antecedents (Octavia Butler chief among them) and also brings us into dialogue with the other influences on her life. Mentors like the inimitable Grace Lee Boggs, but also fellow “woes”: friends and colleagues with whom she is together “Working On Excellence”).
Throughout she challenges dominant paradigms, gently peeling back the assumptions that underpin them to reveal what we have known intuitively all along: the Emperor wears no clothes. She does so not to tear down the old, but to transcend it. I’m reminded her of Ken Wilber’s conception that all creation – all leaps of evolution – “transcend and include” those that came before. One of my favorite essays of all time makes this point brilliantly in the context of a liberal arts education, noting that the notion of “creation” and “innovation” (which we tend to erroneously conceive as an exercise in inventing from nothing) is better understood as a process of synthesis. Of taking other ideas/concepts and combining them to form something new, just as hydrogen and oxygen make water. Indeed, this is how I see my own particular value of “creation” in this world: not new concepts per se, but new combinations that hold the potential to illuminate new ideas.
I won’t rehash the concept of emergent strategy here. You should read the book. I found all of it – the six principles – deeply resonant. Yes, I say, yes! But the insight – woven throughout – that I found most compelling in this moment in history is the very notion of emergence… particularly in juxtaposition with the concept of “resistance.” Michelle Alexander’s debut piece in the NY Times made this point well: resistance is fundamentally a reactionary force. It seeks to defend a status quo. Emergence imagines something better: a new way of being, a way of transcending the limitations of the status quo. Properly understood, WE are the emergence. The forces we seek to transcend are the resistance (I’ll adopt the binary here, though like brown I reject it – there is no “them”, only us).
Inevitably I found myself reading in dialogue with the many other influences on my thinking. Brene Brown in particular, visible in adrienne’s observation: “Vulnerability means sharing your needs.” (p. 91) And again later: “I want to feel like we are responsible for each other’s transformation…from broken people and communities to whole ones.” (p. 150) I think here of Brene’s concept of the “wholehearted self.”
The whole book is a gold mine of quotes and concepts, some original, some derivative, some synthesized. This: “We are creating a world we have never seen.” (p. 163) This perhaps the core feature explaining her attraction to science fiction and the work of black futurists like Butler.
I saw myself in the book, and in brown herself… despite our obviously very different lived experiences. Indeed, her impetus for writing the book and the role she conceives for herself is precisely the one I find myself drawn to:
“I am not the beginning or creator of the ideas in this book, nor am I the only one thinking this way. I don’t want to become a bottleneck in any way to these concepts blossoming, particularly in the realm of social justice. I want to be a good conduit.
More precisely, I want to conduit to be a sacred role between generations, and between ways of knowing. My intention is to be a good conduit of these observations, of this wonder, to grow it. I want our generation to be a good conduit of the world we received, the life.” (p. 272)
Yes to all this. Onward and upward. Together.
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Suggested reading for anyone interested in strategy and change
Reviewed in Australia on November 28, 2018