“It’s Not About Fixing People” – Yes, You Can Tackle Difficult Conversations In A Loving Way
Even for experienced practitioners such as adrienne maree brown, it’s hard to speak to those we love about the biggest issues of our time. An extension of their previous seminal works Emergent Strategy (2017), Pleasure Activism (2019) and We Will Not Cancel Us (2020), Loving Corrections is brown’s latest book exploring how to shift ‘critique’ into feedback, guidance or perspective change by engaging love and being in ‘right relationship’ with one another. The book delves into the most crucial and divisive conversations of our time, including Zionism, gender and ableism.
In the face of polycrises, change can seem impossible and we can often feel debilitated into inaction. Loving Corrections is about embracing the intimate, smaller spaces between us and those close to us, rather than trying to single-handedly tackle the biggest problems of our time.
Writer, activist and facilitator brown got to this place through being lovingly corrected by others when starting out in her career. “People would sit down with me and say, ‘I love you. I care about you. I know that you’re trying to make things right in the world, and [your behaviour] is actually out of alignment with who you are and how you are. Here’s a book you can read, and here’s some basic tenets to understand.” This approach, says brown, was slow and intimate, “and it was always understanding”. Hence, the first page of the book lists several people who have lovingly corrected brown over time.
brown’s Emergent Strategy was a groundbreaking work, thrusting them into circles and spaces which reached even beyond community activism, transformative justice and facilitation. It explores how we can shape social change and collective movements by observing patterns from nature, adaptation and relationships. Inspired by science fiction, particularly the works of Octavia Butler, brown emphasises the importance of flexibility, collaboration and decentralisation.
Pleasure Activism seeks to reclaim the right to pleasure, especially for oppressed, enslaved, displaced and colonised bodies. The book asks, in brown’s words, “how do we make justice and liberation some of the most pleasurable experiences that we can have?” Since the successes of both works, brown has become a widely referenced guide on various social and ecological issues of our time.
“I had done all of this writing, and a lot of it was pointing towards transformative justice and mediation and all these things, but I was wondering, what do we do before we get there?” brown explains. “Before we get to war, before we get to harm, before we get to abuse, before we get to massive conflict that feels so hard to hold. How do we intimately start to be in correction with each other and course correct?”
Loving Corrections is a collection of essays about those course corrections, and brown hopes it leads people to conversations before cutting people out of their lives because they’re “racist or transphobic or ableist”. In We Will Not Cancel Us, brown similarly points to both the benefits and the problems with the ‘cancel culture’ that has dominated the past decade. “Instead of sitting and having a conflict about the relationship and making changes, we were taking it to the internet.”
brown is acutely aware of the fear that permeates culture today; a sense of technological obfuscation and disconnection with misinformation running rampant. “I feel legitimate and righteous fear about the impacts of white supremacy and patriarchy and Zionism and capitalism and other systems that are not about connection and belonging and dignity,” brown tells me. “But I don’t want to live my life from that place.”
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In one essay, Righting Family: Sisters Checking In, brown sits with their sisters Autumn and April, illustrating what loving corrections might look like in a real conversation with those closest to us. It was important here for brown to show what the result of this strategy could be: not perfection, but relationship, intimacy and authentically holding one another accountable. “This book is not about fixing or changing people,” brown continues. “It’s about course correcting together… [asking] how we relate to these major systems that are holding us captive. How do we move towards liberation?”
Taking inspiration from their mentor Grace Lee Boggs, brown’s message with Loving Corrections is taking responsibility for themselves and the relationships that they’re in. Love is key to their work, in that a loving correction enforces the compassionate position that, ‘I’m not trying to throw you away. I’m trying to break you free from a bad idea that is holding you captive, limiting your humanity and limiting the kind of connections you can be in.’ Love is also where boundaries and accountability can stem from, echoing another of brown’s mentors Prentis Hemphill, who says that “boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously”.
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3 Ways To Lovingly Engage In Critical Conversations, by adrienne maree brown
- Timing – “Recognise that if you’re feeling uncomfortable or hurt, or like someone just crossed a boundary, that’s the moment to speak up.”
- Understanding – “Lovingly correct by not expecting immediate changes, but by being in a relationship with the person, and by allowing them space and time to understand your perspective.”
- Honesty – “Loving corrections can feel angry. They can feel like a real confrontation. Love and correction looks a lot of different ways. It’s not always perfectly coherent, and that’s not the goal. The goal is to be honest, to be in the moment, and to be fighting for connection.”
Dalia Al-Dujaili is an Iraqi-British arts writer and producer based in London and the Online Editor of the British Journal of Photography, mainly covering emerging creativity from the SWANA region and various diasporas. Bylines include The Guardian, Dazed, Service95, GQ Middle East, WePresent, Aperture, Atmos, It’s Nice That, Huck and Elephant Art
