This Black History Month, I am sharing 28 stories of Black women who shaped me and showed me the way towards liberation. Because Black women are often not cited for their ideas, I thought this would be one way to give flowers to those who influenced me.
For Day 3, I’d like to honor the work of adrienne maree brown. adrienne is a writer and activist, whose work draws inspiration from Octavia Butler and patterns in nature. I’ve learned a great deal from adrienne’s writing about accountable relationships and how accountability is critical to solidarity and collective liberation. In their writing about our connection to each other, brown says, “The world, the values of the world, are shaped by the choices each of us makes. Which means my thinking, my actions, my relationships, and my life create a front line for the possibilities of the entire species. Each one of us is an individual practice ground for what the whole can or cannot do, will or will not do” To me, this means our actions, beliefs, and relationships create our collective experience. Being in solidarity is about how we support each others’ autonomy, how we make commitments for how we treat each other, how we protect and care for one another, and how we work to maintain boundaries needed for liberation. (https://lnkd.in/grvZvpz5)
Accountable relationships require practice - for many of us being accountable to creating the conditions for others’ liberation will require new ways of seeing the world and other people. For liberation to thrive, it is important to commit to the ongoing practice of collective liberation - of seeing ourselves as responsible for how our actions create conditions for others. It means being accountable to repair when we stumble and cause harm. And as brown writes, it also means being open to the accountability actions of others. Which to me, means being open to apologies, acts to repair harm, and to forgiveness. (https://lnkd.in/ggX3GTHK ).
I find the way adrienne writes about accountable, right relationships to be truly beautiful and inspiring. There’s so much hope in the idea of seeing our reality as a combination of our commitments to each other and how we act to live up to those commitments. Accountability is not about perfection - it is about making agreements about how we want to be together and then working through the mess of life together towards the vision of those agreements. I hope to approach my own relationships that way. Thank you to adrienne maree brown for creating roadmaps for accountability for us to follow! #28LoveLetterstoBlackWomen#BlackHistoryMonth2023#Day3
Image Description: American writer and activist Adrienne Maree Brown discusses her book "Octavia's Brood" on "The Laura Flanders Show" in 2015