Read, Shake, Appreciate #11
Welcome to Read, Shake, Appreciate! This is your fortnightly round-up of words that made me feel inspired, songs that made me shake my ass, and people who I think deserve some spotlight.
This week I’m reading:
We Will Not Cancel Us by adrienne marie brown
If you resonated with anything I wrote in my last Is It Just Me Or… then this pocket-sized 86 pager is for you. Coming from years of experience in movement mediation and transformative justice, adrienne writes beautifully, gently, and hopefully about what social justice movements might look like without cancel culture. Love and care for community runs through every page, and I’m deeply grateful to adrienne for being one of the first people with a large platform who I witnessed speaking on these things.
Here’s a particularly powerful excerpt:
Call outs have a long history as a brilliant strategy for marginalized people to stand up to those with power. Call outs have been a way to bring collective pressure to bear on corporations, institutions, and abusers on behalf of individuals or oppressed peoples who cannot stop the injustice and get accountability on their own. There are those out of alignment with life, consent, dignity and humanity, who will only stop when a light is shined on their inhumane behaviour.
But many of the call outs burning through our movements today don’t feel aligned with the lineage of this tactic. Right now, call outs are being used not just as a necessary consequence for those wielding power to cause harm or enact abuse, but ton shame and humiliate people in the wake of misunderstandings, contradictions, conflicts and mistakes. I want to place my finger on the destructive power on punitive justice currently unleashed in our movements, and see how we bring abolition, vision, and skill to the wounds.
This week I’m shaking to:
A.O.K by Adrian Eagle
Pure, undeniable good vibes. I’ve been doing some long drives lately and it’s literally impossible to not feel more optimistic about life with this song playing and a sunset on the horizon (even if the horizon is a motorway).
This week I’m appreciating:
Linda is one of the first photographers I did a proper “shoot” with, and over the years she’s only gotten more creative, more original, and more dedicated to representing people and causes that don’t get enough representation. Her work is mind-blowingly beautiful (not the mention the fact that she crafts just about everything she works with) and she happens to also be a golden-hearted human. You can check out what she makes here.
Thanks for reading friends! I’ve put a lot of energy into creating this new space and I really appreciate you being here 🥰 if you ever have the (gender neutral) urge to buy me a drink because you appreciate this space too, you can always go paid for a month (only $5!), and get access to extra One Minute Reminders and community chats! 💜