You are invited to the next Breath Door Show Friday February 27th @ Brooklyn Coop Federal Credit Union - comedy toward the solidarity economy - come or tell a friend. Fundraising for East New York Community Land Trust who is buying a community center/permanent home for their organizing.
Toni Cade Bambara asks: “Where are the evolved, poised-for-light adepts who will assume the task of administering power in a human interest, of redefining power as being not the privilege or class right to define, deform, and dominate but as the human responsibility to define, transform, and develop?”1
Power as the human responsibility to define, transform, and develop. WHEW. Sounds pretty good. I wrote about this designation, poised-for-light-adept before: here. I find it utterly gorgeous and energizing….restorative, moving. It gets me going! The pflas are out here, are at large. The first one I wrote about was Alok.
PFLAs embody this sort of power, they live a commitment to freedom and love. If enthusiasm is the experience of feeling possessed by something greater, and the greater is freedom/love/chaos/mystery, they have surrendered to and chosen this possession.
The second person in my roster of PFLAs is Autumn Brown. I have known her mainly as the co-host of How to Survive the End of the World, the podcast that she does with her sister adrienne maree brown. Lately I have been listening to more interviews of her on other shows because she says things that ricochet around my brain for weeks at a time, that bother me.2 I say bother but I mean provoke, push me to change, make me rethink, make things click into place.
She is a literal pop star, has released two albums, and hearing her describe her process of bringing them into the world was very profound.3 She is also publishing a book later this year, Temper: Practicing Freedom in an Unfree World on fugitivity. (substack thinks fugitivity is misspelled which feels telling about where we are right now.) Her work is instructive and motivating.
I’ll note that I am thinking about what it means to learn from fugitivity as a spiritual and political concept as a white American more closely related to slave owners, socialized to empathize and ally with the ruling class. Unearthing this legacy of domination and dissociation in myself has only been possible because of the work of Black Feminists like Autumn and so many others. So much of my allegiance is unconscious and embodied, has generations of inertia around it, and will take a lot of practice to give up. I do believe that we all have to steal ourselves (in her words) in different ways based on our positions, and steel ourselves to the cultural toxins that keep all this fuckery alive in us and the worlds. It’s a generations long process, I’m trying to do my little slice with everything I’ve got.
Anyway, Autumn Brown is poised for light, she is adept, her clarity is kind of staggering. Some of her framings feel like a harsh tonic, they hurt going down, they burn, but you know they’re doing something needed to your guts.
My quote log is here, they’re long, so I put them all at the end, but they are here for your digging! Emphasis mine.
Autumn Brown: Anti-Oppressive Facilitation for Democratic Process on Next Economy Now ↩
The Way Your Blood Beats Listening Party & The Animal in You Listening Party ↩
Freedom Practice in an Unfree World with Autumn Brown on Next Economy Now ↩
Fugitive Practice with Autumn Brown on Becoming the Vision ↩
Freedom Practice in an Unfree World with Autumn Brown on Next Economy Now