In Loving Corrections, activist adrienne maree brown’s new collection of essays, the often fraught work of correction—which is to say, effecting some personal, professional, and/or political change, sometimes by confronting other people espousing harmful ideas—is rooted in a place of mutual trust, and a shared vision for the future.
This isn’t to say that the vision is always rosy. The author, who uses she/they pronouns, speaks openly about the dangers that racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, anti-Blackness, climate denial, and other social scourges pose to our very survival—but never without emphasizing just how much adjustment and healing can accomplish. Vogue spoke to brown about drawing inspiration from Grace Lee Boggs and Octavia Butler, making “loving corrections” within familial relationships, and finding political solidarity in their home base of Durham, North Carolina. The conversation has been edited and condensed.
Vogue: How did the process of putting this book together compare to previous projects?
adrienne maree brown: This one felt more like realizing: Oh, I’m up to something in the writing that I’m doing, and I could pull all of that something together and understand it better. I had been writing these essays, a lot of which came out of some heartbreak or some moment of feeling like, We’ve got to do better than this, and one came out as a word for white people relinquishing the patriarchy. I’d also been writing a column for Yes! magazine called Murmurations that was really giving me a chance to dive in deeper about accountability. As I was looking at those sets of work, I was like, there’s something aligned here, which feels very rooted in the way I used to facilitate. That’s the loving correction—the thing of, okay, we’ve gone off course, and we can get ourselves back on course. There’s a way that I can hold your hand and we can disagree, and we can keep moving forward towards something that lands with us together, rather than something that lands with us at war.
For those who haven’t read the book yet, would you be able to offer an example of an opportunity for “loving correction” that might come up in everyday life?