Keith Runyan

“Accountability isn’t punishment, though it is frequently wielded as such.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

“Knee-jerk call outs say: those who cause harm or mess up or disagree with us cannot change and cannot belong. They must be eradicated. The bad things in the world cannot change, we must disappear the bad until there is only good left.
But one layer under that, what I hear is:
We cannot change.
We do not believe we can create compelling pathways from being harm doers to being healed, to growing.
We do not believe we can hold the complexity of a gray situation.
We do not believe in our own complexity.
We do not believe we can navigate conflict and struggle in principled ways.
We can only handle binary thinking: good/bad, innocent/guilty, angel/abuser, black/white, etc.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

“I want our movement to feel like a vibrant, accountable space where causing harm does not mean you are excluded immediately and eternally from healing, justice, community, or belonging.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

“I want us to ask who benefits from our hopelessness, and to deny our oppressors the satisfaction of getting to see our pain. I want them to wonder how we foment such consistent and deep solidarity and unlearning. I want our infiltrators to be astounded into their own transformations, having failed to tear us apart.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice