Actress Stephanie Hsu was living in a cooperative in New York when adrienne maree brown’s “Emergent Strategy — Shaping Change, Changing Worlds” came out in 2017. The Oscar-nominated “Everything Everywhere All at Once” actress was already involved with the social justice movement, but wasn’t familiar with brown, a facilitator and activist herself. A friend suggested they go to a book signing at WordUp, a community bookshop in the Bronx, so see brown speak.
Brown’s powerful talk moved Hsu to tears. Hsu asked brown what to do when she was losing hope with the social justice movement, and she says the writer-activist gave her the “perfect” answer, explaining how abolitionist Harriet Tubman guided her own work.
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This segment has been edited for length and clarity.
I had the absolute pleasure and gift of getting to meet adrienne [maree brown] before “Emergent Strategy” came out. She was on a book tour for the release. I hadn't read the book. The book hadn't even come out yet. And the moment she spoke, I literally just felt like I met someone who had taken the time to articulate all the feelings I was feeling about the world at large and social movements, and I just started crying — the kinds of tears that you're not even making an ugly cry face, your face is just neutral, and tears are just flowing.
At the end of that Q&A, I remember asking her, in tears, “What do you do when you feel the change you imagine or dream of isn't happening fast enough?” And she said, “I have the perfect answer for you.” She said, “Whenever I have that feeling, whenever I feel lost, I think of Harriet Tubman. I think of this woman, who was guided only by the light of the stars and had no clear path, but she knew, ‘My people have to be free,’ so she walked back and forth. Just walked back and forth to get her people to the other side of freedom, even if she didn't know the way and only had the light of the stars.”
[There’s] something amazing about being grounded down to the speed of walking and to know that if you continue to walk, because you have no other choice other than to move towards freedom, then you're okay, that if she could do it at that time, then we can still do it now.
I'll read you this quote from Emergent Strategy:
“Some of us build and fight for land, healthy bodies, healthy relationships, clean air, water, home, safety, dignity, and humanizing education. Others of us fight for food, and political prisoners, and abolition and environmental justice. Our work is intersectional and multifaceted. Nature teaches us that our work has to be nuanced and steadfast and more than anything that we need each other at our highest natural glory in order to get free.” — Excerpt from “Emergent Strategy” by adrienne maree brown
