The Expert Book Smuggler

We Will Not Cancel Us is a booklet built off of adrienne maree brown’s 2020 blog post “Unthinkable Thoughts: Call Out Culture in the Age of COVID-19”. Aiming to address the way that call out culture impedes movement building from a Black, queer, and feminist viewpoint.

We Will Not Cancel Us encourages readers to question how well the practice of calling out serves us. Does it align with the world we seek to build? In less than 100 pages, brown seeks to show readers alternative paths toward that world.

“In order to generate a future in which we all know we can belong, be human, and be held, we must build life-affirming institutions, including our movements.”

According to brown, movement as sanctuary is where our experiences as humans who have experienced and caused harm are met with centered, grounded invitations to grown. For the author, this means viewing ‘winning’ as healing and not measuring ‘winning’ by anyone’s loss, but instead by breaking cycles of abuse, harm, assault, and systemic oppression. A few examples of putting this into practice include:

• Paying attention to where we feel and/or practice policing & surveillance outside the state.
• Slowing down our initial collective reactions such that violence isn’t met with more violence, but with alternative and satisfying consequences that result in harm reduction.
• Feeling for what is out of alignment with abolition, for what feels like transformative justice, and what feels like radical love in action.

In We Will Not Cancel Us, it is expressed that movements are in danger as we do not know how to handle conflict or move toward accountability in satisfying and collective ways. That we are not engaging in ‘principled struggle’.

Principled struggle: when we are struggling for the sake of something larger than ourselves and are honest and direct with each other while holding compassion.

How does one practice principled struggle? The author suggests this is done by taking responsibility for our own feelings and actions while seeking deeper understanding before responding. When this is not practiced, we may slip into the same reductionist group-think that impedes our ability to manage conflict or practice community accountability and transformative justice.

“The U.S., as a nation, does not choose, or love, life. Not in our policies, in our safety practices, in our relationship to the planet or other nations.”

In 2025, it is clearer than ever to a broad range of people that the United States is being torn asunder, resulting in heightened oppression and violence. Though this has been clear to many racialized groups from the beginning, for those who have yet to experience such violence (white folk), this has resulted in extreme distress. That distress has often turned to misdirected anger towards others struggling beneath the hand of the same oppressor.

This is typically done through online call outs that temporarily soothe the hurt and anger we feel, but fail to effectively end the harm that brought those emotions about. As many organizers have previously stated, call outs have historically been a successful tool for the marginalized to oppose those in power. However, currently call outs are used to shame and humiliate others due to mistakes, misunderstandings, or conflicts.

“We don’t have a collective clarity about the distinctions between conflict, harm, or abuse, but online, we seem to respond to all of it with the same energy- consistently punitive, too often joyful.”

Note: We Will Not Cancel Us makes it clear that this is not applicable to situations such as survivors naming their abusers, but instead toward our tendency to treat all conflict/harm the same.

The author states that instant judgment and punishment are practices of power over others. This is what those in power do to those who cannot stop them or demand justice, and that this is practiced at an individual and collective level. The booklet includes questions to ask yourself before engaging in call outs such as:

• Have there been any private efforts for accountability or conflict resolution?
• Has the accused individual or group avoided accountability? Have they continued to cause harm?
• Does the accused person have significantly more power than the accuser(s)- in what ways? Are they using that power to avoid accountability?
• Is the call out precise? Is the demand for accountability related to the alleged harm?
• Is the only acceptable consequence to those making the call out for the accused to cease to exist?
• Does this feel performative?

Often, instead of supporting the harmed party, we focus ourselves solely on aiming our collective attention towards punishing those accused of harm. In the book, brown clarifies that while call-outs are often necessary, movement spaces should utilize them only as a last resort for situations involving harm and abuse.

“I can’t help but wonder wonder who benefits from movements that engage in public infighting, blame, shame, and knee-jerk call outs? I can’t help but see the state grinning, gathering all the data it needs, watching us weaken ourselves.”

We Will Not Cancel Us suggests that we are terrified of how widespread and act of harm is and that it causes us to point fingers and swiftly remove those we identify as ‘bad’. This urge comes from the desire to protect one another, but can often be used as an act of performing solidarity rather than moving in solidarity.

The book argues that knee-jerk call-outs express that those who cause harm, mess up, or disagree with us cannot change, cannot belong, and must be eradicated. That the bad things in the world are unchangeable and we must disappear the bad until only the good is left. It upholds the following ideas:

• We do not believe we can create a compelling pathway from being harm dowers to being healed and growing.
• We do not believe we can hold the complexity of a gray situation.
• We can only handle binary thinking: good/bad, innocent/guilty, angel/abuser, etc.

Just as the book invites us to remember that the state is watching, listening, and making use of our limitations, current events show us the same. The state is aware that we focus on infighting versus uniting, and they have used that for widespread corruption and oppression. They are unafraid to break the law, as they do not see us as capable of combating such crimes.