Transcript:

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What gets in the way of accountability? So many things get in the way of accountability. I think one of the first things is that as a culture, we haven't been socialized to really build the muscle of accountability. Accountability is really hard work, it's not just Oh, right, I did something wrong, I'm just gonna say I'm sorry and it's going to be done. We all know those people who do the, someone tells you, hey, that really hurt me and they do the, Oh, my God, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry I did that. It's totally right, you're totally right. That is not accountability, that is actually still about the person, feeling a lot of shame or shame spiraling or trying to make it better. But it's not really saying, Oh, I really recognize that I did something, that hurt this person, that I had an impact on them. So accountability requires a lot of listening to what is it that this person is trying to tell me that I did that impacted them.

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Folks really just want to be seen and heard and understood. And it requires a ton of self reflection. Like, do I have enough inside of me? Do I got myself enough to know that if someone's telling me that I harm them, that I hurt them, that I'm not gonna fall apart, that I'm not a bad person? All those things that we, that a lot of folks go through when they feel like, confronted with something that they've done wrong. And in order to do that, they have to work a lot on themselves to be able to get to the place where they can be accountable. - In my personal experience, and the experience of people I love and care about, it feels like shame gets in the way of accountability. Shame and all of the things that are the fears underneath shame. So like, for me, for example, I feel really terrible, when I've done something wrong, really, really terrible, and really afraid of losing belonging. Like that the person is going to be like, you're terrible. That thing was terrible, and you're terrible, and you suck, and you're that kind of person now and

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I don't wanna be around you anymore. So like, shame, and then fear of loss of belonging, loss of connection, of being judged, like everywhere I go. And I think that, in my experience at least, that shame separates. Shame is something that keeps me from other people. Shame is something that I've seen folks like, makes them either become super, like I when I feel ashamed, I become super hyper-focused on myself, so that I actually can't be accountable to anyone else. Because I'm so feeling like embarrassed, not wanting to be seen, overwhelmed, guilty, that it's actually all about me. And that to get to accountability I actually need to move past shame to actually be able to show up and be like, Hey, I'm here, to be able to respond to you, and not make you have to caretake me in my shame. - What I have seen in people, at least this is the way I have seen this expressed, is that people feel a lot of shame about both being a survivor of violence,

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but also being someone who has caused harm. So I think one of the big shifts we're trying to make is really understanding how everyday violence is, how normalized it is. How any one of us can be a survivor of violence, and probably is a survivor of violence, and how any one of us can also cause harm. And yet also not just make that kind of, a sort of neutral soup in which we all swim, but that there are situations in which the actions that we've taken, the attitudes that we have need to be addressed in a specific way. - I think we're trained that to admit harm is to admit to being a terrible person. And so I think we flee from accountability, we don't wanna face the fact that we've hurt someone. I think, mostly in the culture, we're trained to avoid it, or to protect our intentions or our innocence. - We just have so much practice and rehearsal

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of doing things in a punitive way, a way that's coming from skepticism, rather than abundance or trust, rather than reorienting to what it looks like to bring everyone along with us. Knowing that in order to do so, we need to open ourselves up to a lot more nuance and contradiction. That it's not as easy as the sort of Judeo-Christian hegemony, or hegemonic idea that there's a right and wrong, there's the righteous and there's the wrong. And really holding that there's complexity, that we're all fallible, we've all made mistakes, we all cause harm. It's not all to the same degree, it's not all balanced. But that there's a belief that we can heal from that, that we can hold that. - We wanna see ourselves as outside of harm, like we're the ones who've been hurt and it's other people who are doing the hurting. And that we're on the right side of justice, we're on the right side of these systems. And so it becomes, you know it kind of ends up being defined

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as a moral flaw that we've hurt other people or that we've made mistakes, or that we've created harm or been complicit in harm. But actually, I think it's the opposite. I think we could actually do much better if we stepped into it and recognized it, that it's not surprising that we might cause harm or be complicit in harm, because that's what we're trained into, that's what we're encouraged, we're pulled into these systems. - White supremacy culture seeps into interpersonal relationships, families, communities, nonprofit organizations that might have the best of intentions or values, and there are contradictions. They might say, we're here for racial justice, we're here for workers justice, we're here for migrant justice, and that doesn't mean that they are incapable of harm, of retribution, and of all the patterns that we've been acculturated into, that are steeped in avoidance of conflict, avoidance of shame, and on the other side of

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a righteous infliction of shame. Whether it's inside or outside of our movements, we have a culture of finger wagging, of shaming, of distancing the people who are right or righteous from those who've caused harm. And so all of that baggage is what gets in the way of accountability.

- I think we're taught to lie a lot. And I think that we're all really scared of not belonging. - A lot of how we get trained to be in the world is about protecting our own interests, being right, protecting our egos having a sense of importance. And accountability asks you to strip some of that away. Accountability asks you to put your ego aside, to acknowledge your interrelationship with other people, and maybe not just somebody you did harm to but kind of an ecosystem or a cluster of people who might be involved in your life,and it asks you to commit to being in relationship

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to people in a deep way. And I think there are a lot of challenges to that. Some of that is the individualism that I talked about. Some of that is that we also really get socialized into vengeance and punishment as responses to harm, and kind of undoing that impulse to immediately go for kind of what's the most thing I can do to this person to let them know that they hurt me, gets in the way of holding people accountable because sometimes the rush to vengeance erodes the possibility of having somebody in a more accountable process. - Our norms of punishing someone when they've done something wrong really get in the way of accountability. It's a matter of incentives, right? So if you own up to something, and then everyone's gonna agree that you're a terrible person, and you're not allowed to be around us anymore, and we all hate you, why would you do that? Right? And that starts as children, when if you are bad

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or do the wrong thing, a lot of times you're punished. And there are alternate ways of raising children that are about the fact that children have agency, children can consent, children can practice autonomy, and I think that kind of works against that thing that a lot of people are socialized into, which is kind of a punishment and blame mentality that really feeds into justification for incarceration. Right? Because if people who do bad things are bad people and need to be kept away from the rest of us, then why would you own up to being one of those bad people who had done a bad thing? - One of the first things that needs to be there in order for folks who've hurt or abused somebody to actually admit that they did it and work towards resolving the harm is, we have to make it more worth it for them to admit what they did than it is for them to lie and deny about it. As an abuse survivor, as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse specifically, I can say that it's endemic,

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among survivors, like most of us have the experience as survivors of the people who have harmed us being like, you're crazy, that didn't happen. There are a lot of people who honestly are like, if I admit that I did this, my life is over, there's no way back, I'm gonna lose absolutely everything that I have. I will have no friends, no community, no job, no home, nothing. And they're not wrong. I would say, especially for people who perpetuate childhood sexual abuse or harm, but also for folks who do other forms of harm. I was in a Generation Five training years ago now that stuck with me ever since where the facilitator was like, Okay, so what mechanisms out there exist? She was like, Okay, what do most survivors want? And everybody was like, they want the person who harmed them to admit that they did it, so that we can stop feeling nuts, like, am I remembering this wrong? Blah blah blah blah blah. And she was like, Okay, great. What is there out there in society that supports people for doing it, like not giving them a cookie, but being like, Hey, we're really glad that you were honest and here's we go from here. And there's dead silence in the room. And I was just like, right.

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When there's not models that people know about that's like, you can say that you did something bad and you will not be rejected forever, you can actually make repair, and there's still a place for you in the community, no one will do it. And the times that I've seen people who have caused harm actually admit it has been when it's been like, Hey, you fucked up, but you know what? You're not the only one and there's actually a road back if you'll admit what you did and if you can move towards listening to what the survivor and their supporters are asking you for and do the work. - What would it look like if accountability wasn't scary? Accountability will never be easy or comfortable, but it also doesn't have to be scary. And I think right now we live, in our culture, in our society we use accountability almost as a threat. Right? And people are scared of accountability. And people aren't even as scared of doing something wrong as they are of being caught, and maybe then being held accountable.

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But what if accountability wasn't a scary thing? What if it was something that was actually looked at as an opportunity and a place for growth, and something that was generative.