Transcript:

0:00

MIA MINGUS: Accountability is, I often think about it in like three different sections: that it's apologizing, making amends, and changing your behavior so the harm doesn't happen again. And obviously that includes understanding your impact, that includes understanding the impact on you as well as the person that was harmed or people who were harmed, as well as the community. Understanding, you know, all of the negative effects it has, all of that stuff. But I feel like, the pieces that feel, that I've learned are really important are: making sure you apologize, like an actual apology, doing the work to make amends if you can, and especially working to change your behavior so that the harm doesn't happen again.

00:40

PRIYA RAI: We love using the word accountability and we all have different definitions of actually what that looks like. So I think that accountability is in short, this is a definition that comes from an organization called the Northwest Network, it is being responsible for your choices and the consequences of your choices. I think that's a really simple and beautiful sentence that actually means a lot. And what I've come to learn in practice is that really means like, doing all of the hard work that you need to do to really sit with your feelings. So one, recognize what your feelings are, which is really hard work. Two sit with uncomfortable feelings. Three, really be able to peel apart the layers of how and why did you commit harm in the way that you did or did you act outside of your values. And then making a plan to be able to shift the things that need to shift so you don't make that same choice moving forward. And I think that's actually really complicated and takes a long time. I think nothing about accountability is simple. It's really about how do you put in the work to make sure you can really understand like, why did I make the choice that I made. And unless you can do that you can't make a plan to do something different next time.

01:53

RJ MACCANI: It's about doing sorry. It's an active process. Accountability is going to involve actually sitting with the harm that we've caused, sitting with the impacts of that harm, the way it's rippled out in a person's life in that person's… the lives of that person's loved ones. Accountability is going to be about figuring out what are the actions I can take to make things as right as possible, given that I can't go back in time and change what I did. And accountability also means like looking inward and thinking about what's the transformation that I need to make to ensure that I'll never cause that harm again.

02:34

ESTEBAN KELLY: Accountability means that you're showing up to be in a relationship or to be in a community.

02:42

SONYA SHAH: Accountability is a fierce, radical, amazing way to choose to stay in relationship to each other while acknowledging that harm can happen, and actually, that we're all going to hurt each other at some point, right? So it's this radical way of saying: I choose you, I choose relationship, I choose community. I'm going to stay in community with you. I'm not, there's no throwaway. We can't throw each other away. And that we're going to harm each other. It's going to happen, right? Get two people in a room, it is going to happen. And the spectrum can be this big, of harm, and the spectrum can be all the way to rape and child sexual abuse and, you know, homicide, right? So I think that's really important to say.

03:29

SHIRA HASSAN: So accountability is a really deep process of acknowledging harm and then sitting with the impact of that harm and then working through to transformation so that you include it in who you are, know it about yourself, and make a commitment towards changing that thing. It's a long-term process.

03:52

ELLIOTT FUKUI: I think accountability is essentially a way that we can respect each other's dignity and humanity while also recognizing that everybody makes mistakes. And so accountability is really more of a process than an arrival, right? It's really about exploring the ways that we can be better to each other and more mindful of how our actions have impact.

04:14

ADRIENNE MARIE BROWN: I define accountability as being responsible for your actions, being able to say, yes I did that and I understand the implications. I understand the impacts of that. And I think it's often shared. I very rarely think accountability is something that's just like an individual thing. It's usually like there's a level of individual accountability inside of a structure inside of assessments of relationships or assumptions that have been existing in a relationship.

04:47

STAS SCHMEIDT: When I think about accountability, I think people often talk about holding someone else accountable, but I feel like it really starts with holding yourself accountable. And so when I think about what that actually means, it is really about thinking about your choices, thinking about the options that you have, your desires and your drives, your values, and making, being aware of your agency within those different competing things. Recognizing your ability to make choices that align or having made choices that didn't align with your values. And then figuring out what it takes to address any impact on yourself or on others based on those choices.

05:25

LEA ROTH: Yeah, I would say that at bare minimum it's not denial, right? It's not telling someone that their experience didn't happen. It's not deflecting your responsibility. So at minimum just accepting that something happened that you were part of and contributed to. And then, kind of, you know ideally you would get to a space where you can identify your agency and the choices that you made that led to an outcome that may have harmed someone.

05:53

STAS: I think as consent educators we find that there always is a choice, even if people feel like there isn't a choice. And there's a degree of owning that power and identifying, even just imagining the ways that you could create choices in situations. Because often people deflect accountability by by feeling like they didn't have any ability to do something different.

06:11

SONYA: Accountability has to become, I love this idea that it has to become a norm, a cultural social norm. Like it should be like, we're going in the car with my kids and I'm like: did you put your seatbelt on? How are you feeling today? Are you happy or sad? Is there anything you need to be responsible for today? Right? Like we know about the seatbelt campaign and what it did. So the accountability campaign can do the same thing. And the reality is that it's true, it's like so freaking hard to do. It's the hardest thing to do because it requires so much self-reflection and dealing with my shame and oh my god, did i do something wrong? It requires that we deal with the fact that we don't come from a culture that is socialized to care about each other. We haven't developed, we have let supremacy and being right and capitalism and patriarchy create the divisions of our otherness, right? We have to, we have to hold those things, right? It requires that we begin a culture of coming from empathy, from listening, from being socialized to care for each other and putting that at the center.

07:18

KAI LUMUMBA BARROW: So I think this issue of accountability is maybe one that we should spend more time really talking about, because it is key to the question of transformative justice, you know? Community accountability practices require that we have a shared idea of what accountability actually means, that A, we have a shared idea that we're a community. And B, that we have ways to remind each other that we are a community and we are accountable to each other, right? So that might have to be revisited on the regular.

07:58

MARTINA KARTMAN: When I think about accountability, I think about it in layers. So there's both, sort of like the self-accountability that we do, right? So that requires us to be clear about what our values are and conscious of our actions, and requires that individuals have a practice around checking whether or not their actions are in alignment with their values. It means doing the hard work of understanding when we cause harm, what that harm was, what the impact was. And it requires the individuals actually, like, are in a real question about why that happened. So if somebody causes harm it means that you're asking yourself like the many why's. So not just why did that happen that day? But really, what's going on with me that allowed for this kind of violence or this kind of harm to come from me? And that might mean like actually doing our own healing work. It might mean actually understanding our own trauma and being able to demonstrate insight. And then there's like, the next layer of accountability that i think about is accountability in relationship, right? Accountability with each other. That means that we're actually doing something about it, that we're either showing up to hear about the impact of that harm or to apologize if that's what's called for. And it means that we're actually like, cutting the behavior out that was going on and then that we're doing the long-term work of making sure that doesn't happen again, right? So like doing whatever work needs to happen for a particular person to be in right relationship with themselves and with folks around them, and that they have the skills to have loving and equitable relationships.

09:35

LEAH LAKSHMI PIEPZNA-SAMARASINHA: It begins with someone being like, yeah, I did that. You're right, I did that. You know, I don't want it to be true that I did that, but I did that. And then I think it's a grappling with what does it mean that I did that? And really listening to the harm that's been caused which often, you know I think often we kind of think of that as just coming from the survivor, but often it's coming from people who are around the survivor. Like I can think of a process I'm in where the survivor's been harmed a lot, but I'm also a point where I'm like, you know I'm really, I have some things to say, too, about how this has affected me as someone who's part of this community, right? I think of it as a willingness to sit and listen to the truths of the harm that's been caused and really sit with them and think about it and journal about it and meditate on it and really be like, curious about it and work through all the levels of shame and self-hatred and really dig to like, okay so what's what's the core? Where did that come from? What were the conditions and the systems that made me make that choice, you know? And I think that's something that can be done on the person who caused harm's own. I think it's also really held by community stuff. I think like, I'm thinking about different intersections of disability and neurodivergence and harm and I mean, I'll name myself. I'm someone who's newly, you know, grasping being on the dissociation spectrum and having parts of me that broke off through trauma when I was younger. And I'm in conversation with like a few people who have similar experiences of neurodiversity where I'm like, okay so that angry ten-year-old part of me that sometimes screams, I hate you, you know at somebody, okay that's not adult me, but that's still me. How do I sit with that part of myself and be like, what does that part need so maybe they don't do that in the same way, but they're still getting their needs met, you know? And i think that there's actually, I mean this might be going like really far afield for some folks, but I think that actually that's something that's a principle or a strategy that could work even for people who aren't, whose harm isn't coming from their neurodivergence or isn't intersecting with it, around like, what need were you getting met by causing harm? What does that need in order for you not to be causing harm in order to get that need met? I'll also say, I think most people, in my experience doing this work, you know we all really want the kind of like, grand prize of the person who caused harm admits they did it and does the deep soul searching work and like really rebuilds themselves and is in an ongoing process around you know, change. And you may or may not get that all the way. And then there's other things that sometimes are more concrete around the apology or the, I don't want you to be in the same room with me for a while. Or you know, if we go both get asked to be on the same panel, I need you to step back and I need you to tell them why, you know? The I in this case is the survivor. I need you to pay for my therapy, I need you to do this and that. And I think something that I've been talking about with Ejeris Dixon, I've heard her say, and different people like Shira [Hassan] and Mariame [Kaba] and different people, talk about the fact that you know, there's no accountability process that's actually going to make whatever rape or violence or murder that happened not happen, right? I want to name that because I think that it's important to also name that if the person who caused harm is still not willing to accept any accountability or responsibility or even be like, yeah, what you said happened happened, that the things that we do to build new lives and communities is a form of accountability and change and it counts.

12:58

ESTEBAN: Many times people who are involved in an accountability process begin it and enter that room, enter that space before they've really understood or agreed that there's something that they need to be accountable for. So what you have is the relationship. They're accountable to people, they're accountable to community, or project, or something that is a response to an invitation to show up. And then the work begins.

13:27

NURI NUSRAT: Being willing to recognize that we have impact on other humans and beings and living creatures, and that some of those impacts are harmful. And sometimes we do things that harm people, and that we want to make repair. That we should make repair for that. And we're actually, like I'm actually willing to look at myself and like, the reasons that I've done it, try to repair it to the person that I've harmed and like, their people. But also that I'm willing to do the internal work that it takes to not do it again, right? And to actually like, not just not do it again, but come up with a new way of being that actually feels helpful, healing, right?

14:09

MIMI KIM: When I first started doing this work I was interested in a notion of accountability that was much more around how can we hold somebody accountable to address harm that they've caused. I now see, I think, a deeper way of thinking of accountability, or perhaps a different word that we can come up with depending on who we're talking with, as something that's more grounded in one's sense of self in the world, one's values around who they want to be, who they want to be to each other, who they want to be to people that they love. And I think if we think of accountability more in that, using that approach, that people in general feel more comfortable with it and that we can get at a deeper and more meaningful way of addressing the ways in which people really want to be in the world and how they haven't been that person, and how they can make changes or ask changes in the conditions that we face right now in order to have all of us be the kind of people that we need to be in order to thrive and survive on this planet.

15:25

SHIRA: This is about making accountability irresistible. This is about making it something that everyone wants to do to be towards, to be together towards ending violence. This is about making accountability realistic, approachable, and something that's achievable. And something that doesn't feel terrifying. And so how do we make an individual be accountable is actually a bigger question about how do we make accountability something that people feel like they can do, and feel like they're not terrified of.

15:56

SONYA: I think that accountability is the opposite of punishment, right? Punishment is basically saying you have no humanity, your humanity doesn't matter, we're going to lock you up and throw away the key. And accountability is the opposite. It's saying, you still matter. This still matters. Our relationship matters. But something's been done and we want to do something to repair it.