I’ve included a voice recording here at the top if you’d prefer to listen:
“Does she have people of color that she’s accountable to?”
The question, posed a bit sanctimoniously by a young female movement organizer (let’s call her Anna), took me off guard. I was a staff member at a retreat led by a contemplative Christian spiritual teacher, an older white woman; Anna’s question was posed in reference to the teacher. The attendees consisted mostly of older white professionals in their 50’s to 70’s who followed her from event to event. I was one of a smaller group of repeat attendees who were in our 30’s and early 40’s and were considered the young ‘uns.
Anna and her friends were in their 20’s, racially and economically diverse members of a social justice/service program for postcollegiates run by the Episcopal Church; they had been invited to attend, free of charge, in an attempt to make the teacher’s work more accessible and to diversify the community. Inevitably, they began brewing a revolt. The retreat container felt cult-like to some of them, the meditation and rituals made some of them feel uncomfortable, the whole thing was too white and reeked of privilege.
I don’t blame them for this reaction. From my perspective, sitting between the two ends of the age spectrum, it was a clash of cultures that was bound to happen. The activists had flown from a large northern city to be plunked down in rural southern Appalachia and asked to meditate, listen to long lectures on arcane mystical concepts, and get vulnerable with a bunch of white suburbanites in small groups. This is generally not the sort of thing one should sign up for unless they are really into it. In this case, I got the impression that many of them had been encouraged to come along for the ride to make up numbers.
The retreat organizers, for their part, were some of the loveliest, kindest people I know; people who had encouraged, supported, and made it possible for me to attend. They believed the teaching and practices taught at the retreat were genuinely life-changing and were excited to be able to share their resources, spiritual and material, with the young people. Were they also driven by a desire for relevance and progressive credibility points? Probably. I say that with no judgement; it’s a pretty universal human desire to be liked and approved of.
In the middle of the week-long retreat, rumor spread that the activists were planning some sort of confrontation with the larger group. I took on the role of peacemaker and struck up private conversations with some of the activists to gauge their concerns and facilitate an appropriate response. This is how I came to be confronted with Anna’s question.
From Anna’s perspective, what was most important were not the intentions of the teacher and retreat organizers, but the impact she and her friends were experiencing. They felt alienated and unsupported; for her this was indicative of an unconscious privilege and racism that festered within. The solution was to build a system of accountability wherein the white, middle-class teacher and her deputies allowed all their actions to be reviewed and examined by outside experts with the right identities.
How to manage corporate peons (and kids)
The words “accountable” and “accountability” made their way into English in the 14th century from Old French via the Norman aristocracy. The roots lie in the Latin computare, a compound of com, “together,” and putare, which can mean “to settle,” “to ponder,” or “to render judgement or valuation,” all meanings derived from the Proto-Italic putos, “to purify or cleanse.” Perhaps we can understand computare, rendered in English as “count,” to mean something like “to work together to get to what is essential; to understand the heart of things between us.”
Interestingly, the other meaning of the word count, as a title or rank of nobility, has a slightly different, though related etymology: it comes from the Latin comes, “companion” or “friend.” Over time it became associated specifically with friends of the emperor who rendered service or acted as delegates, eventually becoming a formalized appointment with perks and privileges.
Whatever the original circumstances that gave birth to computare, in the Imperial Roman system that would lay the foundation for modern Western civilization, the squishy billowing shapes of ideas and words became firm and angular, streamlining processes of standardization and replication for maximum efficiency. The messy process of figuring things out in relationship became a system of checks and balances, columns in a ledger tallying debits and credits, losses and gains, obligations and profits. To be accountable is to give a justification for one’s actions to a superior by doing the math. Occasionally accountability went in the other direction, as with a king to his nobles, who, after all, outnumber him.
By the 20th century, accountability became a key concept in corporate managerial hierarchy. An employee is accountable to his manager for fulfilling production quotas, the manager is accountable to the CEO for budget expenditures, the CEO is accountable to the shareholders for returning profits. The man at the bottom counts the hours, days, and weeks of his life as they are turned into gold for the men at the top, believing that it will all come out even in the final reckoning, 40 years into the future when he is able to retire and finally get his life back.
Modern management theory conceives of accountability not simply as a quality of accepting responsibility for ones duties, roles, and behaviors, but as a process which subjects every decision and action to a cost-benefit analysis as well as monitoring and oversight. Accountability becomes a process in which one has an “obligation to explain his or her actions to another party who has the right to pass judgment on the actions as well as to subject the person to potential consequences for his or her actions” and an expectation that they will be subject to “overt monitoring and evaluation.”1
In the 1970’s, accountability theory leapt into the education world, launching the accountability “movement” and transforming K-12 schooling in the US. It was no longer enough to measure student achievement and ensure adequate funding. Students were pushed to strive for “excellence” and increase “output,” and teachers were asked to justify every action: “Now results, and a record of the cost of these results, are being compared and educators are being made to answer for them,” wrote one self-satisfied reformer in 1988.2 Reaching beyond the laudable goals of cultivating a sense of agency, responsibility, and love for learning, accountability initiatives like the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 demanded teachers and students be pressed and formed in a system of standardized, replicable interventions and outcomes.
Reconciliation become accusation
At the same time, another move toward “accountability” was taking shape. During the 80’s and 90’s, left-wing peace and justice movements were seeking alternatives to what they saw as an increasingly punitive and harmful justice system. As corrections budgets were slashed and states decided educating prisoners were too expensive, prisons became increasingly privatized and corporatized and inmates used as a source of cheap (and unpaid) labor. Tough sentencing laws led to millions of young and disproportionately poor and black men being incarcerated for life with little hope of rehabilitation.
The Restorative Justice movement (now often called Transformative Justice) was birthed out of the non-violent, peace-oriented Mennonite and Quaker traditions as an alternative to punishment for violent offenders. The purpose was to develop a process for accountability to the local community in situations where clear harm was committed and a perpetrator convicted by a court of law, and it drew from traditional practices of indigenous people in North America and New Zealand. Among the principles of RJ were that the process should be voluntary, non-coercive, collaborative, and cooperative. It was designed to occur in a relational context, with the families and friends of the victim and perpetrator participating, and to ultimately re-integrate the offender into the community. In this process, accountability returned to the oldest sense of computare: working together to determine the heart of the matter. In the event that a perpetrator was unwilling to participate in the process, RJ recognized the need for coercive justice.3
Over time, the principles of RJ filtered into the general culture of progressive change making circles, particularly non-profit organizations where deeply-held values of equality were in conflict with the hierarchical management systems required to operate. What was originally designed for violent crime became adapted to the more nebulous realm of interpersonal conflict, though still occuring within the context of a clearly defined community with clear roles and/or lines of accountability, and with frameworks like Marshall Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication used to support the process.
As RJ’s accountability process trickled down further, removed from its original context and the communities of practice that supported it, it’s become a vague set of ideas absorbed by the children of the 80’s, 90’s and 00’s. What we have now in contemporary social justice circles is a strange brew concocted by people who have grown up shaped by an educational movement that seeks to maximize conformity and pliancy: the attempt to remedy relational “harm” in communities through corporate management mechanisms of coercion and control. The consequences:
These “communities” and the relationships that comprise them are often ill-defined. It might be a climate action group comprised entirely of volunteers, an online forum for queer high-schoolers, or people who regularly tweet about disability rights. In any of these cases, it’s not clear that anyone can claim the reasonable expectation of accountability, nor are there structures to support a process.
In an attempt to justify coercive methods, harm and violence are defined down to mean “anything that make me feel uncomfortable or threatened,” and cease to have any real meaning. (See Sarah Schulman’s Conflict Is Not Abuse)
People make claims that “impact” matters more than intent, ignoring the fact that we very often have a choice in how we choose to let things impact us. In addition, the left’s race-to-the-bottom Oppression Olympics creates an incentive to overstate impact. This allows all sorts of manipulation of accountability mechanisms for personal gain and the avoidance of self-reflection.
Even when softer, less punitive styles of accountability are attempted, it’s often a passive-aggressive end-run around learning healthy adult behaviors, like how to communicate clearly and hold differences of opinion and perspective with respect. For instance, people who never learned to ask for what they want honestly (and receive a “no”) turn around and blame others for failing to read their minds. Rather than work things out interpersonally, there’s always a need to appeal to some outside process or authority to adjudicate.
Accountability becomes a way for someone who feels powerless and inadequate to assert their power by enforcing conformity and compliance to their agenda
Even an RJ or non-violent process, which seeks to be non-coercive, has an element of coercion for the offender. When the alternative is prison, you’d be a fool not to choose it; in the setting of a non-profit work place, one’s job is presumably on the line. This is reasonable— violent crime poses an existential threat to a community, and an organization must have employees who are willing to subordinate themselves to its mission and work well with others if it is going to accomplish anything.
But it’s harder to justify this kind of coercion in loose-knit, voluntary “communities.” When there are no specific standards that people are consenting to be held to, no due process for those accused of wrongdoing, and no systems for administering accountability beyond accusations, call-outs, and demands for submission and compliance, what standing does anyone have to compel accountability?
If one of my friends or acquaintances, who has no authority over me, comes to me claiming I have hurt them, I will apologize if I agree that I did something wrong, or if the issue seems trivial enough that I don’t mind the apology. If I disagree that I have caused harm, I will generally respectfully decline to apologize, as to do so would lack integrity. If the friend decides my unwillingness to validate their truth is a deal-breaker for the relationship, so be it. I don’t discard friends lightly, but I also don’t allow them to make me their emotional hostage. I have lost a few friends this way, but I’ve also gained respect and deeper relationships with others. People who are willing to sit through deep disagreement and stay with you are the ones you can trust with your life; these are the kinds of relationships that real community is based on.
The modern trend toward accountability is in some ways an attempt to evade and elide the messiness of taking honest stock of oneself, examining one’s own beliefs and misconceptions, cultivating one’s own sense of value and agency and holding it in tension with that of others. In the attempt to bypass this process of developing emotional and relational maturity by demanding conformity and compliance, progressives have created something even more chaotic and destabilizing: cancel culture, where personal discomfort, feelings of inferiority, and resentment are weaponized to destroy the connective tissue of authentic community.
Why do so many people submit themselves to these demands for “accountability” when they come from Instagram influencers, loose acquaintances, and “comrades” who are seething with resentment? One clue is found in management literature: When the views of one’s audience— whether it’s a peer group, organizational higher ups, aspirational role models, or social media “followers”— are known, the desire to please will lead us to alter our own view in response. This desire to please is especially high amongst people who test high in measures of self-monitoring and social anxiety, and low in individuation, which is the task of developing a sense of self that is both separate from others yet able to connect and build strong, mutually supportive relationships.4
These are exactly the qualities that are fostered in the high-conformity, high-external monitoring environments of our corporate educational and workplace cultures, and they are ramped up to the millionth degree by the self-reflexive negative feedback loops of Instagram, Twitter, and other social media.
Responding, not accounting
In the end, I helped to facilitate a smaller meeting, out of a retreat cohort of 200, between the teacher and the 20 or so activists. We began with meditation and prayer to slow our minds down and create receptivity. Anna and her friends were able to ask deeper questions than were possible in the larger gatherings and share their feelings of disconnection and their concerns that the material was out of touch and irrelevant to their struggles. The teacher was able to demonstrate empathy and understanding while gently pointing to the value of the spiritual practices she was teaching to help all of us see beyond the immediacy of our emotional responses and social conditioning. While it didn’t resolve all the tensions, I believe most of the participants felt less anxious and more appreciative as a result.
While I was never part of the core group of decision-makers in the teacher’s organizations (I don’t believe she had her own, though there were a few small nonprofits organized by her students to disseminate her work), and have stayed only loosely connected over the years, I know there was a push amongst several people who were more involved to build more bridges with other contemplative groups and teachers rooted in communities of color. This is a good thing! While I’m not sure what ever came of it, deepening relationships with people in other contexts generally leads to more insight, growth, and maturation.
At the same time, feeling excessive guilt about one’s “privilege” (and I’m not suggesting privilege is not real, though it is often exaggerated) or behaving in an overly deferential way tends to undermine authentic relationship building. Nobody likes a sycophant, except a megalomaniac.
I think what is needed is not more accountability, in the sense of automatically deferring to or allowing ourselves to be managed and controlled by anyone possessing more points in the woke identitarian hierarchy; rather what is needed is responsibility— a willingness to respond to others with empathy, integrity, and honesty. That’s a much harder thing to manage than the reflexive conformity of accountability. It means we have to be willing to hold the tension of disagreement. We have to be willing to be disliked, willing to be misunderstood and we have to be willing to let down our guard. We have to risk getting things wrong and learn to forgive ourselves and others in the trust that we are learning to get it right.
https://deliverypdf.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=819027008027065117092117028028075092037036069049083071005104007093091118119029101093096050033032121023027004090022116006123120023073034069016012098104101103024024010001051117097023121005080094108106109115072120073100112005108088112124020004007064020&EXT=pdf&INDEX=TRUE
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1492816
http://www.review.upeace.org/pdf.cfm?articulo=124&ejemplar=23
https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/lernerlab/files/lerner_tetlock_1999.pdf
Thanks for this piece.
You did better than I would have - I would've laughed in Anna's face.