Feminist Accountability

Disrupting Violence and Transforming Power

Ann Russo

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781479832323
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Explores accountability as a framework for building movements to transform systemic oppression and violence What does it take to build communities to stand up to injustice and create social change? How do we work together to transform, without reproducing, systems of violence and oppression?In an age when feminism has become increasingly mainstream, noted feminist scholar and activist Ann Russo asks feminists to consider the ways that our own behavior might contribute to the interlocking systems of oppression that we aim to dismantle. Feminist Accountability offers an intersectional analysis of three main areas of feminism in practice: anti-racist work, community accountability and transformative justice, and US-based work in and about violence in the global south. Russo explores accountability as a set of frameworks and practices for community- and movement-building against oppression and violence. Rather than evading the ways that we are implicated, complicit, or actively engaged in harm, Russo shows us how we might cultivate accountability so that we can contribute to the feminist work of transforming oppression and violence. Among many others, Russo brings up the example of the most prominent and funded feminist and LGBT antiviolence organizations, which have become mainstream in social service, advocacy, and policy reform projects. This means they often approach violence through a social service and criminal legal lens that understands violence as an individual and interpersonal issue, rather than a social and political one. As a result, they ally with, rather than significantly challenge, the state institutions, policies, and systems that underlie and contribute to endemic violence. Grounded in theories, analyses, and politics developed by feminists of color and transnational feminists of the global south, with her own thirty plus years of participation in community building, organizing, and activism, Russo provides insider expertise and critical reflection on leveraging frameworks of accountability to upend inequitable divides and the culture that supports them.

Part I

Accountability as Intersectional Praxis

1

Building Communities

What would it look like to cultivate accountability as an everyday practice of addressing harm to strengthen our communities? Rather than inflicting shame and punishment, accountability calls us to take responsibility for our contribution to and/or complicity in the harms of systemic oppression. Connie Burk of the Northwest Network in Seattle, Washington, frames accountability as “an internal resource for recognizing and redressing the harms we have caused to ourselves and others” rather than as “something that happens to bad people.”1 Similarly, Carolyn Boyes-Watson, in her book Peacemaking Circles and Urban Youth, suggests we understand accountability as “an active experience, not a passive one” in that “[i]t is something we do, not something done to us.”2 This approach to accountability disrupts the dominant carceral logic that reserves punitive and shaming responses for groups of people designated as the “bad people” while offering everyone else immunity from any responsibility for wrongdoing. Instead it calls for the recognition that all of us are capable of harm and complicity in systemic oppression, and so we all could practice taking accountability for our involvement in the perpetuation of oppression and violence.

This praxis of accountability is a decisive shift away from a “zero tolerance” approach to the harms of everyday oppression that offers no room for recovering from mistakes and that “relies on fear to motivate good behavior.”3 A zero tolerance approach assumes that people’s racist, sexist, homophobic, and/or xenophobic words and actions are individual aberrations in an otherwise equitable and just community, and that oppression can be easily prevented and stopped by punishing, shaming, and/or ostracizing individuals who are oppressive. By contrast, through a lens of accountability, we recognize that the roots of oppression and violence operate on intimate, interpersonal, institutional, and systemic levels, rather than beginning and ending with the individual. These systems impact our lived realities and are always at work on our psyches, identities, relationships, and communities. From this perspective, racist behavior is an outcome of ongoing racial inequities, injustices, and abuses of power that are always/already operating in our lives, including in feminist, queer, antiracist, and social justice communities. When one of us perpetuates the harm of racism, then, we approach it not as an individual and unchangeable moral flaw from which we cannot recover but as an action for which we can take responsibility and make amends, and that we can commit to change. If we cultivate an ongoing praxis of accountability within our relationships and communities, we are much more likely to take responsibility for our actions, to learn from our mistakes, to make changes to prevent future harm, and to build deeper relationships in the process.

From this approach, taking accountability can become something we yearn to do rather than something we run away from. In other words, instead of causing us to try to pretend we are above perpetuating harm, a praxis of accountability directs us to recognize how our words, actions, and decisions are always embedded in relations of power and to act from that recognition. We can then approach the manifestation of oppressive systems in our lives as an opportunity to strengthen our skills of accountability and to practice disrupting systemic power and building toward change. As bell hooks in Teaching Community writes, “To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination.”4

By making it a daily practice to name the ways white, male, heteronormative, able-bodied, and/or class privilege and supremacy inform our actions and manifest in our lives, we are better able to undermine their work in producing divisions, inequities, and violence. This requires that we become less afraid of recognizing how we are implicated in the everyday injustices and more eager to shift and transform power lines and the structural oppressions that maintain them. In our relationships, then, instead of responding to oppression through a framework of innocence and guilt to be met with approval or punishment, we encourage one another to take accountability for the systemic impacts and pulls of oppressive systems so that we can disrupt and transform them. When taking accountability becomes an active practice, it becomes less of a painful process that we mostly try to avoid.

The ways these systems manifest in our everyday words and actions, even when we are struggling against them, is indicative of the strength of the systems. Our mistakes, blunders, and complicity shed light on the gravitational pulls of systemic oppressions and illuminate the need for more work, struggle, and change. I am adopting this notion of “gravitational pull” from Chris Crass, a white antiracist activist and author of Collective Liberation.5 He uses this term as a reminder that these forces are always at work pulling us into logics that normalize systemic oppression. Part of the necessary social change work is to lessen the power of systemic oppression over our identities and choices, and for this we need each other.

A communal approach to accountability means that we build relationships and communities that can hold the inevitable conflict, oppression, and difficulty that we will inevitably experience given the ongoing work of interlocking systemic oppression. This puts us in a better position to work collectively to engage, understand, process, and transform these systems and their impact. Such an approach, Sharon Welch suggests, offers a more modest “hope for resilience in the face of ongoing and new challenges.” Within such a space, Welch envisions, “Rather than denouncing or bemoaning the partiality and weakness of others’ responses, let us see them as something to be responded to, played with, and worked with.”6

In this chapter, I draw on a praxis of accountability for building accountable communities of struggle that is fundamentally different from the current carceral logic that is often embedded in feminist and queer antiracist and antiviolence organizing. In it, I explore practices that help cultivate our willingness to take accountability for the ways we participate in and/or are implicated within systems of oppression and privilege. They call us to recognize, challenge, and transform the impact of systemic racism and white supremacy on our identities and relationships as well as our ideas and visions for social change. A praxis of accountability can build a community’s capacity to address the harms of interpersonal and intimate violence, which are explored in the second section of this book.

Refusing Innocence, Embracing Accountability

One of the formidable barriers to owning up to how we are implicated in systems of oppression is the binary framework of guilt/innocence that pervades the dominant culture in the United States. The queer, antiracist feminist projects that I have been involved in over the last forty years have often mimicked carceral and punitive responses to the manifestation of endemic racism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, ableism, and other systems of oppression within and outside of our communities. We tend to divide people into two distinct and rigidly defined subject positions—victim or perpetrator. This binary framework leads feminist, queer, and antiracist scholars, educators, and activists to want to present ourselves as “innocent” in relation to structures of oppression and domination in order to evade the determination that we are guilty. And thus, as Ellen Kaye Scott suggests, we “tend to vie for membership in the victim category and attach a great deal of shame to belonging to the perpetrator category.”7 This response among white folks doing antiracist work, Tema Okun argues, is the “logical consequence of a cultural binary where we are taught we can only be one of two discrete choices rather than a muddy and chaotic mixture of both.”8 As a result, when people tell us that our words and actions are racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, transphobic, or when they point out our complicity, we defend ourselves as a victim of some other oppression and/or we defend our individual intentions as innocent. We often present ourselves as one of the “good” ones located on the side of those marginalized, oppressed, and silenced, and we do this, in part, by primarily focusing on how we experience oppression.9 Relatedly, even though queer and antiracist feminists recognize that oppression is systemic and structural, we often respond to oppression as if it is rooted in our individual attitudes and behaviors.10 We tend to defend our individual intentions, rather than address the impact of our behavior and its relationship to broader systemic oppression. In order to dis-identify ourselves from systems of oppression from which we benefit, we resist examining how deeply entrenched these systems are in our identities, relationships, and interactions. These defensive and evasive responses block our ability to address the harms within and between us.11

A practice of accountability, on the other hand, encourages us to shed critical light on how these systems are manifesting in our lives and in our communities, rather than silence conversations that might reveal their impact. This makes it more likely that we are able to collectively build critical consciousness and action that would work to undermine and disrupt these systems. In other words, a practice of taking accountability for our acts and/or complicity can free us up to act, to change, and to transform ourselves. I have deeply appreciated the story that Aurora Levins Morales shares in her book Medicine Stories in the context of her family’s complex, contradictory, and painful history of oppression, privilege, and resistance. In her essay, “Raicism,” she shares how after growing up with her mother’s struggles around poverty and racism in the Bronx, New York, she traveled to Puerto Rico and learned that she came from “five generations of slave-holding ancestors among the petty landed gentry of northeast Puerto Rico.”12 While this initially led her to feel shame, upset, and discomfort, she realized the deadendedness of this response. She decided to shift out of guilt and denial and move toward accountability.13 For her, this translated into a commitment to break the family silences around slavery: “to acknowledge publicly and repeatedly my family debt to their coerced labor, to expose and reject family mythology about our ‘kind’ treatment of slaves . . . [and to make] African people visible in every discussion of Puerto Rican history in which I participate.” Taking accountability, she suggests, frees us to act, and “leads to greater integrity and less shame, less self-righteousness and more righteousness, humility and compassion and a sense of proportion.”14

This practice of tracing our locations and actions within structures of oppression and privilege was brought home to me in an antiracism training in 2000 for an LGBT group in Chicago called Queer White Allies Against Racism.15 The trainers had us watch a short film, Space Traders, based on a short story by Derrick Bell (1993) from his book Faces at the Bottom of the Well.16 Briefly, the story is as follows: an alien group lands in the United States and offers the following: “Give up all African-Americans and in return they will leave for America the contents of their ships—enough gold to retire the national debt, a magic chemical that will cleanse America’s polluted skies and waters, and a limitless source of safe energy to replace our dwindling reserves. Following roughly two weeks to consider the offer, heated public debate leads to a referendum that when approved, consigns all blacks to the traders.”17 As the story develops, almost all of the white leadership and the majority of white people (70 percent) vote for the tradeoff on the basis of its benefits for whites; some even frame it as patriotic for Black people to do this service for the nation because it would restore all natural resources to the United States. While the film also shows people of color and liberal whites resisting the resolution, ultimately their efforts are ineffective.

After showing the film, the antiracist trainers asked our group of queer, white antiracist activists, with whom did you identify? Most of us expressed identification with the African Americans in the film—with their struggles, the dilemmas they faced, the pain of being betrayed by friends, the experience of being singled out and/or targeted. None of us spoke about our relationship with the white people in the film; instead, we distanced ourselves from them and their actions, particularly given the outcome of the film. The trainers challenged our dis-identification and asked us to explore more specifically how the white people in the film upheld or resisted white supremacy. They encouraged us to compare the white people’s choices and actions in the film to our own decisions, relationships, actions, and allegiances we make in our lives, in our workplaces, political organizations, and educational institutions. Rather than placing ourselves outside of the system, or solely identifying with the experience of being oppressed, we were directed by the trainers to critically understand how embedded we are in the engines of white supremacy, and how our lives and decisions are impacted by as well as aligned with and/or resistant to that system. And it is within such a context of naming that we can best see where we are able to contribute to change and act in solidarity against racism and white supremacy.

Similarly, Leslie Roman, in her essay “White Is a Color! White Defensiveness, Postmodernism, and Anti-racist Pedagogy,” argues that white people need to locate ourselves “in the stories of structural racism” rather than outside of them. We need to create narratives where we “fully account for the daily ways we (whites) benefit from conferred racial privilege as well as from our complicity in the often invisible institutional and structural workings of racism.”18 Such a process opens up paths for action in relation to these systems of power that we might otherwise see ourselves as outside of. By recognizing rather than denying the places where we may be complicit in these systems, we can make conscious choices about taking actions that would disrupt and shift power lines. In so doing, we can act more decisively in solidarity with people of color to resist, challenge, and transform these systems and the devastating harms they create in people’s lives, and to build a world, as Shakti Butler from World Trust suggests, that would work for all of us. Within this context, everyday accountability is an important reminder of our interconnectedness in these systems, and of how our liberation is bound up with one another, rather than isolated and distinct.19

From Identifying Privilege to Co-struggling

In the 1980s, in response to feminists of color calling for white feminists to address racism, I joined other white feminists as we began to name and make visible our relationship to racism and white supremacy. We began to critically examine our unearned privileges, our consequent sense of entitlement, and our active and passive complicity in interpersonal and institutional racism in order to critically understand how these systems had shaped our feminist communities, organizations, and political work. This practice of naming systemic privileges eventually expanded to include class, ability, citizenship, gender, and other areas of privilege.20 Naming our privilege, dominance, and entitlement in systemic inequities and injustices, and their impact on people of color and people of the global south, is important as these are underscrutinized in dominant US and western culture. And yet, as the practice has been assimilated into normative logics, it often translates into a static listing of identities associated with privileged structural location, rather than critical active engagement in response to our complicity and involvement in these historical systems of racism, white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, and imperialism. Naming privilege became a process of ascribing a passive identity attribute or status, rather than as something we understand as systematically propped up, produced, reproduced, or alternatively disrupted, challenged, and transformed through our daily choices, actions, ideas, and/or our knowledge production. The listing does not prompt people to reckon with the impact of white supremacy on our own identities and lives, nor the substantial and devastating impacts our dominance and entitlement have on those oppressed, marginalized, and excluded through this privileging. Nor does it direct us to act or to resist.

In relation to action, many white antiracist educators and activists, like myself, also began to take up the term “ally” to signal our commitment to taking responsibility for our privileged locations and the associated harms. And while this too moved us out of evading our role in systemic oppressions, over time the term began to be used as an identity label and a role, rather than a praxis of action. Mia McKenzie, Black feminist blogger, aptly suggests in “No More ‘Allies’” that we must approach allyship as a practice, “as an active thing that must be done over and over again, in the largest and smallest ways, every day.”21

The word “ally” also locates those made dominant by systemic oppression as outside of their impact. In practice, it does not necessarily direct us to take accountability for how we are actively participating in the system, for the ways in which we are both implicated and impacted—physically, emotionally, intellectually, economically, socially, legally—by systemic oppression and violence; instead, it directs us to “help” less privileged “others.” The result is that being an “ally” often reproduces the normativity of white supremacist patriarchy, rather than challenging it. For instance, when “allies” uncritically assume that we are in the best position to “do good” and “to help” those harmed, the concept reproduces the myth of superiority and does not challenge the inequity ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Cultivating Feminist Accountability
• Part I: Accountability as Intersectional Praxis
• Part II: Community Accountability and Transformative Justice
• Part III: (Re)Imagining Feminist Solidarity
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author