Hello dear ones,
This is a tender piece of writing, one that I started writing a long time ago but have felt too scared to share. Wading into the murky waters of transformative justice (TJ) and community accountability shouldn’t feel this hard. And yet, it does. I’ve watched as many polarizing conversations have taken place online: around the use and misuse of cancellations; around whether those who’ve caused harm should be excommunicated; around the importance of gossip to protect community. I will not be weighing into those conversations here, as others have already done so (see: adrienne maree brown’s We Will Not Cancel Us, Kai Cheng Thom’s I Hope We Choose Love, the writing of Estelle Ellison on their IG @abolish_time).
What I want to share here is something that I’ve found missing from these conversations concerning the tendency, on the part of community, to opt out of accountability work with those they know have caused harm. I believe that if we’re ever going to see a world without police and prisons, a world built upon transformative justice (which believes in addressing the root causes of harm without causing further harm), we must be willing to step into the work of accountability with those we know. At the end of this newsletter, I’ll share more info about my upcoming webinar, which I hope can offer folks some of the skills needed: “Community Accountability: A Trauma-Informed Approach.” For now, I leave you with these messy thoughts and feelings. And if you missed part 1, you can read it here.
A few reminders and FYIs before we dive in:
Submit your questions for episode 6 of OPENINGS, my monthly advice podcast. You can do so by sending me an email at hello@margeauxfeldman.com with the subject line OPENINGS SUBMISSION. Please keep submissions to 250 words or less.
Sharing is caring. Another easy way to support this work is to share this post with others who you think might benefit from this writing. You can hit the button below to share:
Thank you, as always, for being a part of the CARESCAPES universe! It’s such a deep honour to have you here with me!
Many months ago, I had a transformational conversation with someone on Instagram. They had tagged me on their stories, alongside a screenshot of a comment on my public statement. Their words read: “@softcore_trauma is great at evading accountability.” This person then messaged me and we engaged in a conversation about my accountability process. They started to process how quickly they had reacted after reading my statement, and how their reaction reflected their need to be seen as a good white person. By the end, we were talking about the ways in which white folks are so quick to prove that they know better than X person who has caused harm. And that this is especially true in cases where the harm has been caused by a white person and those harmed are Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour.
What I find so fascinating about this compulsion to perform purity politics, is that this is precisely one of the tenants of white supremacy culture. Tema Okun, the author of White Supremacy Culture (WSC), explains how one tenant of WSC is “The belief there is one right way to do things. Connected to the belief in an objective ‘perfect’ that is both attainable and desirable for everyone. Connected to the belief that I am qualified to know what the perfect right way is for myself and others.” Perfectionism, writes Okun, shows up as
point[ing] out either how the person or work is inadequate
or even more common, to talk to others about the inadequacies of a person or their work without ever talking directly to them
mistakes are seen as personal, i.e. they reflect badly on the person making them as opposed to being seen for what they are – mistakes
making a mistake is confused with being a mistake, doing wrong with being wrong
the person making the "mistake" or doing something "wrong" rarely participates in defining what doing it "right" looks like or whether a "mistake" actually occurred
This performance of perfectionism or “rigid radicalism” as carla bergman and Nick Montgomery call it, is all too pervasive. In their book Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times, bergman and Montgomery write:
“There is something that circulates in many radical spaces, movements, and milieus that saps their power from within. It is the pleasure of feeling more radical than others and the worry about not being radical enough; the sad comfort of sorting unfolding events into dead categories; the vigilant apprehension of errors and complicities in oneself and others; the anxious postering on social media with the highs of being liked and the lows of being ignored; the suspicion and the resentment felt in the presence of something new; the way curiosity feels naive and condescension feels right.”
I watched this rigid radicalism play out when I started to notice that instagram friends of mine unfollowed me in the wake of last year’s callouts. Instead of using the lines of connection we created over months of messages sent back and forth to say “Hey Margeaux, I’m hearing X and it’s really concerning to me. How are you taking accountability?” they chose instead to cut their ties with me. Their choice to do so has been instructive in the sense that it has made clear that these humans are not my humans. And there has been a lot of grief caused by their actions. Not simply because I have lost people that I considered friends. The larger grief comes from knowing that they had information about harm I caused and they decided that it was better to not engage with me than it was to try and talk to me about being accountable.
I first heard the statement “accountability requires relationships” while listening to a conversation between Mia Mingus and Rania El Mugammer — and it has stuck with me ever since. Despite what we’ve been told by the prison-industrial complex, it is rarely the case that people cause harm intentionally. And so when we learn that we have caused harm, we need to know what it is we have done if we are to change our actions and behaviours. Without that information, we are doomed to repeat the same harms again and again. There is a reason why community is such a core piece of accountability within transformative justice: accountability cannot happen without relationships.
Cutting people off without first talking to them about the harm they caused to someone else does not enable change to happen (and the reality is, you’ll need to talk to them again and again. Transformation does not happen over night. Accountability does not happen over night). Cutting people off, without any attempts to engage with them, makes you complicit in future harm. The truth is the people best equipped to support us in being accountable are those who know us. Left without anyone that we trust, the shame becomes overwhelming, and we become defensive. We need our friends to lovingly tell us “Hey, this thing you did wasn’t okay and I believe in your capacity to be accountable and change your behaviour. Let’s talk about how I can support you in this.”
In the early 2000s, long before I knew what transformative justice was, harm occurred in my community. A man sexually assaulted a woman after they’d both been drinking. They were friends to each other and friends to us all. The woman wanted us to cut off all contact with the man, and many of our friends did. My best friend and I were the only ones who tried to remain in friendships with both parties. We did so because the person harmed was well supported, and we knew, deep down, that the man would not change if excommunicated from his community. He needed people in his life, people he trusted, to have these hard conversations with him about the harm he caused.
Our choice to remain in friendship with him meant that our other friend did have to cut off contact with us for many years. Eventually, she reached out and we were able to mend our friendship. In the meantime, our other friend started therapy and we had hard convos about how toxic masculinity and his male privilege led him to not ask for consent, thinking instead that the absence of no was enough to proceed. Of course, we cannot say whether his transformation would have happened without us. And, at the same time, it would have been a whole lot harder for him to do that work on his own. Accountability requires relationships.
I want to return now to this conversation I had with that follower who called me out on their stories. Because tied to perfectionism is another characteristic of white supremacy: urgency. We see that someone has caused harm and we IMMEDIATELY denounce them. And so when people see a comment about me causing harm, left by an anonymous account that was created specifically to troll me, they ask no questions and next thing I know the original account that reposted a meme of mine has unfollowed me, and white people who have seen the comment are sharing it in their stories, telling everyone to unfollow me.
I get why they do it: we’ve been told, as white people, that if we see a call out where a white person has caused harm to someone more marginalized, we better believe it and then do our part to make sure everyone else knows about it. If you don’t do that, then you are complicit in harm. You are not a person to be trusted. I really appreciated the nuance that K Agbebiyi has brought to this conversation:
There are so many uncomfortable truths we are going to have to grapple with when it comes to preventing and intervening in regards to various types of abuse. But if when anyone even attempts to have them, they are being repeatedly told they’re an apologist, then people aren’t going to want to engage in this work. Even if the people themselves are survivors. That’s the reality. People say they support abolition, but anyone who considers themselves in community with someone who is abusive (and is someone who wants to aid them in seeking accountability) is ostracized. So of course people are more likely to shun people they deem abusive, than actually work with them to find ways to prevent future instances of abuse. Why would they want to intervene when they could lose everything despite not even being the person who was originally engaged in the abuse? For ex there is someone I follow on tiktok who is a survivor, and is also a psychologist who works with sex offenders. Constantly people in the comments say that they want this abuse to stop and THEN harass the psychologist saying they’re an awful person. DESPITE research showing that this person’s interventions are what it actually takes to prevent further instances of abuse. The harassment is relentless. At this point, it feels more about people’s emotions than the cold hard fact that in order to intervene in instances of sexual abuse, this person would literally have to interact with/provide therapy to someone who engages in this abuse. But when you say that, even as a survivor, you’re a disgusting person who is an abuse apologist. So then when the cycle continues and people 1. question why and 2. say abolitionists don’t have a ‘plan.’ There’s also this idea that being friends with someone who has been abusive means that you encourage, enable, and even promote their behavior. While this DOES happen frequently, this is not always the same thing. In order to allow abusers to feel invested in the safety + respect of others, they sadly have to find themselves invested and a part of a larger community. Why would they feel passionate about changing when the only people who are allowed to engage with them are future would-be unknowing victims?”
Accountability requires relationships. If we opt out of our relationships with people who’ve caused harm, we are not actually doing the work of accountability and transformative justice. And so, when we hear that someone has caused harm or has been abusive, what would happen if we paused, if we sought out more information? What kind of transformation might actually be possible if we did?
What’s missing when urgency takes over is curiosity, which, as Kai Cheng Thom writes, is one of the keys of loving justice. When we are unable to get curious, we are not within our window of tolerance. Everything becomes black and white, right and wrong (either/or thinking: another characteristic of WSC). What I’ve learnt through my own healing process is that when I’m unable to be curious, I lose my capacity for compassion, and I reduce human beings (myself included) to a singular story of who they are. And no healing can happen from a place of shame.
Just how quickly we can erase another person’s dignity and call it accountability? The answer: in a split second. Staci K. Haines writes about the how dignity is a core human need in her book The Politics of Trauma.
One of the challenges we face as we work together is that building justice is complex and nuanced while white supremacy culture likes to pretend we can reduce everything to a simple either/or. So we are called to navigate the complexity of our conditioning without losing sight of the inherent humanity in each of us … I will say that white supremacy wants us to attack each other as the problem. As we fight with and among each other, we fail to identify the actual problem.
Why do we erase each other’s dignity and humanity? Because we are afraid. We are afraid that if we don’t denounce one another, we will be the next one on the chopping block. Unsurprisingly, fear is a characteristic of WSC:
“White supremacy culture cultivates our fear of not belonging, of not being enough. Living in fear that we are not enough, white supremacy culture teaches us to fear others (or hate others) in an attempt, sometimes overt, sometimes unspoken, to prove to ourselves that we are ok. An easy way to prove we are ok is to point the finger at all those who are not. An easy way to belong to each other is to hate and fear all the others who do not.”
White supremacy culture's number one strategy is to make us afraid. All of the characteristics listed on the website are driven by fear. We fear not being good enough, not being enough, not deserving love or happiness. When we are afraid, whatever the reason, especially when we don't have the skills to hold that fear, we are easily manipulated by any promise of safety.
Kai Cheng Thom shared a poem on Instagram about the difference between punishment and accountability that I want to share here:
Punishment humiliates
but Justice rehumanizes
Punishment denigrates
where Justice is kind
Punishment re-enacts violence
Justice transforms it
Punishment seeks to end harm with more harm
Justice seeks to heal it
When we strip another human of their dignity, we are in the land of punishment. One of the most painful aspects of conflict involving serious harm is that we are forced to confront seemingly contradictory truths that threaten our foundational beliefs about who we are. Are good or bad people? Are we deserving of dignity and forgiveness?
When these fundamental beliefs are challenged, as they will be if we’re invested in TJ, it is easy to lose our access to compassion and curiosity on a neurobiological level. This is because if it is true that people we consider "good" are capable of serious harm, the world as we know it loses a layer of safety. We start to doubt our judgement, our sanity, and our own trustworthiness. As a result, many of us double down, demonizing the other and disconnecting from them. Our urgency impulse has taken over. We come by this response honestly. And it breaks my heart when I see others give into this impulse.
I was in a workshop with Mia Mingus when she spoke the words “transformative justice work is grief work” and her words hit me like a punch in the gut. There are so many ways that we can understand her statement: witnessing the harm another person has caused can bring up all of our grief for the times were were harmed; knowing that someone we loved acted out of alignment with their values and caused someone harm can bring up grief from times that we caused harm because of our trauma. For me, the biggest grief of all is the grief that comes when people opt out of this work and the opportunity for healing and transformation is missed.
We will cause harm. Not because we want to but because humans are messy. We can have the best of intentions and still hurt one another. There is much we can do to mitigate the harm we cause, but we cannot hold ourselves to a standard of perfectionism, for when we fail, we spiral into shame and blame. Accountability is not possible when we are stuck in shame. If we believe that we're a bad person, transformation feels impossible.
Just as we're all capable of harm, we too are capable of transformation. But we cannot do the work of accountability alone. We need the support of those we love and trust. Community accountability asks us to stay in the mess, to resist the impulse to opt out when someone we know causes harm. We must build our capacity to have hard conversations. We must choose to push through the discomfort of saying "you have caused harm and I believe you can change." If we opt out of relationality when those we know cause harm, we become culpable in the future harm they may cause. And we deny the reality that we too are capable of harm. Opting out doesn't get us to the world we want to believe in. A world of transformation and healing is possible, if we choose to do the work.
Wanna learn more and build your community’s knowledge? Start a book club! Here’s a list I’ve composed of books, blogs, workbooks, and other TJ and abolition resources:
Join me for my last webinar of 2022: “Community Accountability: A Trauma-Informed Approach,” happening November 30th from 4-6pm MDT. Webinar will be recorded, so don’t worry if you can’t attend live.
About the webinar:
Bringing together the skills and knowledge from the first workshop in this series, “Conflict Transformation 101,” we’ll focus on how to practice transformative justice and community accountability when conflict and harm have occurred.* Unfortunately, we live in a time where so many are committed to alternative models of responding to harm, but the paths taken are not trauma-informed, end up causing further harm, and do not result in transformation. One of the main goals of this workshop is to arm participants with the skills they need to address conflict within their communities in a way that supports healing for all.
In this two hour webinar, participants will:
Learn the foundations of community accountability processes and practices.
Gain an understanding of the differences between conflict, harm, and abuse; punishment and consequences.
Be walked through trauma-informed best practices for when someone you know has caused harm.
Leave with an understanding of roles you can play in community accountability and what skills you need to grow.
Receive a workbook with case studies, reflection questions, and other resources.
Tickets are $30-90 with free spots for BIPOC. Recognizing that transformative justice and community accountability have their roots in QTBIPOC communities, 10% of the proceeds from this webinar will be redistributed to Survived and Punished.
If you have enjoyed this newsletter and want to support me you can:
Share a snippet on social media & tell someone to subscribe
Forward this email to a friend you think would enjoy it
PayPal me a one-time donation.
Become a Patron (100% of contributions pay BIPOC folks who do Takeover Tuesdays on my Instagram).
Become a paid subscriber, by following the steps here.
And if you haven’t already…
I think there's lots of important nuance in this writing. I think there is a distinction that maybe should have stressed importance that continuing relationships with abusers can also be opting out and enabling abuse? Like I think it's important to lay out that under abuse culture it is often survivors who have low support or high consequence and abusers who have low consequence or high support (framework from accountabilitymapping) and (whilst people don't exist soley in a binary of abuser or survivor) that imbalance of low consequence or high support is a creation of abuse culture. Perpetuating that imbalance can perpetuate abuse culture. Apart of balancing that out can be to prioritise supporting survivors and adopting a model of higher consequence for abusers. Sometimes priotising high support for abusers can look like enabling - especially if we buy into the white supremacy narratives of "cancel culture" and we begin to equate consequences as punishment. Sometimes transformative justice can look like outing an abuser who's denied invitations for acocuntability - it can look like lessening an abusers access to those they may harm. I think in scenarios where survivors have already have extended invitations for accountability when we make the decision to continue a friendship with their abuser that we are prioritising the humanity and healing of the abuser at the detriment of the survivor. We are adopting a high support role, which is necessary but are we adopting a high consequence role too? When abuse happens amongst mutual friends, prioritising higher support for the person harmed and higher consequence for the person who abused - that can be transformative, especially considering the context of abuse culture that we live under. You can sit an abuser or someone who has done harm down, lay out the harm they have caused, offer them resources or redirect them to support and choose to end the friendship as a consequence to their actions, a boundary for yourself or a form of support to the person they harmed.
Really appreciated these reflections, and it got me thinking a lot about the second season of the show The Wilds (which Amazon unfortunately cancelled, leaving a huge cliffhanger...sigh). I think a lot about how we need to find ways to hold both things: the fact that the person/people who are harmed deserve to be kept safe from the person who hurt them (especially in cases of abuse) and the first and foremost focus should be on making sure they are safe/have what they need AND ALSO that other people who have a relationship with the person that caused harm can and should work through accountability processes with the person that caused the harm. Neither has to negate the other, but that's how people come to see it.
(Major spoiler territory here for anyone interested in watching the Wilds! Also mentions of SA.) In the second season of the Wilds, the show introduces a new group of people stranded on an island, but this time it's a group of young men. A major point in the season is that the shady corporation that set this all up is trying to determine why the young men survived a shorter amount of time before having to be pulled from the island than the young women did, and we find out partway through the season that the key incident that caused them to stop working together as well as they did in the beginning was that one of the guys (a very charismatic plant/spy from the corporation, actually) sexually assaults one of the others. When this comes to light, the group ejects him and rallies around the young man who was assaulted. But what starts as supporting him turns into believing that the one who did the assault deserves to die for this, and anyone who tries to bring him water/food/etc is ostracized as well. Of course, there are many other elements to how this plays out that were really interesting to see explored, like the way the charismatic guy tries to charm his way back in (without actually taking any accountability for what he did) or the way the one who was assaulted becomes set on revenge and humiliating anyone who questions his actions, both of which lead to boiling points and deep factures within the group. But that beginning choice they make -- not just to eject the guy (which would make sense, removing him from the "base" location they are at so that they can minimize further harm as they work through this all), but to take away any support for him, in a survival situation that raises the stakes to literal life and death -- shapes what happens to everyone in that group going forward. This doesn't end well for any of them. While it's not a perfect show by any means, I think this exploration of what happens to a group when that level of harm occurs is important, because it happens in real life all the time, and we often lack the tools or understanding to work through the messiness in a way that respects and prioritizes the needs of someone who is hurt while also addressing the root cause of the harm so that it won't happen again.
Thank you for sharing this!