Accountability

We are in a time of deep reckoning. From prisons and policing to climate collapse and colonialism, there is a plethora of interpersonal and systemic violence that demands our attention, reparation, love, and transformation. In this time of reckoning, it has become clear that our existing models of punishment, imprisonment, and shame are ineffective and deeply violent. What do we do with this inheritance? Who are we called to be at this ending of the world? What new worlds might emerge from the rubble, with our tending?

As a white person, much of my work has been to continually wake up to the ways in which white supremacy has shaped the violence and devastation of this moment. As I became more deeply steeped in prison abolition and transformative justice, I felt drawn to the work of accountability and accompanying people who have caused harm, starting with myself. What does it mean to pursue an accountability that isn't performative or attempting to cling to moral authority? What would a proactive accountability - not one that waits to be confronted, but that is constantly attentive and practicing? What would an accountability that is loving, messy, rigorous, relational, grace-filled, deeply transformative, and centered on liberation feel, taste, sound, smell, and look like?

Sitting with these questions led me to create a working, three-part conception of a proactive accountability for myself, developed through a deep reading practice of three speculative fiction novels (Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed, Madeline Miller's Circe, and Kung Li Sun's Begin the World Over) alongside other texts by abolitionists, organizers, transformative justice practitioners, and liberation theologians. I discovered that accountability wasn't about making myself small so as to minimize harm, so that I could cling to comfort, innocence, perfectionism, or narratives of goodness. Instead, my conception of proactive accountability includes:

• Multidimensional relationship: Sonya Renee Taylor teaches that "accountability without relationship is just punishment." Therefore, accountability requires that we do the deep, proactive work of building relationship. "Multidimensional," to me, means that we build relationships not only with each other, but with the earth, cosmos, ancestors, and descendants, and learn to be in relationship with and accountable to all of them. In this understanding, not investing in deep, multi-dimensional relationship is itself a harm.

• Discern our gifts and take responsibility for them - and support others to do the same. There's a story I love that says that the ancestors invited us to be born in this moment, giving us each a particular medicine that the world needs. Liberation requires each of these gifts and medicines. We live in a society that doesn't support us to discern and understand our gifts, let alone help us develop and live into them. Yet, if we have medicine that we don't offer or are prevented from offering, we aren't providing the care and possibility that the world needs. Therefore, learning to name our gifts and take responsibility for them - to take these gifts seriously, as if they were ancestrally, cosmically, divinely gifted medicines we're meant to bring to this world in this time - and to support those around us to do the same must be part of our work of accountability. This also means that it's our responsibility to recognize what prevents people from living into their gifts and work collectively to dismantle and transform those conditions.

• Apply our gifts proactively to the work of collective liberation - and support others to do the same. It's not enough to individually know our gifts. As bell hooks wrote, "I am often struck by the dangerous narcissism fostered by spiritual rhetoric that pays so much attention to individual self-improvement and so little to the practice of love within the context of community." We do not discover our gifts simply for our own benefit: we must bring them to the work of collective liberation. As Gwendolyn Brooks said: "we are each other's harvest: we are each other's business: we are each other's magnitude and bond."

When I think of accountability in this way, I feel a shift in my body. "Accountability" is no longer a scary word implying that I'm unworthy, or a word that rhymes with punishment. Instead, it's a deeply pleasurable, courageous, loving voice whispering to my soul: you're here for a reason. Embrace it. Act on it. Remember. Just as Toni Cade Bambara taught that her work as a cultural organizer is to "make revolution irresistible," I believe it is my work - and the work of abolitionists in our time - to make accountability irresistible.

Some of the work that I am moving into is to develop practices to support myself and my community to practice deep accountability.