One of the first things I remember learning about restorative justice is how it centers accountability over punishment and how it offers practices that allow harm-doers to take accountability in meaningful ways. While that was many years ago, it is only much more recently that I have been challenged to deepen my understanding of accountability – how hard it is and how radical a cultural shift is required to truly embrace it.
Much of my learning on this comes from a fantastic video series produced by the Barnard Center for Research on Women called “Transforming Harm: Experiments in Accountability,” which I highly recommend. Among the many kernels of wisdom in this series is an exploration of how damaging a punitive and individualistic culture is to the potential for accountability. As Rachel Herzing of the Center for Political Education puts it, “A lot of how we get trained to be in the world is about protecting our own interests, being right, protecting our egos, having a sense of importance, and accountability asks you to strip some of that away.”
If we receive messages that when we make mistakes we are bad people, it dramatically decreases the chance that we will genuinely own up to those mistakes. If we don’t have models and structures for taking accountability, many of us will “shame-spiral,” and get so caught up in that shame that we don’t do any of the work of accountability and repair.
The reality is that all of us make mistakes and do harm. It is part of being human. While that harm is not always to the same degree, it is a given. If we don’t figure out a way – as individuals and as a collective – to acknowledge and repair those harms, as well as to see that work as a strength, not a weakness, then we risk doing even greater harm.
I am directing this message as much to myself as to anyone else. For all the reasons above, I have often done a poor job of taking accountability when I’ve messed up. I get scared. I get defensive. Outwardly I may say I’m sorry and I may feel guilty and ashamed, but that is different than truly, courageously, facing the harm I've done and taking real steps to repair it.
In the video series, Sonya Shah of The Ahimsa Collective says, “So many things get in the way of accountability. I think one of the first things is that, as a culture, we haven’t been socialized to really build the muscle of accountability. Accountability is really hard work. […] Accountability requires a lot of listening to what is it that this person’s trying to tell me about what I did that impacted them.”
That hard work Shah is talking about is an area of growth for me and one I’m pushing myself to step into. As she says, it requires more than just an apology but an active engagement with impact and deep self-reflection about how to address the wrongdoing and keep it from repeating.
It is even more needed in this moment of reckoning with how deeply anti-Black racism pervades not just our history but our institutions, our media, our relationships, and our communities today. If we are not serious about taking real accountability for that harm, nothing will change.
I’d challenge all of us to imagine, as individuals and communities, what it would look like to fully embrace accountability as a vital part of sustaining strong relationships and building toward a more just world. And then, I challenge us all to live our lives in alignment with that. It almost certainly won’t be easy but, I am convinced, it is necessary and it can be transformative.
Embracing Accountability