Social Justice Usage
Source: Racial Equity Tools
Accountability is a keystone of racial equity work. Accountability, as used in this website, refers to creating processes and systems that are designed to help individuals and groups to be held in check for their decisions and actions and for whether the work being done reflects and embodies racial justice principles. Accountability in racial equity work is about consistently checking the work against a set of questions: How is the issue being defined? Who is defining it? Who is this work going to benefit if it succeeds? Who will benefit if the work does not succeed? How are risks distributed among the stakeholders? How will a group know if its plan has accounted for risks and unintended consequences for different racial and ethnic groups? What happens if people pull out before the goals are met? Who anointed the people and groups being relied on for the answers to these questions? Who else can answer these questions to guide the work?
New Discourses Commentary
In Critical Social Justice, “accountability” refers to being held liable and duly punished for speech, action, or belief that is problematic, which is to say that runs afoul of or contrary to the expectations and demands of the ideology. It can also refer to assessments of or within institutions, systems, or policy to determine if they are in line with the ideology. These assessments will be determined under the Theory of Critical Social Justice and will therefore seek to determine whether or not the relevant entities produce equitable outcomes or, instead, in some way create or maintain the systems of oppression that Theory assumes defines all of social reality.
Speaking generally, as with the common parlance use of the word, accountability refers to how someone can decide to place, withhold, or revoke trust in a person, institution, system, or policy. Through a critical lens, this will be determined more or less wholly by assessing whether or not the relevant object of interest should be seen as problematic, willfully ignorant (or falsely conscious), or compliant with the critical approach (critically conscious) and equitable (see also, engagement and authenticity). If it is found to be compliant, then accountability has been satisfied until the next assessment. If it is found to be willfully ignorant or falsely conscious (including both internalized dominance and internalized oppression, which result from socialization in the dominant system), consciousness raising and other forms of (re)-education will be applied as part of the accountability process to bring it into compliance (see also, diversity). If it is found to be problematic (or inequitable), accountability will entail punishment, sanction, calling out, or even cancellation, plus disruption, dismantling, deconstructing, and reimagining the relevant entity, depending on the severity of the failure of accountability to critical expectations (see also, hegemony).
Put more plainly, accountability refers to the justification for taking some form of executive action against that which is not operating under the strictures of Critical Social Justice and its Theory and activism, including punitive and retributive measures. It is often explained, for example, that people in “free” countries should be free to speak however they like and should also expect to be held accountable for their speech when it is harmful or violent (see also, freedom of speech), as subjectively determined by someone with the relevant critical consciousness (i.e., Woke). In that sense, accountability means social retribution for falling afoul of Critical Social Justice or someone who believes in it.
Because the paradigm in which this form of accountability is enforced is “Social Justice,” that means that social action will be taken against violators, including call out and cancel culture (often involving mobbing), and in some cases responding with physical violence and/or property damage. Being held “accountable” for something like willful participation in that which is considered systemically racist, transphobic, homophobic, fatphobic, ableist or disableist, misogynistic, etc., may therefore include being mobbed on social media or physically, removed from one’s job (cancelled), having one’s business boycotted (or worse), being socially stigmatized, shamed, denounced, and threatened, and so on, including prosecuted in jurisdictions where hate speech is a crime.
Accountability is often listed as part of a suite of other ideas such as diversity, inclusion, equity, and belonging, especially in corporate and other professional training environments. For example, diversity, equity, and inclusion are often presented as DEI, and when accountability is added to these, the acronym is sometimes given as IDEA. These are meant to be complementary ideas that create and enforce compliance with Critical Social Justice in institutions and workplaces. Accountability is, in effect, the enforcement mechanism in this grouping, and it is organized such that everything is to be accountable to “stakeholders,” which is defined broadly as everyone and everything that has any stake in the behavior and outcomes of the entity of interest (which is effectively everyone and everything).
Related Terms
Ableism; Authenticity; Belonging; Call out; Cancel; Consciousness raising; Critical; Critical consciousness; Deconstruction; Disableism; Dismantle; Disrupt; Diversity; Dominant; Engagement; Equity; False consciousness; Fatphobia; Freedom of speech; Harm; Hate speech; Hegemony; Homophobia; Ideology; Inclusion; Internalized dominance; Internalized oppression; Misogyny; Oppression; Problematic; Racism (systemic); Reality; Reimagine; Sexism (systemic); Social Justice; Socialization; Stakeholder; System, the; Theory; Transphobia; Violence; Willfully ignorant; Woke/Wokeness
Revision date: 11/11/20
2 comments
I’m new to your site, so this may already be explained elsewhere.
Wokism (like feminism & modern environmentalism) all arises from the idea of “Critical Theory”, which comes straight out of the Marxist’s “Frankfurt School”. Even the “Cancel Culture” arose from it.
“We must ensure that access to knowledge becomes increasingly difficult and elitist. May the gap widen between the people and science, that information intended for the general public be anesthetized from all subversive content. Especially no philosophy. Here again, it is necessary to use persuasion and not direct violence: massively broadcast, via television, entertainment always flattering the emotional or instinctive. We will occupy the spirits with what is futile and playful. It is good, in incessant chatter and music, to keep the mind from thinking. ” ~Günther Anders, “The Obsolescence of Man”, 1956
—Anders (Günther Sigmund Stern) was a member of the Frankfurt School, which put all of these ideas into action!
Note the date of publication. It was one year before Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” was published. By that time Frankfurt School acolytes were in a great many University Humanities departments. The religious opposition to Rand’s atheistic & rationally selfish views was minimal compared to the smears & misrepresentations made by those acolytes. Their goal was to prevent the general public’s “access”, especially because it was well reasoned philosophy! Rand was almost certainly the first victim of the, unnamed at the time, “Cancel Culture”.
This doesn’t go far enough in comparing the immorality of perceived hate speech to the immorality of verbal or physical assault on the speakers. The crux of the disagreement appears to be that which deserves to be condemned and how it is to be condemned. Mob rule should never be the course of action. Corporotocratic union with CRT in the exercise of unilateral cancellation deserves its own chapter.