"Who made you judge and juror, bitch?"

I realized on a pretty deep level recently that I'm definitely not someone who's in the role of community builder. That is a very specific role, and extremely challenging. I've always described my job more like improv performer/ Showmanic Clown. One part of all that is humbly pointing out the accountability process--including all of our inconsistencies and hypocrisies as humans and also suggesting the accountability process for harm doers.

The thing with all that is, first, who am I to decide? Well, I rarely am. I take cues from wronged people. Rarely do I bring my personal beefs forward, despite what people have assumed of me. It has happened, but it's minimal. You fuck with my friends? I'm gonna be asking plenty of questions, probably publicly.

What if the person isn't ready for apology or accountability? That's something that happens often. When talking about transformative justice we need to be prepared for this eventuality often.

The assumptions that the steps of publicly warning or trying to barrier off harm doers come from something punitive are just that--assumptions. I firmly believe that one day harm doers should have the opportunity to be integrated back into their communities. Victimized peoples' needs should be prioritized always. Our failing is that we don't know how to do that to begin with. Instead we see accusers, victims and witnesses as party to incidents that hurt the makeup of the family. That hurt stability and togetherness. Which is also truth! But in punishing the harm identifiers (or also assuming that they're coming from a place of implying that they're perfect, which is totally absurd), we close off the stories of wronged people and this ultimately stymies the process.

I think progressive spaces could also stand to digest the idea that nobody out there is going to express themselves perfectly. We all have our implicit biases, we all have some problematic languaging/conceptualizing still in there and all of that. Everyone's a little prejudiced, but we need to keep it in check and recognize it. What turns the corner poorly is when community begins to fixate on tone and people not expressing themselves perfectly vs the content of what is being conveyed, which might still be crucial. How can we radically listen to a lot of peoples' input?

I also believe that certain people in their process of recognizing harm doing towards others should not be babied or treated like anything other than adults. I've seen so much community process of making excuses for some people, of being unwilling to see new information about people because they've been in high-profile roles, when the truth is we're all human, and a lot of us have struggled with similar issues. And really, has a person become high profile through hard work and meritocracy? I don't believe that this is an all-or-nothing issue, but it's important to recognize the social role of personality types, interdependence, fostering dependence in some cases, and "scene politics." Not everybody has a go-get-'em leadership personality, and our social groups need to become expansive about the fact that this world takes all kinds. Some of us are hugely out there, bombastic movers and shakers. Some of us work more quietly. As much as we like to talk about toxic individualism, some of us didn't, practically, have many positive community models in our formative years or have been harmed by community repeatedly without moves to address it. This can create trauma just like it would create any other kind of interpersonal relationship trauma. It's important to keep a wide lens about all of these factors and to see where we might be closing ourselves off to the whole picture when we encounter information that upsets us at first.