I don’t have to take this from YOU

CW: racism, transphobia, medical bias, murder, fragility

A lot of my job is helping people understand and overcome institutional bias, which means a lot of my job is trying to understand accountability. There’s a specific bias that I think is one of the hardest to unlearn and most uncomfortable to think about, and poses one of the biggest barriers to community building.

“I don’t have to take this from you.”

Accountability is really hard, and it’s eleventy million times harder (read: completely impossible) if one person doesn’t feel like they have to care what the other person thinks about them. A really unfortunate thing is that systems of power operate along lines that make people really likely to think things like this.

Not things like, “I don’t care what people of color have to say because I’m a racist.”

It turns out people don’t usually think of themselves as racist even when the whole rest of the world and leading experts in racism think they’re very clearly definitely racist. A great example is Matthew Heimbach, a neo-Nazi who founded a political party designed to bring together neo-Nazis, the KKK, neo-Confederates, and other people any reasonable person would consider textbook racists. Heimbach insists he isn’t racist. So do a lot of his friends.

No, this usually sounds more like, “I can’t believe she would say that to me. DOES SHE KNOW WHO I AM?”

Hierarchy means not having to care about what Those People think as much as you care about what Real People think. You are not answerable to Those People. An easy example: if you work in the US, your boss is probably allowed to make remarks about whether your clothing, hair color, and makeup (if applicable) are workplace appropriate. If you commented on your boss’s clothing being workplace inappropriate, you might get fired.

She doesn’t have to take that from you.

Automatically dismissing criticisms from people lower down on the food chain helps prop up systems of exploitation by reducing the emotional cost for people at the top. “I don’t have to take this from you” means that instead of experiencing discomfort around my own actions and potentially having to change my actions, I get to be mad at you.

This is a big problem in medical equity because there’s already a strong hierarchy between provider and patient (especially MD/patient), and that hierarchy is already being degraded by cultural changes as the US moves toward a more collaborative and less paternalistic style of healthcare management. When the hierarchy is challenged more abruptly by patients who know more than their provider about their condition (as is frequently the case with trans people and people who have chronic diseases), providers can be overtly hostile, undermining and arguing with patients. The same thing can happen in the face of complaints about professionalism or bias, and for the same reason. It inherently threatens the provider’s status, which is already on shaky ground.

“I’m a doctor. I don’t have to take this from you.”

And we see it in our allies, too. A few years ago I taught a Nonbinary 101 seminar at a trans conference. The talk was primarily attended by transgender- and nonbinary-identified people, but there was a group of cisgender teachers who identified as ally activists for trans youth. They were in the room because they felt like they didn’t understand nonbinary identity, which was great. During the talk one of the women asked a long, meandering (comment) question, and a few trans attendees giggled at something she said.

Laughter is a classic accountability tool, and it can be one of the gentlest. Like pointed eye contact and shared pauses, this is a way for marginalized people to safely communicate to each other “oh no, I heard it too.” It’s a survival tool, and it also communicates to the speaker that something went wrong.

Unfortunately the speaker in this case “didn’t have to take that from them.” And her friends didn’t either. After the talk six of them cornered me to explain that they were allies and they were trying and people should give them space to learn and you know this is why people kill trans people because hate generates hate. It was almost an hour before I managed to escape. They were so angry that trans people, in a trans-centered space, had quietly giggled, that they explained to another trans person that giggling is why people like me should be dead.

And I have been those angry white ladies too.

Around the time of the Ferguson protests, I went through a terrible awkward place where I cared a lot about antiracism but fucked up at every turn. I felt immense pressure to get everything right, but I could never seem to stick the landing. I knew silence was complacency, but I also knew I wasn’t supposed to add my own take. So I resolved to signal boost. I shared a post from a Black friend that had a #blacklivesmatter tag and an #alllivesmatter tag.

Someone called me a white supremacist.

And I was Mad. I was white-moderate-bingo mad.

I was following the rules and they were calling me a racist. They were making assumptions about my character. They were making it too hard even though I was trying. It was unfair. They should give me time to learn and maybe even appreciate me. Didn’t they know they were going to alienate people by making it impossible not to be racist? I was angry and resentful and I wanted everyone to be nicer to me because I was helping.

(I was not helping.)

I didn’t have to take that from them.

I sat with this feeling for a while and had a moment where I realized that there were a lot of places in my life where if I messed up or hurt someone’s feelings and someone pointed it out, I didn’t feel angry and resentful. I felt embarrassed, and maybe guilty, but not angry. Certainly it didn’t ruin my week. It didn’t make me feel unsafe and hopeless.

And I got real with myself. I asked myself the prickly question behind that feeling: do you think people of color aren’t allowed to tell you that you’re wrong?

And that question had some more questions inside it.

…do you think people of color can’t be right when you’re wrong?

…do you think it’s okay for people of color to make you feel guilty when you do something harmful to them?

…do you care about racism enough to feel uncomfortable sometimes?

I thought I knew the answers to those questions, but that reflection led me to realize that my emotional reactions and my responses didn’t line up with my values. The decision to be accountable, for me, meant being very intentional about the idea that accountability means feeling uncomfortable sometimes when you don’t have to — and it means that discomfort was yours already. You should feel uncomfortable when you’re hurting people, even by accident. The person holding you accountable just made you aware of the discomfort that was already there. And that’s a pretty caring thing to do.

Very quickly my anger about this went away and, like magic, a lot of the criticism went away at the same time. I wasn’t doing good work and I was suffering inordinately BECAUSE I wasn’t accountable. This is frequently called white fragility, but I think that captures the effect better than the cause. People who get into white fragility (or cis fragility or male fragility) aren’t necessarily lacking in resilience — often, they’re not recognizing the other party as their emotional equal, as someone who might have the right to make them feel unpleasant feelings sometimes. I was fragile because I had unrecognized white supremacist assumptions coloring my perceptions of accountability.

I’ve shared this story with a number of people before (including the cis allies who generously provided that memento mori) in hopes that it can light a path for others. Accountability is hard and messy, but from what I’ve learned so far, it can’t start at all until all parties are more uncomfortable with the idea of doing harm than with being called out.