Black woman holding up a sign that says we will not be silenced

Oppression has many layers and one of the most significant and difficult to overcome is internalized oppression. This conditioning, operating on conscious and subconscious levels, leads us to choose what hurts us because we’ve been taught to believe that we have no other options.

For those of us conditioned as passive enablers of white supremacy, we don’t tend to enter the fight in earnest until we feel we have skin in the game. It wasn’t until Mike Brown’s killer Darren Wilson didn’t even get indicted by the grand jury that I realized I was also a piece and the entire game was rigged. The realization left me so disturbed that I physically felt compelled to action. It wasn’t until much later that I understood that my inability to see the humanity in my own people from the point of a life being taken, rather than the point of an institution “failing,” was contributing to the problem of action without movement.

What does accountability look like? Is it shaming, cancelling, or apologizing and promising to do better? Does it require an audience? People fear shame and economic loss, but are they powerful enough to actually change minds? Accountability is a word often used and ill-defined in my experience. Accountability, like decolonization, does not seem to be a one-stop-shop. Both are processes that require intentional and consistent attention and action.

When I first stepped into activist spaces I was attracted to the biggest personality, the most hype person at the rally, the most subversive people who also saw the whole system as guilty and were willing to put their words into action. I was swept into hashtag culture, following popular figures and believing in the power of electoral politics to save the system from itself. Considering that I had never before felt such a sense of unity with people around the country and around the world I think it’s understandable that I accepted what was immediately apparent. My desire to dig deeper and learn more eventually showed me the other side of these individuals and the issues they represented. Popular personas coopted grassroots energy and continue to benefit from brutality against Black people while also failing to meaningfully acknowledge the privilege intersecting within their marginalized identities. I am no exception. I allowed myself to feel all of the pride for the work that so many others had done before me and were doing around me, and used my marginalized identity to ignore or downplay my privilege in situations where I held an oppressor identity.

I have been shamed, cancelled, had my money-making capacity disrupted, and made public apologies with promises to do better over and over. It never feels like enough, but I am learning to be okay with this discomfort. There is utility in shaming. I feel ashamed that I did not see the need to fight for others until I realized I had skin in the game. I feel ashamed about the boundaries that I have violated, the people I have spoken over, and my lack of discipline. Each has resulted directly in harm to others, and when we harm or allow harm to be done to others we should at the very least feel shame. Once shame causes immobilization though, it ceases to be useful as a motivator. Wallowing in shame might give us a sense of absolution or validation but it does not do anything tangible to improve life for ourselves or for others. It’s a challenge to find the balance between feeling the weight of our actions and inactions, and being crushed by that same weight.

There is utility in anger. Feeling anger for its own sake, giving myself time to sit with the emotion and love myself enough to feel rage at being mistreated, is absolutely necessary for me to hold on to my humanity. However, allowing myself to wallow in anger is as harmful as wallowing in shame. With anger comes physiological responses that raise stress levels and result in diminished health outcomes. The system wins whether we are extreme in our complacency or fury as our health declines either way, with fewer of us left to put up a fight. I am trying to be more open, more hopeful, and more joyful to improve my health outcomes and expand my perception of my own power and the power of others who we call marginalized. It is worth the struggle to create a future where we don’t define ourselves by oppression.