I’m starting to question my grasp of it. I hear a lot of folks saying that white people need to be accountable for addressing racism and opposing whiteness. And I wholeheartedly agree. But when it comes to accountability, race, and injustice, I don’t really know what I’m doing.
From what I can tell, even my ideas of accountability are tangled up with white dominance. When I think of accountability, I automatically connect it with accounting. I’m also no authority on accounting and, for me, accounting is about numbers, oversight, and the act of quantifying. Because of this, accountability brings up images of correctness, performance, and tallying value or worth. To accountability, I inadvertently attach the idea that there’s an outside measure needing to be met or satisfied, someone’s looking over my shoulder to make sure things are adding up. This is similar to how whiteness and race works in my mind.
With whiteness, there’s a sense that I’m constantly trying to make the cut. I feel the need to track liabilities and assets — do the right things, make the best choices, don’t make mistakes. One way I’ve come to understand whiteness is as a measuring stick. There’s the expectations of behavior and speech, the moralized ways of being that demand adherence, there’s a strict accounting to whiteness — to the ideals and standards of humanity that whiteness defines. Don’t stray, don’t question, don’t try to be outside its inflexible boundaries. Don’t do it or you’ll end up like those whiteness has already devalued and rejected.
And I get that there’s a part of being accountable to race and racism that is about outward action. That the things I’m doing and my way of being, is experienced by others as sincere — especially to those whom racism targets. That it’s not simply whiteness repackaged, where I take I’ve learned from whiteness, and call it accountability.
Whiteness told me that certain things automatically come included with my white skin, like white people are individuals, we hold expertise, we maintain control, and we are in the position to establish guidelines for others. Unfortunately, many of the things l learned from whiteness, can get in the way of my truly practicing accountability. They’re probably also why I relate accountability with concepts of accounting.
I’ve learned that I need to be careful with accountability. I can’t allow notions of accounting, that come to mind when I hear about accountability, to take over. The pieces of accounting that I pick out — the ones that place me at arms length and give antiracism and racial inequity a business-like and transactional feel. I’m working to ensure that my accountability is about quality not quantity, that it’s relational, based in shared humanity, and that it’s deeply personal.
In talking this over with a group of dear friends recently, they reminded me that the root word of accountable — account — can also mean story or description. To account is to tell the narrative of something, to relay what happened. To set the record straight.
This is why I’m here writing stories of race, racism, and whiteness. It’s part of my being accountable for the ways I’m impacted by whiteness and how I participate in racial inequity. I’m facing my fears, unearthing the things that haunt me, and working out how to be whole. I’m offering my account to others who might be on a similar journey and could use a companion. I’m extending my story to add to and help change the account of what it means to be white in America.
I'm When it comes to accountability, whiteness, and ending racism, I may not know exactly what I’m doing. But I know that I don’t have to do it perfectly and I can’t do it alone.
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