Accountability: Hard to Get, But We Must Insist, Persist

Accountability. We hear this word repeatedly in the public arena. At minimum, it means bearing responsibility for personal and institutional actions that harm others, by way of a penalty and/or reparations to those harmed, or if killed, their family members. Ideally, it means owning one’s perpetration as well.

Yet time and again, we are faced with institutions, and the empowered people in them, acting to shield perpetrators from taking responsibility. Whether we look at the Catholic Church, the prosecution of police officers who murder the unarmed, or Michigan State University, we see that the powerful ignore, deny-lie about the reports and evidence of assaults on human beings whose lives are cheapened. Whose lives are so trivialized that whatever morality there may be institutionally and personally goes on override. What matters to the empowered is the perpetuation of an image. What matters is that contracts don’t dry up because of bad publicity, that the institution incurs no stain, loses no athlete who drives the money train to the institution, experiences no shame.

The bodies of children, females, Black, Brown, gay and trans people have no boundaries to be respected. These are the actions that repeat. Even as words proclaiming equity, liberty and justice for all, and God-fearing, fill mission statements, speeches, prayers, ads and conversations-light.

Empowered by “Me too,” 160 young women have given voice in Court as to the impact of Dr. Nasser’s sexual molestation. They broke open the sham of Michigan State’s dismissal of allegations of young women years earlier, based on their in-house review.  These women crumbled the University walls sealing off the truth and understand all too well that the problem is not confined to Dr. Nasser. The booting of the President of Michigan State is an easy, though appropriate start to accountability. All those who laid bricks, who took the words of Nasser’s cohort of physicians rather than those of the female students must be held accountable too.

And what about the kind of accountability that requires those who knowingly abandon victims to predators to sit with the spiritual vacancy within them? Can we expect that?

What we know for sure is that Frederick Douglas had it right. Power accedes to nothing but demand.