An Open Education in Accountability for Portland Tenants United

Published here to prevent this post from being removed due to disingenuous reporting to Medium or Facebook. This website may end up changing in appearance but this link will not be taken down. If there are updates to the story contained here, I will append links to the end of the post, and make a note at the beginning. Happy reading.

It is not a serious proposition to expect conflict to cease existing. This is true of the broader world, and it is true of social justice movement spaces particularly, given the ever-changing dynamics of social justice and the need for an open mind as understandings of oppression evolve. 

It is an immense act of bravery for a person to speak up to say they have been harmed, because it always comes with the risk of further harm. When that bravery manifests in specific accusations of harm, the gracious response is to say “thank you,” apologize, and do better.

Accountability is to be honest and open about one’s own behavior and its impacts with others. Integrity is accountability to oneself and to one’s own values; to do as one says, even when nobody is around, or inquiring. Principled leftists request of one another honesty and integrity, or “hold others accountable,” regarding all manner of harms: from microaggressions which add up to a lifetime of stress for marginalized people, to unseemly behavior among friends and partners, to intimate partner abuse, rape, and murder.

Social work practitioners use an acronym in certain situations of domestic violence, to describe behavior common of a perpetrator of abuse when confronted with the accusation that they’ve harmed someone. It is important to understand the concept of “DARVO,” an acronym for “Deny, Accuse, Reverse Victim and Oppressor.” Perpetrators often refuse honesty, will deny that they caused harm, will accuse those holding them accountable of harms, and will reverse the responsibility for harm between the person asking for accountability (the victim) and the perpetrator of harm (the oppressor).

Community accountability has yet to be perfected, and valid critiques of its methods must not be overlooked. The tendency to “hold others accountable” for the harmful impacts of their actions is muddied when all or some of those impacts exist in the realm of the emotional. Our capacity to understand others’ emotions is directly proportional to our ability to have empathy for that person, which is not an American competence.

A neoliberal media establishment proffers a corrupt feminism that upholds Margaret Thatcher, Sarah Palin, and Hillary Clinton as feminist icons for being women imperialists. White feminism, a lady-boss middle-class white egalitarianism mostly focused on individual achievement within a deeply oppressive structure, is upheld while Black, Indigenous, and International feminisms are ignored. There is a tendency to flatten all harms as “abuse,” thereby stigmatizing the perpetrator of harm as “an abuser.” White feminism flattens nuance where such a flattening benefits white interests, and ignores identity dynamics that don’t fit neat harmless victim / monstrous abuser narratives. Harms exist along a broad spectrum, and often discussions of such harms lack nuance, which makes it harder to address and heal from them.

Those who refuse accountability often seem terrified of being wrong, admitting it, and changing. And who can blame them? Puritan colonizers once drowned sinners in the river for heresy, and we live in the nation they founded. Today, the social and professional equivalent of drownings is a possible outcome of conflict within the movement. Non-specific callouts, amplified as idle gossip, fly about activist circles without a thought toward reparation and healing. There’s a learned Puritanism in the social justice movement which demands perfection and infallibility, labels perpetrators of any harm as abusers, labels certain identities as innately abusive, and pretends harmlessness among all others. None of these critiques negates the need to demand perpetrators of harm have accountability and integrity. 

On May 19th, Oregon had a Primary election in the middle of a pandemic. About eight thousand people ran for one of four seats on City Council, and among them was Margot Black, who is widely-recognized as the de facto head of Portland Tenants United. Margot has a habit of saying that anyone who speaks less-than-glowingly about her is a misogynist, so before I continue allow me to preemptively note that I’m writing this essay in part as a favor to Margot and PTU. There are those who will dismiss this wholly, because of who I am, disqualifying me to write such an essay. Some Puritans will imply that I should be drowned in a river for whatever misdeeds, instead of speaking up against the ladyboss of Portland Tenants United, Margot Black. More than as a favor to PTU, I write this because I have grown weary of watching calls for accountability falter under the inept, neoliberal propaganda of the last 40 years – faults played out by both perpetrators and victims of harm. Just as Margaret Thatcher is not a feminist icon, there is no part of accountability and the abolition of police and prisons that rests upon vague rumor-mongering about leftist organizers with no path toward reparation or healing. Gossip seeking only to destroy reputations is a well-documented COINTELPRO tactic, and the people who participate in it are no less destructive than the police. Many on the left have unwittingly adopted the ideologies of Puritanism and neoliberalism, and to admit any wrongdoing as a part of the movement feels akin to condemning oneself to a lifetime of solitary confinement. There exists a perverse incentive for social justice workers to demonstrate themselves as virtuous by labeling others as harmful abusers. Left activists today live with a “first past the post” imperative during interpersonal conflicts to accuse others of perpetrating harm first, lest they be accused of DARVO themselves – a contorted ouroboros of justice workers labeling each other abusers, without specificity or nuance, and with no designs for a world less punitive and more restorative. So many calls for accountability are met with fragility and denial, frustration compels us to forego direct conversations for public renunciations. Our human capacity for cruelty is on clear display among as we relish in publicly denouncing the heresy of fellow leftists as hypocrisy. Our failure of imagination is never more visible than when we refuse to be honest and open, to be accountable for specific harms or to take requested steps toward reparation and healing. It is a direct consequence of how we have positioned and conducted ourselves as a movement that these patterns of behavior keep happening.

PTU spent much of the past few years claiming credit for others’ work in the Oregon housing justice movement, predominantly the work of women of color. It is not an uncommon occurrence to find a white person who desires laudatory praise for investing even a small amount of their time in social justice work. And PTU did indeed help many people directly, work for which Margot has already received much credit, and much press. In spite of her positive contributions to some folks’ lives, Margot Black and her fellow PTU Organizers have hurt many people, and refused to be accountable for that harm. Instead, PTU have denied accusations and multiple detailed accounts, made false claims of harm against their accusers, and reversed the claims of harm to paint Margot as a victim and her accusers as her oppressors.

Several years ago I was party to a call for accountability regarding harms PTU perpetrated against me and others. Multiple organizers had experienced such harm and our stories closely aligned – particularly the experiences of many organizers of color. PTU initially responded to that call for accountability with apologies, and claims that Margot would step back from PTU. The community waited, and watched, and such action did not happen, or at least it did not produce desired change. Just prior to the election, additional community members stepped forward with specific testimony requesting PTU to ask Margot to step back. This request remains unanswered. Meanwhile, PTU members continue to practice DARVO in a vain attempt at saving face.

The average call for accountability is so nebulous and terrifying that of course PTU, of course Margot Black, has no desire to admit culpability. Many on the left would paint themselves as innocents and call for punishments in grotesque, social media-fueled dog-piles. Often the accused would sooner drown themselves in the river, for at least then there would be specific directions for what to do once they admit harm. But in the case of PTU, a very specific set of harms has been reported. The people harmed have made specific requests of PTU for there to be consequences to this behavior, and have faced nothing short of defamation and harassment from PTU as a result.

It is important to state that Margot is not alone in this! Multiple people within her organization have both protected her from these accusations and acted on her behalf in defaming anyone who has spoken up.

Local union-of-unions Jobs with Justice (JWJ) recently called the question at their Steering Committee of PTU’s involvement in their work, given ongoing questions regarding this behavior. Following the most recent call for her accountability, two leading organizers within PTU, both white and masculine, pushed back at the JWJ Steering Committee by demanding JWJ investigate two women of color JWJ employees for advancing this effort. A vote of the JWJ Steering Committee preserved PTU’s presence in that space, while denying the validity of the experiences of those who disclosed their harm, and alleging impropriety and a subversion of process for having called this question to begin with.

In summary of the harm I am describing: white masculine organizers used their institutional power to actively deny that a white woman and her organization have caused harm worthy of consequences, over the bravely-shared experiences of multiple people of color, trans people, and working class people. These white men denied the lived experiences of multiple women of color, and have made defamatory remarks about people of color and working class people, in an effort to silence those willing to speak out. That the perpetrators of this DARVO are white people, and so many of the survivors targeted are organizers from marginalized backgrounds, is disgusting in itself. It lacks integrity to do so at a moment when many of these same people are professing investment in the movement for Black lives, and in a movement where we know that marginalized voices are often spoken over. 

Accountability need not be terrifying. PTU should heed the community call for accountability, ask Margot to take an indefinite leave, and work without Margot’s influence on building a stronger organization. Margot can do work independently which strengthens her commitments to communities of color and other oppressed groups which have felt the impacts of Margot’s and PTU’s misconduct. There are unresolved questions regarding the propriety of Margot’s romantic relationship with an intern, who came to PTU via a local college. There are unresolved tensions between PTU and a myriad of groups across Portland, for a variety of well-founded reasons. Building an organization that admits its faults and doesn’t make the same mistakes twice is what organizational accountability looks like. In much the same regard, Margot needs to ensure for herself first and foremost that she admits to and doesn’t repeat her mistakes. There is nothing wrong with being wrong. We are all harmed, and we are all capable of doing harm. There is much wrong with never changing, nor admitting you need to. And it is a dangerously harmful pattern to attempt to malign those whom you’ve harmed after they have the courage to tell you.

Margot has claimed since the more recent call for her accountability that she “can’t leave the house” because she “fears someone cut the brakes on her car.” While ridiculous, this is edifying. When you view challenges to white supremacy as a threat to your own security, you tacitly admit that your own security is only possible because of white supremacy. Margot’s emotions are valid, but there is a difference between feeling and being threatened – a distinction often lost under white feminism’s flattening of all nuance and privileging of white feelings above POC experiences. White emotion that claims to feel intimidated by people of color also reeks of the mythology of dangerous melanated people. Privileging of a white woman’s voice got Emmitt Till lynched.

To borrow from Jay Smooth, to be accountable is a practice, not a singular act. When someone tells you that you need to be accountable, it should be accepted like someone doing you the favor of telling you there’s a booger in your nose. If your response to this is to say, “but I blew my nose last week!,” you miss the point. It is a gift to be told you messed up – and people mess up all the time. If you hold yourself to a standard of being perfect, you’ll never allow yourself to improve. You’ll be stuck. And like many in our community, I am sick of watching Margot, and PTU, and the broader community of accountability advocates remain stuck in their desire for perfection. “Being good [is] a practice… that we carry out by engageing our imperfections.” To Margot and PTU: it’s simply time to admit your flaws, and join the community in being fallible. Despite all the Puritanism infecting the movement, nobody wants to drown you. Despite how threatening it can feel to your security to be told what you have done is racist, nobody is going to cut the brakes on your car. Much to the contrary, we just want you to take the boot off our neck, and acknowledge you put it there in the first place, and shouldn’t have.

Two femmes of color lost their jobs because of this mess. If you want to, make a donation in their honor to Don’t Shoot Portland, an org I know they support.