The Fury of Accountability

Ellen DeGeneres is back and she is freaking livid!

All the white women I know who've been held publicly accountable for their behavior have one thing in common: They are absolutely seething about it. It doesn't matter if it happened six months ago or six years ago; it doesn't matter what they said or did at the time to restore their images; it doesn't matter what steps they went through to repair the harm they caused — all of them are absolutely fucking furious about being held accountable. None of them would frame their reckonings as "what I did." In fact, all of them would frame it as "what happened to me" or "what I went through." 

The last Zoom I was on where a white woman was supposed to apologize for a whole litany of destructive decisions — and I've been in activist spaces for 20 years; I've been on plenty of these Zooms — she had to turn off her camera multiple times because she was vibrating with an incandescent rage that made me think her body was about to go full-on supernova all over her pristine kitchen. Like maybe I was going to see someone's head really explode. She never even got out an actual apology. It was, "After everything I've done…" And, "All the sacrifices I've made over the years…" 

I've been thinking about this lately for a few reasons. 

The first is that I got doxxed a couple of weeks ago for tweeting that Caitlin Clark should use her voice and her platform to speak out against her racist fans who have been hurling intense and unrelenting hate at Black players in the WNBA this season. For real doxxed. Had my phone number and address posted on social media and Reddit, people texting me to kill myself, queer women messaging my wife that she should divorce me because she could do better, my Twitter profile photo plastered all over the internet with men saying "What is this thing?" etc. Sadly, it was not my first time at the doxxing rodeo and it eventually died down because I didn't fight back. The thing people kept yelling at me, besides that I should throw myself in front of a bus, is that Caitlin Clark is "nice" and "has done so much for little girls" and why was I spreading all these lies that she was "mean." 

The second is that Ellen DeGeneres is back and she is freaking livid! According to Variety, before recording her most recent Netflix stand-up special, she told the audience, "Let me catch you up on what’s been going on with me since you last saw me. I got chickens. Oh yeah, and I got kicked out of show business for being mean.” Variety says she "went on to admit that she 'can be demanding and impatient and tough.'" (Apparently a reference to Warner Brothers' internal investigation that found evidence of "racial insensitivity, sexual misconduct and other problems in the work environment" that led to the firing of three senior staff on her talk show.) However: "I am many things," Ellen said, "but I am not mean.'" 

She also told the audience she was "going bye-bye" and "this is the last time you will see me." 

You can just feel the scorching outrage coming off her words, the fury at the audacity of the people who asked for some accountability. And if you've ever been on one of those Zooms, or an in-person meeting, like the one I was talking about in the beginning, you know exactly what I mean. You can feel it.

What all of these things have in common — the Zooms, the doxxing, Ellen's new standup special — is the incensed assumption that, for white women, being nice should be enough. That having a record of doing good stuff for people should position us above criticism and absolve us of any other wrongdoing. Nobody likes being held accountable for bad behavior, but for white women there's this "how dare you" mentality that almost never goes away once we’ve experienced repercussions, especially public ones. 

No one has embodied this mindset more in recent years than Ellen. In 2019, when she was criticized after being shown on camera pal-ing around at a Dallas Cowboys game with war criminal and renowned homophobe George W. Bush, she used her talk show to go on a four-minute tirade, telling her audience, "I’m friends with George Bush. In fact, I’m friends with a lot of people who don’t share the same beliefs that I have. Just because I don’t agree with someone on everything doesn’t mean that I’m not going to be friends with them. When I say, ‘Be kind to one another,’ I don’t mean only the people that think the same way that you do. I mean, ‘Be kind to everyone, it doesn’t matter.’”

And she has apparently not grown one single bit since then. She has continued to furiously insist that she's nice, nice, nice. To operate under the delusion that niceness is the same thing as rightness. That niceness is the most righteous quality a person can have. That being nice to people who have made — or are actively making — the world a worse place is, actually, a good thing. Be kind to everyone (to racists, to transphobes, to fascists, to misogynists, to the people who oppress others and deny their humanity), it doesn't matter. 

The root of this kind of niceness isn't actually kindness, of course; it's a fear of open conflict. 

Caitlin Clark’s sponsors and PR people don't want her to come out swinging at her racist fans because they don't want to lose their support or their money. They want to sell tickets and t-shirts and shoes way more than they want people to stop flinging racist dirt at the rest of the league. They would prefer that Caitlin Clark simply sidestep the question and run as far away from it as possible. Which is why she spent most of this season saying, "I'm not on social media, so I don't really see all that stuff." Deliberate obtuseness. Ellen DeGeneres doesn't want things to be awkward when she's enjoying the privileges of being super-duper rich, like, say, sitting in Jerry Jones' box at a Cowboys game, so she's "friends with everybody." Conflating politeness with goodness. Prioritizing social norms over everything else. 

And doesn't our country just have the longest, ugliest history of using civility to provide cover for our most abhorrent actions. Us genteel Southerners, always saying "sir" and "ma'am" while enacting the most immoral laws and perpetuating the most heinous crimes against our fellow humans. 

The problem with being a white woman writing about white women like this is that it can come off like trying to draw a line between the "bad" ones and the "good" ones, that I’m writing to position myself firmly on the "good" side. But that's not a real thing. Being a Good Person isn't some static achievement you reach for doing nice stuff. I’ve been called in and out about my actions many, many, maaaaany times in my life. I’ve mostly been given the gift — especially by the Black women in my life — of being leveled with frankly and directly and privately because of the graceful assumption that I'm ready to hear the critique and do something about it.

I haven't always responded perfectly or even well when faced with the truth of my own failures and missteps and outright terrible behavior, but I am always trying to learn and grow and get better. And, bare minimum, I understand that being a sweet, nice girl who's done some good things doesn't make me incapable of causing enormous harm. I'm dangerous, and I don't mean that as a threat or some kind of weird Swiftian brag. I'm kind and I'm dangerous and my work won't ever be done. 

I think, more often than not, very visible repercussions come when people who've been wronged feel like they've tried everything else and they don't have any other options besides going public with their concerns.

I have huge hope for Caitlin Clark. My anti-racist learning curve was steep in the beginning too, and she's young, and with immersion and guidance maybe she'll soon take up the social justice mantle of her WNBA predecessors. I also have hope that, as time goes on, we'll be able to distinguish Caitlin Clark's voice from the voices of her most vocally racist fans, because she'll give us some real words and real actions to hang our Logowoman hats on. 

Ellen DeGeneres, though — like JK Rowling — is long gone. "Bye-bye," I guess she would say. Frenzied with the idea that she's the one who's been wronged by being called to account for her words and her actions, firmly rooted in the belief that "not being mean" is the same thing as being good and right.