Thread by @anitasarkeesian

I am utterly speechless. #AoIR2020

This thread is about community accountability when the people causing harm are 1) close to you and 2) refuse to be held accountable.

I’ve been involved to one degree or another with ReFiG from its beginning (founders of ReFiG are the names in the session above). One of them was my grad school supervisor, was a founding board member of femfreq, among other things. We have a long history. I owe her a lot.

The leaders of ReFiG have been called out on transphobia as well as worker exploitation, most prominently last year but there has been low key awareness of this for some time.

Because of my long and supportive history with them I hoped that I could reach out and open up some dialogue with the goal of a possible restorative process.

Instead for months I was met with defensiveness, deflection, blame placed on the victims, an array of excuses. They demonstrated a deep refusal to engage with any of the accusations that were coming from different sources and different situations.

I even tried to engage with the ReFiG organizing committee and was met mostly with either exhaustion at the subject or more excuses about how they’ve done so much for feminism and games and therefore everything else is null.

I tried to do as much as I could behind the scenes to support a restorative process because like I said, I owe so very much and truly hoped that someone I once considered a mentor would be able to handle this situation with some grace.

The fact that a) the door was shut in my face, b) the people who have been harmed have received no acknowledgement of their pain and c) they are now parading around academia as experts in how ‘unfair cancel culture is’ is deeply disappointing.

I think it’s important to be able to recognize that people can have contributed positively to communities, be generous to some people, and make a substantial impact while also doing harm along the way.

I hate talking about this publicly and tried to avoid it but we really have to reckon with; how can we hold people accountable who cause harm and what do we do with people who refuse to be held accountable?

What responsibility or role do we have when the people we call friends, partners, mentors are causing harm? Because if we ignore it or make excuses for it then we become complicit and the cycle never ends.

I highly recommend @AoIR_org reconsider their inclusion of this session in #AoIR2020 as well as audit their future selection process because despite the history of these speakers they still approved a group of entirely white women to speak to the experience of ‘cancel culture’.