Saturday, September 20, 2014

Violence & Accountability
There is much to be learned from the ongoing contortious NFL response to the sudden dramatization of a long-term problem, casting them and their players as the villains.  While there has already been some powerful analysis and will certainly be more, I am struck by the shameless hypocrisy surrounding NFL leadership claims about accountability.

I am not the first to point this out, but it strikes me as one of the lessons here that cuts across issue-areas and is rarely, if ever, the thematic thread our mass media focus on to tell and analyze a story.

The leader of the organization, speaking for the leadership group, (mostly men, all extremely wealthy, nearly all white) comes to the podium and--in his own words--tells us that the trail of mistakes starts with him and he is accountable.

What this means in this context is he is 'manning up' and admitting his mistake, so he can get on with his work.  He highlights for the moment that this work will include prioritizing addressing the problem on the table.  In this case it is domestic violence, but in other large organizations it is budgetary crises or downsizing or product recalls or the large-scale corruption and deception we saw in the recent financial crisis or in the ongoing pilfering of workers pension funds.

Anyway, to stay on point, the leader's comments about his own accountability reflect a remarkable about-face (that he hopes we do not see) on how to hold someone accountable.  In the recent past, when the person to be held accountable was not an elite among the leadership club the favored framing was zero tolerance to justify highly punitive responses targeting the individuals responsible.

In general, I do not support highly punitive responses, but I certainly do not support a system where accountability for the wealthy means they must admit they made a mistake so we can let them continue to lead us to a remedy, while accountability for the average Joe means something else entirely.

Just to be clear, in this case the average Joes do appear to deserve severe punishment, as does the leader of the NFL.  And while the average Joes have video footage to turn our stomachs so we have little doubt about the harm they caused, the NFL leader hides behind his apologetic accountability to make it harder for us to see the far greater harms resulting from his enabling, overlooking, and downplaying.

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