“Complicity” is a term used with increasing frequency in today’s society — applied to broad harms like the climate or opioid crises, but also a driving force in cancel culture. Calling out complicity can be a force for positive change, but it also can cause deep, and often unwarranted, damage to others.
Professor of Sociology Francine Banner’s latest book “Beyond Complicity: Why We Blame Each Other Instead of Systems” (University of California Press) examines the complex role that complicity plays in U.S. law and in popular culture. Banner, who practiced as an attorney before receiving her doctorate, recently discussed the reasons most people tend to focus on individuals, rather than institutions, when making accusations of complicity. She also reflected on the significance of this “threshold moment” where — driven by movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo — this tendency appears to be shifting.
“Complicity” is a very powerful – and, as you point out, very broadly used – term in today’s society. What are some of the productive ways the concept is being applied or thought about?
We're in a space of radical reimagining about accountability and responsibility in the world right now. We’re also in a period where we're facing a lot of newly identified risks in the form of things like climate change, war and natural disasters. Long-term issues, like racism and sexism, are coming to the surface in new ways as well.
The idea of complicity can force the hand of institutions and corporations and governments, pressing them to be accountable for the role they have played in creating harms that we're facing today. For example, we see the Black Lives Matter movement demanding that state officials be held accountable for harms they've created through long-term discriminatory behavior and use of force. The #MeToo social movement is calling for, and succeeding in making, legislative changes.
Now, we also see institutions pushing back against social reforms and trying to place responsibility for addressing and controlling harms back on individuals. But the Black Lives Matter and #Me Too movements really have been an example of people coming to understand that the hazards we are facing today are about more than individual culpability. They are created by the government’s lack of investment in social services, ignoring ongoing risks and systematic mistreatment of certain populations. Calling out the government as complicit exposes this long-term and often hidden responsibility.
What are some of the harmful ways the idea of complicity is used?
I think the negative side of complicity really comes out in the interpersonal — things like cancel culture. Social media followers will be quick to blame a celebrity, for example, who may have nothing to do with a political cause, for not posting in solidarity with a particular position. And then we'll see this period of cancellation, where they'll lose fans or maybe be denied some opportunities. Then they apologize, and the cycle starts again. This is what happens when the public tries to address a systemic problem through stigmatization and not education.
You’ve talked about the fact that there is no concept of “uncomplicit.” How significant is this to the damage an accusation of complicity can cause?
Yes, something really interesting about complicity is there is no “uncomplicit.” It's not as though you can say, “Hey, now I solved this. I no longer have any hand in whatever crisis or harm is happening.” If we look at something like climate change, I would love to say, “I, Francine Banner, have no responsibility for climate change.” But, in fact, I'm drinking from a plastic cup right now, I commute to work in a gasoline-powered car. Even if I decide to stay silent and do nothing, I will probably be contributing to harm in some way. Now, is this as significant as what, say, ExxonMobil is doing? No. Do I know how to blame ExxonMobil? I do not. Do I know how to cancel Francine Banner? Yes, I do.
There are no boundaries to complicity — especially in the court of public opinion. But even in the law, there's not really any direct measure of how little or how much a person needs to do to become an accomplice. Current laws don’t draw a distinction — as they used to — between accessories-before-the fact and principals. Let's say there's a bank robbery. We're going to hold the person who held the door open as accountable as the person that cracked the safe, and as responsible as the person who actually put the gun to the clerk’s head. The law doesn't draw a distinction. Although at least the law has boundaries of constitutionality and proportionality.
On social media, on the other hand, there really aren’t boundaries. So we can have somebody who did something really, really bad, and they apologize and they stir up some goodwill in the public, and they come back from cancellation seemingly unharmed. Then we see someone who did something that we might think of as relatively minor, and for whatever reason, they're unable to rebound from that and suffer extreme consequences. There are intersectional factors at play — most often race and gender — but sometimes there doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason to it, who stays canceled and who emerges bulletproof.
You talk in the book about society being at a “threshold moment” in terms of complicity. How did we arrive at this moment?
There are different periods of time in which there's more space for debate, often due to societies undergoing trauma. During and after World War II, people came to understand the extent to which other people were capable of doing horrible things. In the post-war period, the field of psychiatry expanded, because people were starting to understand post-traumatic stress, a concept that really hadn't existed before, for instance.
We can see Covid, I think, as a collective trauma that a lot of us went through and are still experiencing. After living through the pandemic,, there are new conversations happening. Right now, across the board, I think we've got people from all walks of life asking questions they wouldn't have been asking prior to 2020.
We're now at a point in our history where concepts and ideas that we would have seen as sedimented in other times are now more up for debate. Because of recent social movements more people are having conversations about different types of harms. We're seeing emotional harm being recognized, we have a concept of hate crimes, we are beginning to appreciate the impacts of collective, individual and inter-generational trauma. As a society, we understand mental health differently than 20 or 30 years ago. With this, we're rethinking how we identify harms and injuries and reconsidering how we need to address them. Thanks to recent social movements, we are debating topics we might not have talked about before, and we have more nuanced language to engage these complicated questions.
Has there been a backlash against this shift?
We are definitely seeing a walking back of some of the promises that were made as a result of the social movements that were so powerful in 2020. That's in part because it's really difficult to sustain the types of intense activism that people were engaging in. It's difficult to hold corporate and governmental feet to the fire. It’s also hard to keep sustained interest in one topic when there are so many other, urgent global problems. And there are really strong interests in keeping the status quo. When it comes down to it, it’s a lot easier to blame a challenging situation on, say, your neighbor who has a political sign you disagree with in their yard than it is to actually figure out who's responsible for the large-scale disasters we're facing and then hold the people that are really in power accountable in a tangible way.
So, what can people do so they do not become discouraged?
It can be easy to become paralyzed in the face of something so daunting. As soon as you start questioning the machine, you realize you're part of the machine. And I think it can be tempting to have self doubt, because, by its nature, the breadth of complicity means that we're all going to be complicit in something. However, as we recognize shortcomings — our own and others’ — it’s important not to become preoccupied with those and lose sight of the need to hold these larger systems and structures accountable. I think there are optimistic ways to look at this show of strength by the status quo. You could look at it as institutional power, but you can also look at it as a recognition of the power that the opposition has.
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Interview by Kristin Palm
