An exposé typically indicts the character of its subject; “Surviving R. Kelly” indicts a public that knew of his character and did nothing about it, a public that constructed an elaborate architecture of denial and has chosen to live in it. — Jelani Cobb, New Yorker, January 2019
On January 3, 2019, Lifetime released the first two episodes of the six-part documentary series Surviving R. Kelly. Directed by the critic and filmmaker dream hampton, the series quickly became Lifetime’s best performer in years, attracting high praise from critics and gripping millions of viewers over the course of few days. As its title makes explicit, the documentary focuses on the tumultuous life of the R&B superstar R. Kelly, whose immensely successful career spans nearly three decades, boasting a panoply of prestigious accolades and yet also engulfed in successive accusations of sexual abuse and assault. hampton’s work focuses specifically on this latter aspect of Kelly’s celebrity, weaving a poignant and sobering story from first-hand testimonies of survivors and many formerly close to Kelly.
Kelly’s celebrity has always been shrouded in the public knowledge of his strange private character and life. In 1996, Kelly married the singer Aaliyah while she was only 15 years old, with whom he had begun a relationship during the production of Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number. In 2000, a 27-minute video emerged of Kelly assaulting a 14-year-old girl, including graphic imagery of Kelly urinating on and having sex with the minor. Two years later, in 2002, Kelly was indicted by the Cook County’s DA Office on 21 counts of child pornography. In 2003, he was arrested in Miami on 12 counts of possession of child pornography. Finally, in 2008, Kelly stood trial on 14 charges of making child pornography, which ultimately resulted in his dubious acquittal on all counts after only a day of jury deliberations.
These facts are noteworthy because hampton builds on this repository of public knowledge to call her viewers to question and hold them accountable. How did we let this happen? How did Kelly get away with his misdeeds for so long? How did mainstream culture tolerate this, not to mention outright encourage and lionize it at times? And isn’t mainstream culture, at least in some ways, our culture? If so, then are we not responsible for having egged on Kelly’s celebrity and status, behind whose thickly-constructed shield he was able to carry out his egregious acts?
Yes, is the obvious answer here. We are accountable. At this juncture in the era of #MeToo, the story of R. Kelly is in many ways familiar to us. Broadly, it is the story of Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Kevin Spacey, and Louis C.K., among others. It is the story of open secrets, failures of allyship, and culturally manufactured disbelief and ignorance. Simply put, it is the painful tale of wrongdoers hiding in plain sight and evading accountability, because they inhabit what I call cultures of enablement, wherein our everyday actions implicate us in gross, systemic injustices. Before I unpack this claim, however, I should first explain what I think a ‘culture’ is and consists of. I find particularly helpful here an account that Sally Haslanger has recently put forth.
Haslanger defines a ‘culture’ as an interconnected network of meanings, scripts, schemas, principle, and the like, whose toolbox of meaning we draw on in everyday practice to make sense of the world (2017, 155). On this account, cultures encompass the tools and resources of our everyday activities, both as these are employed in our personal lives and at the level of social aggregation and interaction. For better or worse, cultures rarely possess clearly demarcated boundaries, since the networks of resources that they comprise are continually evolving, changing, and merging. In this sense, cultures encircle everything that we do and thus provide resources for exercising agency. That is, we develop the sense of an agential self, and learn to navigate the social spaces where everyday practices unfold, only in employing the resources, tools, and meanings of the cultures that we inhabit. Thus construed, cultures offer the interdependent conceptual and material frames for socially meaningful action, in which our identities are deeply bound up in shared understandings of what is meaningful, possible, actionable, etc.
But cultures are also sites of injustice and oppression, both at the individual and institutional levels. This happens when cultures occlude our access to that which is morally valuable and thus organize us in ways of life that are unjust and problematic. For Haslanger, these are instances of cultures turning ideological, wherein we are prevented from “knowing what and who matters” (2017, 159). Ideologies, however, do not manifest epistemically alone, since our cultural ways of life are materially grounded too. In other words, ideologies have material natures and manifestations, as they both shape and are shaped in our everyday, materially coordinated practices. If a culture has turned ideological, then, that culture now contains actionable possibilities for material harms to persons and groups. But, when a culture turns ideological, it also becomes what I call a site of enablement, where the very structures of meaning that we would ideally draw on to maximize inclusiveness and coordination, are now used in the service of enabling and perpetuating certain moral wrongs.
In these cultural contexts of enablement, we often fail to recognize what is morally amiss in our worldview, or when we do pick up on something that doesn’t feel quite right, we don’t feel compelled to engage in practices of moral critique and activism. Put simply, we fail to organize ourselves justly, because that which is morally valuable to us has been eclipsed ideologically and become invisible epistemically and materially. More importantly, we often fail to recognize what is morally amiss in such contexts, because our actions and activities, often unthinkingly, uphold the very structures that maintain and produce oppression. When a culture becomes ideologically infested, the tools of the mainstream become materials for enacting oppressive behavior, and thus arise cultures of enablement, which materially enable and promote oppressive trends and, concomitantly, foreclose possibilities for meaningful resistance and change.
In cultures of enablement, wrongdoers can escape responsibility and hide in plain sight. Plain sight defines the purview of that which is culturally accessible and publicly intelligible. Thus, when someone hides in plain sight, they are doing something that we can’t quite see and appreciate, even though that thing is otherwise right in front of us. This is what happens in cultural contexts of enablement, where bullies and abusers get away with their misdeeds, because their actions do not strike us as morally peculiar and objectionable. In fact, in such contexts, we often unreflectively encourage such forms of wrongful behavior, even though we recognize something is not quite right. To hide in plain sight, then, is somewhat of a misnomer, since there is not much hiding involved in cultures of enablement. In such contexts, the prism of popular imaginary is too diffractive for a normative wrong to clearly register as such. To use Miranda Fricker’s (2007) language, these are contexts in which a moral wrong takes place in the vicinity of hermeneutic lacunae, where deficits in the epistemic lingua franca inhibit moral understanding of normative facts.
To make all of this more concrete, let’s go back to Surviving R. Kelly. Toward the end of the first episode, entitled “The Pied Piper of R&B,” the columnist and critic Jamilah Lemieux exclaims the following about the dearth of public outrage over Kelly’s marriage to a then 15-year-old Aaliyah:
Where was the outrage? Where was Essence? Where was Ebony? Where was the local news? Where was anyone? Why was this, not in that moment, full-stop?! Why didn’t the culture say something is wrong?
Lemieux is putting the finger on just the right pulse! The kind of failure of the public imaginary that she is lamenting is precisely where cultures of enablement take root and emerge. In cultures of enablement, ideological practices that undergird the popular ways of life occlude and obstruct the development of critical capacities necessary for moral critique. In a later episode of the documentary, the fashion designer and television host Wendy Williams offers the following astute observation:
R. Kelly was one of those people hiding in plain sight. And sometimes we, as a society, are so in denial of people that we admire that we don’t want to see it.
This is roughly on point, though in a culture of enablement, it is not always the case that people are actively refusing to see something as a moral wrong. More often, instead, it is the case that we are not seeing something as a moral wrong, because our epistemic and critical capacities have been corrupted under the influence of pernicious ideologies. Nonetheless, Williams is right insofar as the phenomenon that she is describing calls into the attention the ways that we are collectively implicated and enmeshed in cultures of enablement.
This brings me to my last point: The cultures that allow abusers like Kelly to thrive, in many important ways, share borders with the ones that you and I inhabit. If this is the case, and I believe it is, then how do we conceptualize our responsibilities in relation to the forms of structural injustice that take place in our cultures?
To answer this question, I draw on the work of the late Iris Marion Young. In a (2006) paper entitled “Responsibility and Global Justice,” Young proposes what she calls a ‘social connection model’ of responsibility, which she carefully distinguishes from standard and traditional models of responsibility as liability. In Young’s view, this model asserts that many of us, whose actions contribute to structural processes that produce injustice, have responsibilities to address and remedy these wrongs. Young’s point is an important one to emphasize here, because the task of cultural critique and reform first demands that we accept accountability for wrongs that took place in our culture, especially under our watch.
In discussions of responsibility as liability, responsibility is often conceptualized as a form of holding individual agents accountable for their actions. In other words, responsibility accrues to an agent when there is some kind of a causal linkage between harm, action, and intention. As such, the liability model of responsibility seeks to isolate and mark out an individual agent or entity as the bearer of responsibility, wherein someone is responsible, and others are not. You may be familiar with this account of responsibility because it drives much of our thinking about accountability and punishment in criminal and legal contexts. So, for example, applying this account to an abuser like Kelly, we would have to retrace the consequences of his actions to partially reflective exercise of individual agency. And once this linkage has been clearly established, responsibility would be solely assigned to Kelly’s moral decision making.
Undoubtedly, there is a sense in which Kelly should be held liable for many of his actions and harms that resulted thereof. That said, liability models of responsibility oftentimes come up short in helping us account for wrongful actions that have a systemic and ecological nature. Granted that Kelly will have to assume the lion’s share of responsibility for his systematically abusive conduct, what about the actions of those persons that Lemieux and Williams decry in the quotes above? Presumably, Williams and Lemieux have that category of individuals in mind that were in Kelly’s inner circle, or established within the music industry, or journalists with a resonant platform. Liability theorists, here, could argue that these individuals are non-directly responsible for Kelly’s actions, insofar as their silence can be construed as complicty. But where does that leave the millions that have over the years consumed Kelly’s music, perhaps people like you and me? Even if we granted that some persons within this group were ignorant of Kelly’s actions, is it totally implausible to think, given Kelly’s record sales, that at least several thousand consumers supported Kelly’s art in the full knowledge of the accusations against him? In fact, in the immediate aftermath of Surviving R. Kelly’s release, the sales of Kelly’s work hiked due to the newfound attention. So, what do we say here? Are the people in this group of sympathetic consumers to be held accountable? If so, they can’t be held responsible insofar as they are liable!
Young’s connection-model of responsibility addresses this specific challenge. In cases of structural injustice, where large numbers of people participate in institutions and practices that produce harmful results, liability theories cannot adequately account for wrongs that have a wide-scope, cultural ecology. The ecologically distributed nature of structural injustice implies that many people, in various capacities, participate in processes that produce such forms of injustice. And to the extent that many people do so, they are variously responsible for orienting their attitudes and actions toward outcomes that are rectificatory. The extent and the degree to which we participate in bringing about such outcomes will, of course, vary according to the social positions that we differentially occupy in the complex structures of life. Different agents, as Young puts the point, “have different opportunities and capacities, can draw on different kinds and amounts of resources, or face different levels of constraint with respect to processes that can contribute to structural change” (2006, 126). That said, we are collectively to be held account for injustices that took place in our midst, and our responsibilities demand that we participate in socially and collective interconnected right-making efforts.
Interestingly, I think this social-connection model of responsibility is deeply built into the ways that hampton offers her cultural critique in Surviving R. Kelly. The story that the docuseries offers, ultimately, is a story of multiple forces clashing against each other, interacting, and converging to produce an abusive icon. In more familiar terms, the story is intersectionally developed out of the testimonies of different individuals, whom are situated in different structural locales, at the junction of the various axes of race, gender, sexuality, and class, among other identity markers. From family members to former musical mentors; from former friends to musical experts and collaborators; and from journalists covering Kelly’s life to the survivors of his actions, the narrative that hampton’s work puts forth amounts to an interconnected critique of a culture that enabled repeating cycles of abuse, assault, and negligence.
In the final episode of Surviving R. Kelly, entitled “Black Girls Matter,” which is offered as an indictment of the cultural silencing of Black Women, the music journalist Nelson George offers the following provocation:
It’s crazy. Throughout his music, [Kelly] has been remarkably frank about his predilections, about his freakiness. About levels of control, even. They’re in there. So, I mean, it’s not like he’s hidden. But we have been afraid to look.
hampton’s work offers the viewer an opportunity to reckon with this fear, as the cultures of enablement that produce R. Kellys of this world begin to slowly unravel. As Jelani Cobb put the point in his New Yorker review, Surviving R. Kelly is not quite an exposé, since it relays information that has long been widely known and out in the open. This information, however, acquires new moral valence in hampton’s work, because hampton is not merely interested in the story of a person. Rather, her work explores the story of that person, namely R. Kelly, insofar as it is crafted and develops in a particular culture. Specifically, hampton’s docuseries is an indictment of what I call a culture of enablement, wherein everyday practices reinforce systemic patterns of harmful injustice, and thus implicate many persons in interconnected networks of responsibility.
In this sense, Surviving R. Kelly stands out as an important work of cultural journalism and critique, but it also raises an important philosophical point. The structures that delimit and define our cultural, everyday practices are often laden with opportunities for patterned abuse and oppressive manipulation. Insofar as these practices fundamentally influence and shape our agencies, they can organize us in ways of life that obscure what is morally valuable and that trivialize what is morally egregious. In such contexts, the cultural spaces of meaning that we navigate daily transform into sites of enablement, where tools of cultural sense-making become symbols of encouragement to abusers and wrongdoers. This is how cultures of enablement deepen and expand.
But cultures do not have fixed boundaries, and thus they contain a multitudinous array of possibilities for progressive movement. A restructuring of our cultural practices, however, demands that we first accept responsibility for the roles that we variously play in producing injustice. This is the critical cultural springboard that dream hampton and Kelly’s survivors offer, as we begin to confront the consequences of cultural practices that give rise to and enable Kellys of our culture. But social philosophers can also play an important part here, since there is much to be illuminated in our ongoing cultural conversations about agency and responsibility. For many of our sakes, I hope that philosophers take these cultural responsibilities seriously, and that we do not insulate ourselves, as we often have, from important conversations about the future of progressive cultural movements.
Keyvan Shafiei
Keyvan Shafiei is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Philosophy Department at Georgetown University. Their interests primarily lie at the intersection of social ontology, social epistemology, philosophy of culture, and political philosophy. Their dissertation project examines the cultural underpinnings of mass incarcerations, and the ways in which cultures and persons epistemically and ontologically interact.
