Dr. Don Schweitzer, PhD, LMSW

When someone in our organization or movement crosses a line, what does accountability require? Sometimes it requires speaking publicly, especially when harm is serious, repeated, or being concealed. Other times, a private conversation may accomplish more. A colleague can be challenged. A leader can be questioned. An inaccurate statement can be corrected. A policy can be changed. None of those actions necessarily requires a public spectacle. Integrity-Based Advocacy asks us to address harmful behavior without turning accountability into another form of performance. The goal is to correct what is wrong, reduce harm, and strengthen the work. The question isn't whether we've condemned someone loudly enough. It's whether we've taken responsibility for making things better.

One measure of a healthy organization or movement is how it responds when someone raises an uncomfortable concern. Does it become curious? Does it examine the evidence? Or does it begin questioning the person's loyalty? When disagreement is treated as betrayal, people learn to remain silent. Leaders receive less honest feedback. Mistakes become harder to correct. Over time, protecting the group can become more important than protecting its principles. This doesn't mean every criticism is valid or that every disagreement deserves equal attention. It means people need room to question methods, decisions, and leadership without automatically having their commitment to the mission challenged. That's not a threat to integrity. It's one of the conditions that makes integrity possible.

There's an important difference between being loyal to a cause and being loyal to the group that represents it. A cause is grounded in something we hope to accomplish. A group is made up of people, relationships, leaders, habits, and decisions. Those two things can become so closely connected that questioning the group begins to feel like questioning the cause itself. But organizations make mistakes. Leaders become defensive. Movements sometimes drift away from the values that brought people together. We can support a cause while questioning the methods being used in its name. Sometimes that isn't disloyalty at all. It may be one of the most important ways we protect what we believe in.

A tragedy in the Bronx offers an important lesson about advocacy. After 15-year-old Javits Frimpong was killed, Mayor Zohran Mamdani called President Trump to ask for a visa so the boy's mother could travel from Ghana to say goodbye. According to Mamdani, Trump agreed. These two leaders have profound disagreements. Yet keeping a line of communication open created an opportunity to help a grieving family. There's a larger lesson here. Those of us who advocate from positions of relative privilege have a particular responsibility to consider the consequences of our methods. When our tactics provoke backlash or close doors to cooperation, we may not be the ones who suffer most. It may be the very people we're trying to help. Accountability matters. So does the discipline to preserve opportunities for cooperation. Before we burn a bridge, perhaps we should ask: "Who might someday need to cross it?" cnn.com/2026/10/31/us/mamdan…

Here's a question I've been returning to in my work on Integrity-Based Advocacy: Would I defend this method if my opponents used it? It's not a perfect test. Power, history, and circumstances matter. Similar actions can have very different consequences depending on who's using them and why. But the question can reveal something important about our reasoning. Are we evaluating the behavior itself, or are we excusing it because we support the people involved? A just cause doesn't automatically make every method just. The challenge is to remain committed to the cause without surrendering our judgment about how it's being pursued.

We often talk about holding people accountable. But what happens when accountability points toward people we admire, organizations we support, or movements whose goals we believe in? That's a much harder conversation. In my latest essay, I explore why we're often more willing to excuse harmful behavior from our own side, how loyalty can become confused with conformity, and why questioning a movement's methods doesn't necessarily mean abandoning its cause. I also consider an important complication: criticism can sometimes be weaponized by opponents, and not every disagreement needs to become a public denunciation. The challenge is to remain loyal to our values, even when doing so becomes uncomfortable. Integrity Begins With Our Own Side donschweitzer.com/post/integ… I'd be interested in hearing how others navigate the tension between loyalty and accountability.

It's relatively easy to recognize harmful behavior when it comes from people we oppose. We notice the exaggeration, the contempt, the double standards, and the willingness to excuse almost anything in pursuit of a goal. But what happens when people who share our values use those same methods? Suddenly, we're more understanding. We know the history. We recognize the anger. We understand what they're trying to accomplish. Sometimes those distinctions genuinely matter. But they can also become excuses for behavior we would never accept from our opponents. Integrity requires more than recognizing what others are doing wrong. It requires being willing to examine what we're doing ourselves. And that may be the harder test.

Here's a question worth keeping close whenever we find ourselves defending the actions of people or groups we support: Would I defend this behavior if the other side did it? It's an uncomfortable question because it asks us to separate our commitment to a cause from our judgment about the methods being used. We can believe deeply in a movement's goals while questioning its tactics. We can support an organization while challenging its decisions. We can remain loyal to our values while refusing to excuse harmful behavior. That kind of self-examination requires courage. But it's also how we keep integrity from becoming something we demand only of others.

Belonging is a powerful human need. We want to be accepted by the people and communities that share our values. That connection gives us meaning, identity, and support. But belonging can also make honest disagreement uncomfortable. When questioning our own group threatens our standing within it, we may become more concerned with demonstrating loyalty than discovering what's true. This creates a difficult problem for movements and organizations. The very people who care most deeply about a cause may become reluctant to question how it is being pursued. Healthy communities need people who are willing to ask uncomfortable questions. Loyalty to a cause should include the courage to question its methods.

It's relatively easy to recognize harmful behavior when it comes from people we oppose. We can identify dishonesty, intimidation, cruelty, and hypocrisy in those whose views we reject. The harder test comes when people we agree with use those same methods. Suddenly, context matters more. We explain away behavior we would condemn in others. We become reluctant to criticize people who share our goals. And sometimes we convince ourselves that the importance of our cause justifies methods we would otherwise reject. This is one of the challenges at the heart of Integrity-Based Advocacy. Our principles have to apply to our own side, too. Otherwise, they risk becoming tools for judging opponents rather than standards for guiding ourselves.

Here's one of the most uncomfortable tests I know for evaluating a tactic: Would I consider this method legitimate if people I strongly disagreed with used it against my side? It's remarkably easy to develop one standard for methods we approve of and another for methods used against us. That's especially true when we believe the stakes are high. But integrity can't depend entirely on who is holding the tool. If intimidation is wrong, its morality shouldn't reverse when our side intimidates. If misinformation is wrong, our cause doesn't make it true. If dehumanization is dangerous, the identity of the target doesn't make it safe. A good cause deserves methods capable of surviving the same moral scrutiny we apply to everyone else.

Pressure is sometimes necessary for change. People and institutions don't always respond simply because we've made a good argument. The harder question is what happens to us when we begin applying that pressure. Do we still care about truth? Do we still distinguish behavior from identity? Can we recognize legitimate concerns from the other side? Would we object to these same tactics if they were being used against us? Pressure tests more than the people we're trying to influence. It tests the integrity of the people applying it.

One misconception I want to push against in Integrity-Based Advocacy is that respecting someone's humanity means avoiding confrontation. It doesn't. Sometimes integrity requires saying no. Sometimes it requires consequences. Sometimes it requires protest, disruption, organized pressure, or refusing to cooperate with something we believe is wrong. Dignity places a boundary around how we do those things. We can challenge power without humiliation. We can impose consequences without cruelty. We can create pressure without convincing ourselves that the people we're confronting have somehow become less human. Dignity doesn't weaken confrontation. It disciplines it.

It's easy to value dignity when we're dealing with people we respect. Humility is easier when we're unsure we're right. Grace is easier when no one has hurt us. The real test comes under pressure. King's philosophy of nonviolence asks something extraordinarily difficult: remain committed to your values precisely when abandoning them feels most justified. That's why I increasingly think of nonviolence as a discipline of character. Our values matter most when circumstances give us permission to abandon them.

One reason nonviolence is sometimes misunderstood is that it can sound like an instruction to be nice, avoid conflict, or simply endure injustice. King's philosophy demanded almost the opposite. Confront injustice. Create pressure. Disrupt systems that refuse to change. But do it without allowing hatred, humiliation, or dehumanization to determine who you become in the process. That requires enormous discipline. The question isn't whether we confront. It's how we confront, and what our methods are creating while we do it.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about Martin Luther King Jr.'s philosophy of nonviolence. What increasingly interests me is not simply the six steps he taught, but the kind of person those steps require us to become. Investigation requires curiosity. Education requires truthfulness. Personal commitment requires humility. Negotiation requires dignity. Direct action requires courage. Reconciliation requires grace. Seen this way, nonviolence is more than a set of tactics. It is a discipline of character. And that may be one of King's most important lessons for anyone trying to create change today. I wrote more about it here: donschweitzer.com/post/the-v…

One question worth asking before making an argument: "Am I communicating to persuade the person in front of me, or to demonstrate something to the people who already agree with me?" Those can produce very different kinds of communication. One rewards familiar language, applause, and signals of belonging. The other requires curiosity. What matters to this person? How do they understand the problem? What language makes sense within their experience? What might I say differently without changing what I believe? Integrity-Based Advocacy doesn't ask us to water down our convictions. It asks us to become more skillful at communicating them.

There's a difference between changing your principles and changing how you communicate them. That's an important distinction in advocacy. If dignity matters to me, I can explain its importance through fairness, compassion, freedom, faith, responsibility, or even practical outcomes—depending on who I'm talking with. The principle hasn't changed. The language has. We sometimes become so attached to our preferred vocabulary that using different words feels like surrender. It isn't. Translation isn't abandoning your values. It's helping someone else find a doorway into them.

When we care deeply about something, we naturally explain it using the language that persuaded us. But the words that resonate with us may not resonate with someone else. Different people bring different experiences, priorities, fears, values, and assumptions to the same issue. That doesn't mean changing what we believe to make it more acceptable. It means learning how to communicate what we believe in ways another person can actually hear. Good advocacy isn't just about having a strong argument. It's about understanding the person you're hoping to persuade.

Here's a small discipline that can completely change a difficult conversation: Ask before you assume. What are they actually worried about? What do they think is at stake? What part of your argument do they agree with? Where do they think you're wrong? We often enter disagreement already carrying a story about why the other person believes what they believe. Curiosity gives them an opportunity to correct it. Sometimes we'll discover that our assumption was right. Sometimes we won't. Either way, we're now responding to the person in front of us rather than the person we've constructed in our minds.