A woman stating that she is “afraid” of her partner may produce a knee-jerk superficial reaction confirming her as a victim and her partner as a perpetrator because she used fear terminology. This resonates with the government’s use of the vocabulary of “terror” to keep citizens from looking at the consequences of our national policy on other people’s lives, or causing us to racially profile people of color, Muslims, and others. But if instead, enough of a conversation of depth ensues to produce concrete articulation of what exactly she fears, or that citizens fear discovering about ourselves,
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