Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair

by Sarah Schulman

we not only live with those we never chose and to whom we may feel no social sense of belonging, but we are also obligated to preserve their lives and the plurality of which they form a part. In this sense, concrete political norms and ethical prescriptions emerge from the unchosen character of these modes of cohabitation.

It quickly became apparent that the methods we have developed collectively, to date, to understand these kinds of actions in order to avoid them, are not adequate.

Using this principle to examine those events, I have to ask myself what the white police officers, the wealthy football player, and the militarized nation state think is happening that produces and justifies their brutal actions.

But something occurred within the minds, impulses, and group identities of the white police officers, in that they construed the original non-event compounded with these factual and peacemaking communications as some kind of threat or attack. In other words, these policemen looked at nothing, the complete absence of threat, and there they saw threat gross enough to justify murder. Nothing happened, but these people with power saw abuse.

In all of these cases the police, the husband, and the nation overstated harm. They took Nothing, Normative Conflict, and Resistance and misrepresented these reasonable stances of difference as Abuse.

From the most intimate relationship between two people, to the power of the police, to the crushing reality of occupation, these actors displayed distorted thinking in which justifiable behavior was understood as aggression. In this way they overreacted at a level that produced tragedy, pain, and division. It is this moment of overreaction that I wish to examine in this book.

My thesis is that at many levels of human interaction there is the opportunity to conflate discomfort with threat, to mistake internal anxiety for exterior danger,...

Biomythography,

Just as unresolved, formerly subordinated or traumatized individuals can collude with or identify with bullies, so can unresolved, formerly subordinated or traumatized groups of people identify with the supremacy of the state. In both cases, the lack of recognition that the past is not the present leads to the newly acquired power to punish rather than to the self-transformation necessary to resolve conflict and produce justice.

I now am able to ask you to read this book the way you would watch a play: not to emerge saying, “The play is right!” but rather to observe that the play reveals human nuance, contradiction, limitation, joy, connection, and the tragedy of separation. That the playwright’s own humanity is also an example of these unavoidable flaws.

As a novelist, I know that it is the cumulative juxtaposition that reveals the story.

Disaster originates in an initial overreaction to Conflict and then escalates to the level of gross Abuse. It is at the Conflict stage that the hideous future is still not inevitable and can be resolved.

This is expressed through our resistance to facing and resolving problems, which is overwhelmingly a refusal to change how we see ourselves in order to be accountable.

it is the community surrounding a Conflict that is the source of its resolution.

community holds the crucial responsibility to resist overreaction to difference, and to offer alternatives of understanding and complexity.

I am examining the inaccurate claiming of “abuse” as a substitute for problem-solving.

The title of this book, Conflict Is Not Abuse, recommends mutual accountability in a culture of underreaction to abuse and overreaction to conflict. I am motivated to separate out the cultural phenomena of overstatement of harm from harm itself, because this separation is necessary in order to retain the legitimate protections and recognitions afforded the experience of actual violence and real oppression.

The state theorized this unwanted insistence on appropriate treatment as an act of violation, calling it “disorderly conduct” instead of resistance, an illegality to be punished and stigmatized. They shunned people with AIDS and therefore did not hear what they had to say to about how they were being treated. As a result, thousands of arrests took place of people trying to save lives, many of whom fought passionately until the day they died. In other words, it was the mistreatment and shunning of people with HIV that produced their illegality.

It is clear from history that progressive cultural and political advancement is not natural or neutral and does not occur on its own momentum.

meritocracy, entitlement, enemy mind.

Any pain that human beings can create, human beings can transcend. But we have to understand what we are doing.

Those seeking justice often have to organize allies in order to force contact and conversation, negotiation.

And of course this power struggle over whether or not opposing parties will speak is an enormous smokescreen covering up the real issue, the substance of what they need to speak about: namely, the nature of and resolution to the conflict.

the state and shallow group relationships collude to escalate Conflict and obstruct repair.

refusing to be self-critical in order to solve conflicts enhances the power of the state.

As individuals, we have enormous power in the ways we abandon the scapegoated, or i...

We have power to change the ways we encourage shunning and instead do the work to ...

but what to make of the media attention and centering of the Trump voter/supporter that believes generally made-up or inaccurate things as opposed to those actually harmed? for example, the article from the history professor whose student wrote an essay about voting for Trump insisting that Reconstruction failed and was devastating for the South despite that not being in any way shape or form accurate--at what point does communication stop serving a positive purpose and start re-creating/perpetuating harm? or is that an overstatement of harm? I guess maybe a question to return to in the chapter on the state

instead of intervening, he upheld the distorted thinking, unjustified punishment, and exclusion.

I connect them to relevant aspects of the LGBT community, provide alternatives in my classroom, and offer to speak to their parents, i.e., to intervene and stand up to brutality in order to protect its recipient and transform their context.

from the most potent potential for intimacy between strangers, to intimate domestic moments between lovers, to the claims of the state on its citizens, to the geopolitical phenomena of mass murder, we witness a continuum.

false accusations of harm are used to avoid acknowledgment of complicity in creating conflict and instead escalate normative conflict to the level of crisis. This choice to punish rather than resolve is a product of distorted thinking, and relies on reinforcement of negative group relationships, when instead these ideologies should be actively challenged. Through this overstatement of harm, false accusations are used to justify cruelty, while shunning keeps information from entering into the process. Resistance to shunning, exclusion, and unilateral control, while necessary, are mischaracterized as harm and used to re-justify more escalation towards bullying, state intervention, and violence.

sounds like the Trump administration

In trying to understand how the police became the arbiters of our relationships, I look at the historic evolution from the creation of the Feminist Anti-Violence movement in the 1960s to contemporary state control of the domestic realm.

this sounds really interesting already -- I guess it never occurred to me that part of the issue is a disconnect between invoking the police in a time/moment of conflict that they almost invariably (well, that's probably overstating it, but still) respond to in a paradigm of abuse/punishment

Escalation is the key consequence of refusing to problem-solve or negotiate, and it demands our attention as a central obstacle to peace and justice.

I suggest that the rising legitimacy of some LGBT people in relationship to the state through the traditional family structure reinforces some of the problematic aspects of that structure. And how, in particular, the assumptions of the mother role remains antithetical to power sharing, even in the queer family, and its relationship to the state. This alignment between family and state makes us increasingly complicit with a governmental apparatus of punishment that does not address the actual sources of conflict, and instead relies on overreaction instead of repair.

this sounds great

incremental genocide.

Bullies often conceptualize themselves as being under attack when they are the ones originating the pain.

Confusing being mortal with being threatened can occur in any realm. The fact that something could go wrong does not mean that we are in danger. It means that we are alive. Mortality is the sign of life.

this is a really interesting shift / framing

experiencing confusion, disagreement, frustration, and difference does not mean that we are being violated again. Experiencing anxiety does not mean that anyone is doing anything to us that is unjust.

recognition and consciousness about these differences brings us the opportunity to truly face and deal with the problems of intimacy that we couldn’t resolve before.

Awareness of these distinctions gives us the chance to appreciate and enjoy the gifts of intimacy and difference, that perhaps we took for granted before, or of which we were once over-critical. Of course, some people just give up. They internalize a story about themselves that they are unlovable or incapable of loving an equal, or that they are perpetual victims, or that they “can’t do” long-term relationships, but thinking these things doesn’t make them true. In order to “protect” ourselves by keeping our lives small and shutting out intimacies, we could actuall...

Confusions between projection, discomfort, and threat appear in every realm from the most intimate to the global: from the first ping of desire, to the bombardment of civilians.

Is she innocent of being sexually suggestive or is she guilty?

Being accused of desire is as old as history itself, and is central to the queer experience. It has been very, very dangerous. Both seeing and imagining queer desire in another has and can cost us our lives, our homes, our families, and employment. We have been excluded, shunned, imprisoned, and murdered for knowing or believing that desire is reciprocated.

We can actually talk to each other, and find the other ways and realms in which to connect. We can be people. We can deal with it. We can build friendships, collaborate, and just be nice to one another. Uneven desire is not a crime, it is not rude, it is not an assault or grounds for shunning or being hurtful. It’s just life and we can still be friends. For real. Even forever. But we have to talk.

The refusal to actually ask someone what they think is happening and to instead insist on unilateral interpretations compounds misunderstanding and then injustice.

I'll say

I did this to defend a story about myself that I felt safe maintaining, even if it wasn’t true.

Part of peace-making is acknowledging that we can’t know everything about ourselves, and sometimes we reveal things to others that we are not ready to accept.

Withholding this possibility makes normative conflict or resistance the primary source of injustice between us. It is designed to hurt, and it does hurt, with nothing gained but pain.

Five texts are culturally stigmatized as excessive, but they only cover a minute or two of conversation. And people need interactive conversations, even short ones, in order to understand each other.

I'm certainly starting to agree on the value of connecting that way but I'm not sure I agree on the impossibility of connecting via text/email and I think also digital natives are going to be a whole other ballgame entirely

An apology that doesn’t allow the other person to talk is not an apology. People need to speak, look, smell, touch, experience vocal tone, facial expression, make jokes, sit back, shift gears, and evolve their ideas and feelings in front of each other in order to produce meaning.