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

by Sarah Schulman

“If I was being stabbed and I saw a policeman, I would want him to make it stop,” I said. “But if someone stole my cell phone? Why would I call the police? What would be my fantasy behind calling the police? So that a person who could not afford the phone that I can afford should be put in a cage. Why?”

One of the main reasons that people call the police, other than to stop ongoing violence, is because they are upset and they want someone else to be punished.

People often call the police to get their partners or children thrown out of their mutual homes or for other incidents in which there is no violence. It is punitive against the “crime” of opposition.

Tina explained to me that while what happened was undesirable and clearly an act of violence, it was produced by both of them. They understood that they both had to adjust their behaviors, and it was part of the transformation into a sober relationship.

She had never been to New England before, nor ever been in an all-white environment. She also had had very little personal experience with openly gay people. Most of the whites there were busy talking to each other about Northeastern white culture: they were discussing agents, MFA programs, commissions, theaters, publishers, writers, and teachers who were also white. Joanne was inherently excluded from many of these conversations. Very few of the white people knew anything about contemporary or historical Black literature or visual art, especially regional to the American south.

I don't think -- okay, no comment

I started sitting with her at dinner and trying to share my interest and knowledge of African-American artwork in an effort to connect with her and to support her.

what's that one emoji with the face and the teeth

One day she learned that James Baldwin had once been in residence in her studio. This was at the tipping point of her stress, and she became convinced that since Baldwin had been in that studio, and she, the only Black person, was in that studio, it was where “they” put Black people. She started calling it “the slave shack.” She’d come to dinner, and I’d ask, “How is your work going?” and she’d reply, “Another day in the slave shack.” This in a very elite environment normally considered to be a privilege, so the structural racism of the selection process increased her anxiety and created isolation that produced distorted interpretations in a context that was pressured, inappropriate, and unequal.

I mean, that's kind of hilarious and I get the impression that Schulman's the one most discomforted by it

She was standing outside alone, not dancing. I had considered that this might happen—a combination of alienating musical choices, discomfort, and a factual feeling of being out of context.

Wasn’t I self-aggrandizing by substituting myself for, and therefore protecting, a just accounting with the authorities about how in the hell there could only be one Black resident?

I rejected the offer of filing a complaint and submitted a list of forty artists of color to the admissions office, asking them to send each one an application.

so much to say about this and pathologized violence

I do remember once when my girlfriend’s apartment was robbed—this was probably around 1992—and we called the police. When they saw that we were lesbians, they were rude and cocky and insinuating. Their presence in the house was as bad as the robbery.

HIV Criminalization in Canada: How the Richest Middle Class in the World Decided to Call the Police on HIV-Positive People in Order to Cover Up Their Racism, Guilt, and Anxiety about Sexuality and Their Supremacy-Based Investment in Punishment

what a chapter title

SARA AHMED

love

In this chapter, I go to the next step: where in a self-advertised “progressive” nation, Canada, the state actively seeks to convince HIV-negative citizens that they have been Abused so that they will punitively overreact, thereby resulting in unreasonable incarceration, fear, and more power for the state.

I have to admit Schulman has a way of phrasing things that's very chef's kiss

Pavan believes that Canadians have a more “omnipresent” state than Americans and therefore have to problem-solve through their government more regularly than Americans do, which would explain what seems to me to be more of an identification with the state.

According to the Canadian Journal of Law and Society, Black men make up fifty-two percent of the heterosexual males who have been charged but only six percent of HIV-infected men in Canada. The overrepresentation of Black male defendants is significant in a country where only 2.5 percent of its population is Black.

This 9-0 decision reverses decades of global policy defining “safe sex” principally by condom use.

Low viral load is so effective in preventing HIV transmission that the US Center for Disease Control announced in January 2014 that since sex with low viral load without a condom is no longer necessarily “unsafe,” it will now officially be called “condomless sex.”

Implicit in the court rulings is the idea that negative people are not legally responsible to protect themselves from HIV, and that, in fact, the responsibility lies only with the positive partner.

This is consistent with other manifestations of the conflation of anxiety/conflict with abuse.

Instead of seeing a negative person who has unprotected sex as a participant in the problem, the ...

The status quo for years has been that negative men and women stay negative by insisting on “safe sex,” a concept built around the use of condoms, and more recently PrEP (Pre-exposure prophylaxis).

Once the responsibility to protect one’s self is removed, the negative can re-conceptualize their experience as that of being “criminally wronged,” even if they were never at risk for being infected, simply because their condom-using positive sex partner did not disclose. Even though lack of disclosure is an action with no material consequence on the negative’s HIV status, it still, unjustly, qualifies as Abuse.

Canada is definitely a world leader in terms of the police and the media collaborating to ensure that every arrest is covered in the media as a public health warning, especially because it also does double duty as a fishing expedition for further potential complainants to come forward.

The numbers alone show us that unsafe sex is a common human experience; so common, in fact, that we could start to understand unsafe sex as part of the normal conflicts and contradictions that signify being flawed and mortal, i.e., a person. Much as we understand that unwanted pregnancy is an undeniably human part of life, so is HIV infection, but we don’t incarcerate men whose female partners become pregnant when they don’t want to be, even though they didn’t use condoms.

So while what criminalization succeeds at is stigmatizing and punishing people, the outcome of criminalization is counter to its stated intent, unless prisoners are not included in the category of “people” that the state says it wishes to protect.

For example, in the US, the racist assumption for years has been that the reasons for such astronomically high rates of HIV infection among men who have sex with men is because Black men don’t have safe sex. A great deal of theorizing and planning has been done rooted in this assumption. There was an assumed lack of information, an assumed lack of self-esteem, clichés about Black masculinity, and an assumed impact of alcoholism and substance abuse, all leading to the presumption of unsafe sex. However, Greg Millett, the White House’s senior policy advisor on AIDS, released a report in 2015 revealing that, in fact, Black gay men have safe sex three times as often as white gay men. In other words, Black gay men are three times more accountable, aware, and proactive around safe sex than white gay men. So why the high rates? Because Black men are much more likely to have HIV-positive partners than white men. If they want to have sex with other Black men, their partner pools are more limited and their risk of exposure is overwhelmingly higher.

The silence of service organizations speaks volumes. For despite pro forma warnings that women can infect men, few in the Canadian AIDS “business” feel compelled by on-the-ground reality to address it. And when was the last time that heterosexual men’s real needs were ignored?

How would we understand our responsibilities to our friends, family members, and co-nationals if we could extrapolate that perhaps at least a quarter of the people we know are misrepresenting themselves as Abused in order to gain our compassion?

Would we ask ourselves why we so readily endorse victimology without gathering more information? Or would we question the very construction of compassion, how we practice it, and who we offer it to? And what we expect back in return?

In 2011, Canadian courts upheld that there is “no freestanding right to dignity or privacy” which makes revealing HIV status legal.

we are infected with criminal potential.

homonationalism.

the phenomena of dominant-culture gay people who achieve full legal equity, identifying with the state and being welcomed into social categories of Supremacy that they, or their predecessors, had been previously excluded from because of homophobia.

the switch for some members of the LGBT community from disenfranchisement to dominant cultural advantages, which are always accorded to some at the expense of others.

The early Gay Liberation movement, which argued for social revolution in gender, sexuality, and relationships, was overwhelmed by the AIDS crisis and re-emerged as the Gay Rights movement, focusing on relationship recognition.

Canadian homonationalism goes beyond mere access, as the legitimization transforms the LGBT self-concept as well.

No American movement that I work with would use the US stars and stripes without irony.

The impact of this nationalist, pro-family ideology on the queer community of friends in Canada is worth examining by Americans, because this is where we are neoliberally headed.

Gay rights produces new insiders, and it also produces new outsiders.

This new Other—what T.L. Cowan calls “the abject object” queer who can’t access the state—becomes newly differentiated from the recently acceptable in a number of ways.

Implied in the public’s support for same-sex marriage is a fantasy that gay marriage is a mirror of straight marriage.

s fair to say that many straight people support gay marriage because they see it as normalizing, and do so with an undercurrent of expectation that gay marriage will tame gay male sexual culture and produce approximate monogamy among gay men.

In this way, gay marriage is unconsciously understood as an antidote to AIDS, thereby separating “gay” and “AIDS” in the public imagination.

It has never been shown that punishment works. Punishment, denouncing, excluding, threatening, and shunning often create a worse society. It divides people, causes great pain, compromises individual integrity, and obscures truths in the name of falsely shoring up group reputation. Similarly, there is no correlation between having the ability to punish and being right. More often than not, the wrong people get punished. And the punishers use their power to keep from being accountable. So creating new classes of people who can threaten someone with the state, or who can call the police, does not produce more justice, and is more likely to produce more injustice.

As I showed in Part One, escalating Conflict to the status of Abuse obscures our desires, our own contributions to problems in relationships, our own anxieties about sex, love, and HIV, our own projections from our pasts onto the non-deserving present, and it disavows our agency in a manner that enhances the power of the state. Escalation under these circumstances is a resistance to self-knowledge.

In not being pulled over, our Supremacy keeps us from the information that we are protected from being unjustly pulled over. This Supremacy keeps us from knowledge about ourselves and how we are living. We may think, absurdly, that we are simply good drivers, or more likely, not think anything at all. We have no idea that we are inhabiting the benefits of white Supremacy when we don’t get pulled over. We pretend that this injustice is neutral, and in fact is not happening.

A dashcam video recording of her arrest shows that she got angry at being violated, despite the knowledge that she ran a high risk of being punished for resistance to injustice; that the rebellion itself would be constituted as the crime.

But when the white person is pulled over for no reason, they may have no understanding at all as to what is happening, because it is not systemic, simply an annoyance.

The process of moving forward in life requires, I guess, constant adjustment on both sides. We each come closer to a more mature understanding of who we really are, some kind of acceptance, while at the same time working to change the things we can in order to get closer to our desired self. In this way, that gap narrows from both sides: acceptance, and change.