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

by Sarah Schulman

If a person’s sense of self has been punctured, and they have not been willing or able to repair it, they may become intolerant of difference. They may confuse anxiety and vulnerability. They may exaggerate threat, overreact, seek the protection of bullies and shun others, and thereby become bullies themselves. They may lash out particularly cruelly at people they love and desire, as the feeling of loving can remind them of the abusive parent that they once loved. They may never feel safe unless they have an unreasonable amount of control over others, as in shunning. Shame, too, seems to be a driving force in traumatized behavior. Negotiation feels like a defeat, a reminder of the earlier violation. Giving in, adjusting, and changing feel life-threatening. Difference, as to the Supremacist, becomes a threat. Supremacists and the traumatized can be through-the-looking-glass, employing similar tactics for opposing reasons. The people they can’t control become cast as monsters, dehumanized specters that both the Supremacist and the Traumatized collude to create as manifestations of their own projected anxieties: the anxiety of being faced with difference. This monster can be a person with HIV, a Palestinian, or even just someone we know, have loved, desired, or shared space with, who has a challenging or merely different perspective and therefore becomes unbearable. They become a dehumanized object to be destroyed because of what they reveal about us; that there might be some...