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

by Sarah Schulman

At the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, people with HIV were among the most oppressed people on earth. In addition to oppression by race, geography, class, gender, and sexuality, they faced a terminal illness for which there were no known treatments. They had no laws of protection, no services, no representation, and received no compassion. Their lives did not matter and their prognosis was unabated suffering and inevitable mass death. Millions suffered and died without care, comfort, or interest, vilified by cruel projections, neglect, and unjustified exclusion and blame. They were systematically shunned, their experiences and points of view viciously excluded from policy, representation, dominant cultural mores, and law. I witnessed this firsthand. Only when people with AIDS and their friends intervened against the status quo and forced an end to the shunning by forcing interactivity through zaps, sit-ins, initiated agendas, actions, interruptions, shut-downs, exposes, research, and demonstrations, did systemic progress begin to be made. 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 di...