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

by Sarah Schulman

Here we see some of the same elements that were identified earlier in the process of refusing the responsibilities of Conflict and transforming it into overstated claims of Abuse: blame, scapegoating, one-dimensional explanations of people as purely good or exclusively bad that prohibit complex understandings of Conflict (not Abuse) as being mutually produced. It is an inability to self-criticize or to see one’s self as one reason for the conflict. There is lashing out in punishment, acting out in blame; calling the police on an HIV-positive sexual partner, organizing a community to shun and isolate a lover or friend, dehumanizing of Palestinians or other entire peoples or races. These attributes of official definitions of “borderline” reveal both intense fear of difference and overreactions to difference as a projected threat to one’s safety. At their root is a refusal to alter one’s self-perception of a threatened perfectionism.