Conflict Is Not Abuse

Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair

Sarah Schulman

• Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781551526447
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

From intimate relationships to global politics, Sarah Schulman observes a continuum: that inflated accusations of harm are used to avoid accountability. Illuminating the difference between Conflict and Abuse, Schulman directly addresses our contemporary culture of scapegoating. This deep, brave, and bold work reveals how punishment replaces personal and collective self-criticism, and shows why difference is so often used to justify cruelty and shunning. Rooting the problem of escalation in negative group relationships, Schulman illuminates the ways cliques, communities, families, and religious, racial, and national groups bond through the refusal to change their self-concept. She illustrates how Supremacy behavior and Traumatized behavior resemble each other, through a shared inability to tolerate difference.

This important and sure to be controversial book illuminates such contemporary and historical issues of personal, racial, and geo-political difference as tools of escalation towards injustice, exclusion, and punishment, whether the objects of dehumanization are other individuals in our families or communities, people with HIV, African Americans, or Palestinians. Conflict Is Not Abuse is a searing rejection of the cultural phenomenon of blame, cruelty, and scapegoating, and how those in positions of power exacerbate and manipulate fear of the "other" to achieve their goals.

Sarah Schulman is a novelist, nonfiction writer, playwright, screenwriter, journalist and AIDS historian, and the author of eighteen books. A Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellow, Sarah is a Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island. Her novels published by Arsenal include Rat Bohemia, Empathy, After Delores, and The Mere Future. She lives in New York.

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PART ONE | The Conflicted Self and the Abusive State

Chapter One | In Love: Conflict Is Not Abuse

A possible life is one that wills the impossible.

— MAHMOUD DARWISH

OF COURSE IT IS NOT ONLY the police, wealthy football players, or colonial occupiers who can feel abused in the absence of actual threat. It is not only the dominant who feel endangered when faced with normative conflict or when their own unjust actions are responded to with resistance. In fact these distorted reactions occur in both the powerful and the weak, the supremacist and the traumatized, in society and in intimacy. In arenas in which real abuse could conceivably take place, there are those who feel persecuted and threatened even though they are not in danger, and they often lack help from those around them to differentiate between the possible and the actual. Bullies often conceptualize themselves as being under attack when they are the ones originating the pain. Everywhere we look, there is confusion between Conflict and Abuse.

If a person cannot solve a conflict with a friend, how can they possibly contribute to larger efforts for peace? If we refuse to speak to a friend because we project our anxieties onto an email they wrote, how are we going to welcome refugees, immigrants, and the homeless into our communities? The values required for social repair are the same values required for personal repair. And so this discussion must begin in the most micro experience. 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. In the most intimate and personal of arenas, many of us have loved and trusted someone who violated that trust. So when someone else comes along who intrigues us, whose interests we share, who we enjoy being with, with whom there could be some mutual enrichment and understanding, that does not mean that we are going to be violated again. And 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.

Now, 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 actually be hurting ourselves, missing out on a transformative experience of the heart, and sabotaging our small but crucial contribution to making peace. And the withholding also mis-trains those around us to not see us and others like us as sexual, loving adults who have the right to be in intimacy with equals. Relationships of all kinds, after all, are the centerpiece of healing.

Some of the fear is based in earlier experience. If we were in a car accident, we can become afraid of cars. If someone close to us died, we could become terrified of normative loss. If we experience sexually alienating encounters, we could construct ourselves as not sexual. If we are physically violated, we could imagine that every person who reminds us of the assailant is going to assault and violate us. If we are socially oppressed or marginalized or punished, we could mistrust everyone from the category of the oppressor. But this fear of potential threat is not always based in actual experience. It can also be a political construction, one that is fabricated and then advertised through popular culture and entertainment, or enforced through systems of power, like Islamaphobia, or generalized rhetorics of “terror.” We are often made to believe through repetitive official and sub-cultural messaging that certain kinds of people are dangerous, that certain kinds of social interactions are threatening, even though the only thing they might actually threaten is an established power structure. Or when it is we who wield the unjust upper-hand, we are reinforced in falsely conceptualizing the other party’s resistance as the originating threat.

Why do some of us need to feel and act as though we are being assaulted when we’re not? It’s a big question, and one at the core of so much hostility, fear, projection, and punishment. The more I look at this inflationary process, the more I see how central it is to unnecessary separation and pain. 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. Seeing danger that isn’t there leads to escalation and overreaction, which can destroy people’s lives spiritually and literally, individually and collectively. So because the question is so big, I start in the smallest place. With the flirt.

The Dangerous Flirt

I’m at a table with relative strangers. I notice the woman in the opposite chair; she is attractive and smart. Her imagination is surprising. She has insights that are attention-grabbing. And she displays herself in a way that may be aimed at the larger group but is having an effect on me. We are all talking business, but she is a bit naughty. This is a professional gathering inside an institutional building. Yet the woman across the way uses the word “G-spot.” Now, queer people have a sexualized vocabulary in professional spaces that many straight people might find inappropriate, so this stands out as a bit showy, but it’s not that unusual. Later, though, she insists on it. She wants attention for this word and we all give it to her. She smiles, she is bold, she commands but she is also soft in her command. Now I am thinking about her sexually. I am thinking about the word G-spot, its mythologies and implications. The more she insists that we think about this, the more I begin to think about penetrating her and I am also thinking about her penetrating me. Is she flirting with me? I am the stranger here; the others are her workmates. I don’t know if she is always like this, if she is flirting with someone else at the table, or if this is for my benefit. Is this “inadvertent” or is it “intentional.” Is she innocent of being sexually suggestive or is she guilty?

A different person, perhaps one with a history of a specific kind of sexual abuse, processed in a specific way, especially if it pertained to suggestible language, could find her speech inappropriate and upsetting. They could find it harassing. It could be a “trigger.” However, I find it inviting. I am enjoying her and I am appreciating her. If I attempt to follow up in order to discover if this was actually aimed at me, I too could be seen as a harasser; after all, this is a professional relationship. Human Resources could be called in to hurt me. Or, just as easily, my interest could be reciprocated. I have to be very, very careful. One false move and I could be the sad object of an outraged story on the dreaded grapevine: “Sarah Schulman came on to me. It was so inappropriate.” The story would never be “I liked her, I flirted with her, she understood me, and then I was scared I would be hurt like I have been before.” Depending on her character, self-concept, history, and logic, depending on how she chooses to act, or if she is conscious enough to have choice, I could be accused of desire. And so could she. Given the institutional setting, I could even have charges brought against me. Or, things could go very well.

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. Sex workers, especially trans women, often lose their lives expressly because they were desired. And certainly “homosexual panic defense” has been used successfully in courts to justify the murders of gay men, perhaps gay men who had absolutely zero sexual interest in their assailant; or cis women, trans women, or gay men who responded to another man’s wanting. And of course many of us have been violated by the person we most loved and desired, and who loved and desired us. We are accused of desire when it never manifested, and we are accused of desire when it is full and free. Being desired is not the same as being harassed, and we do not have to punish or shun the person who sees what is special about us. Just because you want me, doesn’t mean I have to hurt you. Especially if I also feel attractions that I don’t pursue for reasons of projections from my past. I don’t have to avoid you, ignore your call, refuse to return your email, or block you. 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.

Being falsely accused of desire also has its own more extended history, one more deeply rooted in race. There is already a long, known tradition of white people repeatedly concocting accusations of desire to justify specifically racial violence. Black men, as we all know, have been lynched, tortured, castrated, incarcerated, and murdered by the white state since they were brought to the continent as slaves, and one of the chief channels has been through the false accusation that they desired white women. Of course intrinsic to white Supremacy is the internal fantasy and external projection that Black people want what white people have. So while Black people are the ones who are endangered, they have been falsely positioned as dangerous and threatening to whites in order to justify white cruelty. White people can’t face our need to subjugate and diminish others, so we create a claim that they have done something wrong which justifies this punishment. We take our anxieties about our own negative impulses and unjust deeds and mask them with untrue stories about Black people’s characters, actions, and intent, including in the realm of desire.

I think of the complexity expressed by actress Sarah Paulson’s deep and multi-dimensional performance in the movie 12 Years a Slave. As the white wife of a pathologically cruel slave owner, Paulson’s character cannot understand that her real problem is the frame of white and male Supremacy in which she lives. So she projects her uncomprehending pain into the substitute arena of jealousy over her husband’s sexual abuse of a Black slave, played by Lupita Nyong’o (who won an Oscar). The white woman is not a slave owner herself as she cannot own property, human or otherwise, but her husband owns this Black woman whom he openly sexually abuses. This white woman excuses her husband, overlooks white Supremacy and slavery, and instead aims all her pain and rage at the Black woman, causing her to be brutally whipped. In this way Paulson’s character finds the wrong solution for the wrong problem. Nyong’o’s character is, of course, shunned. She is not allowed to communicate, to speak or to express her experience, point of view, and/or understanding. Her position as a specter is a unilateral creation of the jealous white woman who does not imagine or consider that the Black woman does not want to be understood or treated this way. Political problems become diverted and expressed as intimate problems and anxieties get aimed at the wrong person.

As stark as the racial example is, we certainly don’t need the historic cataclysm of slavery to find projections of social evils catapulted onto intimate personal relationships. They are everywhere. There is a pervasive inability to see the big picture, to look at psychological make-up, to imagine economic consequences, or to ask about other people’s real motives and objectives. This lack of information, communication, and understanding produces unnecessary fear and then cruelty, while refusing contexts and explanatory histories and avoiding scapegoating. The refusal to actually ask someone what they think is happening and to instead insist on unilateral interpretations compounds misunderstanding and then injustice.

The use of accusations of desire as an overstatement of harm is a prototype with powerful trickle-down application. After all, many of us are never supposed to express erotic feeling or its discrete and different counterpart: erotic interest. Women, of course, risk all kinds of slander and are tagged as predators for revealing erotic feeling. Mothers are not supposed to have desires that could disrupt their sacrifice to their children. Queers have been taught all our lives that erotic feeling is wrong and that it will subject us to ridicule, exclusion, and punishment. People who feel erotically towards forbidden objects—like those other than partners to whom they have pledged monogamy, or those who are the wrong age, who work in the same sexually prohibitive workplace, who are transgender, or sex workers, who are generally desexualized by the dominant culture, or who are “off-type” (as in not as butch as one’s femme identity demands in a partner)—can motivate them to hide feelings, even to themselves. Telling the truth of interest means taking the risk of being accused.

There have been times in my life when I was attracted to someone and didn’t want to admit it, or that I was attracted to or even in love with her, or at least loved her, and had no awareness of this. It is not that I was lying, but that I was defended. I blocked access to my own real feelings. I did this to defend a story about myself that I felt safe maintaining, even if it wasn’t true. But sometimes the other person saw the truth that I was unable to access or be accountable for. 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.

Sexism has exploited this truth into the lie that men always know more about women than we know about ourselves. But refuting male Supremacy does not mean pretending that we all understand ourselves completely. What if she reciprocated or expressed what I was not developed enough to express? What if I became angry, or denied the reality? Blamed her as a substitute for examining myself? What if she tried to help me recognize or be accountable to that reality? Certainly this dynamic of defended refusal is a normative part of many people’s coming to terms with their sexual imaginations and can in fact continue after sexual identity is well in place. Is the act of honest pushback a kind of “harassment,” or is it a gift?

Of course, people come to themselves in their own time, but what if the denial manifests in something harmful to the other person? What if I was flirting but didn’t realize what I was feeling and doing? What if she responded? What if I became angry or withdrawn at her recognition of a truth I could not recognize? What if I blamed her and asked her to carry the burden of my own dishonesty? What do we call that? Of course, I should not feel expected to kiss someone I don’t want to kiss. But what if I don’t want to want to kiss her but still want to? Then is the other’s forward response an invasion? I don’t think so.

Email, Texts, and Negative Escalation

This central role of anxiety in escalating Conflict is one of the reasons why, in our contemporary time, email and texts are so often the source for tragic separations of potentially enriching relationships. First of all, email and text are both unidirectional and don’t allow for return information to enhance or transform comprehension. We must speak to each other, especially when events or feelings are fraught. I wish that all the people of the industrial world would sign a pledge that any negative exchange that is created on email or text must be followed by a live, in-person conversation. And clearly we have a responsibility to encourage our friends and colleagues to not make negative judgments based on email or texts. So many relationships are ruined by the artificial nature of these obstructive walls, especially when one party makes a negative power-play by refusing to speak to the other in person. They then create the false problem of whether or not the two conflicted parties will speak at all, which makes addressing and progressing to the real source of anxiety impossible. Refusing to communicate has always been one of the main causes of false accusation as it guarantees negative fantasy about the other, especially in arenas that are particularly loaded like sexuality, love, community, family, materiality, group identification, gender, power, access, and violence. Email and texts don’t allow us to go through the human phases of feeling that occur when we actually communicate face to face.

Refusing to speak to someone without terms for repair is a strange, childish act of destruction in which nothing can be won. Like all withholding, it comes from a state of rage, and states of rage are products of the past. As some say, “If it’s hysterical, it’s historical.” By refusing to talk without terms, a person is refusing to learn about themselves and thereby refusing to have a better life. It hurts everyone around them by dividing communities and inhibiting learning. When we have terms (e.g., “You stole my money to buy drugs so I will talk to you about this when you have three years sober”), they may not ever be met. But at least there is always a possibility of repair. Withholding this possibility makes norm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction | A Reparative Manifesto
• Part One | The Conflicted Self and the Abusive State
• Part Two | The Impulse to Escalate
• Part Three | Supremacy/Trauma and the Justification of Injustice: The Israeli War on Gaza
• Conclusion | The Duty of Repair
• Acknowledgments
• Works Cited
• Citations by Page
• About the Author