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

Author:Sarah Schulman [Schulman, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781551526447
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Published: 2016-10-04T04:00:00+00:00

Interrupting Escalation Before It Produces Tragedy

As both supremacists and the traumatized refuse information and communication that could alter their concepts of themselves, escalation is created. Up to this point I have thought about how overstating harm and overreaction to conflict give more power to the state. The state in turn entices some of us into a place of reward while scapegoating the more vulnerable as a smokescreen to avoid facing the conflicts inherent in the social structure itself. In all cases, this destructive involvement with the state takes place after the explosion of overreaction. The police are called after actual violence has occurred. Or someone calls the police unnecessarily after imagining or claiming that Conflict is instead Abuse. But unfortunately, there is no one to call before. Who do we call when it matters, when it’s the moment to inhibit escalation, before the explosion becomes inevitable?

Ideally, the people to call before are the healthy, fair, and self-critical group—family, friends, community—who have the love and awareness to see what the conflicted cannot see, and who can help the anxious calm down and seek communication and negotiation, and in this way create reconciliation. But because we misunderstand what real loyalty means, we often do the opposite within our groups: exacerbate escalation rather than relieve it.

So that moment before the cataclysm is the most important: the moment of initial, unnecessary escalation. This is when someone’s anxiety, fear, immaturity, self-inflation, racism, inexperience with problem-solving, or submission to distorted thinking kicks in, and the escalation towards overreaction begins. This, as Dudley Saunders says, is the time when overreaction is “internally logical,” but not an accurate response to the external. It seems obvious that if we can create a social norm that encourages de-escalation, we can save a lot of relationships, communities, and lives. But that means looking deeply at overreaction itself. And that includes the difficult recognition that for some, unjust escalation is a choice, and for others, it is a compulsion.

It’s true that my discussion is “undisciplined,” as it is not rooted in traditional academic research or controlled studies with live subjects. But it’s civilians who will have to find solutions to escalation, and in this spirit I am looking within, thinking, feeling, observing, listening to eclectic sources and other people’s stories, to try to think of ways to help myself and others to not escalate Conflict so that it becomes Abuse; to face and deal with it, instead of avoiding it. When I think about moving forward, in mutual recognition, towards resolution, I think about the word agreement. Not that we would hold the same views, but rather that we would communicate enough to agree on what each of our different views actually are. That I could tell you what you think and you would recognize my rendition as accurate, and you could do the same for me. And in this way, we would at least agree on what we each understand differently. This could, in turn, facilitate some insight into this difference.

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