Decompiling Oppression #129
Sam McVeety
Ever since reading it a few months ago, I've been wanting to write about Sarah Schulman's Conflict is Not Abuse. One reason that it has taken me this long is the complexity of the subject matter; she is exploring topics that carry significant emotional charge and arguing that there are no easy answers. Although she is able to do so (over the course of hundreds of pages) in a way that centers compassion and humanity, I realize that it's no small task to translate some of these ideas into a shorter format, and not one I take lightly. Even so, as I think about practices that I want to deepen in the year ahead, I find myself drawn, over and over again, to her ideas of how to realize truly supportive, growth-oriented communities.
Before we get to communities, I think it's important to frame some of the core ideas of the book, because context is crucial. As implied by the title of the book (and borrowing her capitalization scheme for the moment), she is proposing a more intentional treatment and understanding of what constitutes Conflict (emotions, even extreme ones, between people who both have the ability to walk away from a situation) as opposed to Abuse (harm where one party has a significant degree of control over another). She neatly summarizes this as: "Abuse is Power Over and Conflict is Power Struggle." Lest we gloss over it, this power analysis is essential to her framing. Without it, it would be all too easy to reproduce the discourse and unjust systems (such as those minimizing gendered violence, or toxic work environments) that ignore the existence of power and insist that people are on equal footing, when in fact they are not.
It is within the above framing that she looks at what should be properly labeled as Abuse or Conflict, arguing that the former term is overused. She identifies two patterns for this overuse: first from those used to having an excess of power, who react with extreme emotions to that power being threatened (think: white fragility and the like, often using language of "victimization" if not the actual word “abuse”). She also sees this misuse coming from people without power, often carrying traumatic experiences, who have had their sense of self so threatened in the past that they are on heightened alert for anything that might resemble coercion or gaslighting.
Crucially, these observations are only a starting point. She isn't just trying to win an argument by saying a term is overused, and then assume she can dismiss whole swaths of human experience. Instead, she is looking at these circumstances from a posture of curiosity and compassion, trying to identify what kind of response would best support the individuals who are experiencing these situations. To that end, she contrasts Abuse and Conflict with regard to the possibility of changing oneself, where acknowledging that we are participating in a Conflict (rather than being Abused) implies that there is something we can do to learn and grow from the experience. Thus, to erroneously label something as Abuse denies someone the possibility for growth and change:
Unfortunately, the necessary social conversation that could help us to understand how people participate in the escalation of conflict became conflated with the real crisis of blaming victims, even though they are two entirely separate things ... And how traumatized, anxious, or addicted people can escalate conflict became a repressed subject in the name of not inflating blame-the-victim rhetoric, since understanding is conflated with blame.
With this preamble in mind, an idea that I want to lift up is how she envisions community response to Conflict. Throughout her work, she rejects the idea of disposability (particularly group shunning/canceling), and asks that truly supportive friends do the same when supporting someone through Conflict. When someone has been made merely uncomfortable (as opposed to truly unsafe), she argues that the role of community is to work towards resolving the Conflict, usually by getting the people involved to actually talk to each other. To identify whether Conflict is occurring, a community should ask questions to understand the circumstances and the possibility of repair. To do so does not minimize someone's experience; it is an attempt to understand how best to respond for the good of everyone involved:
Asking hard questions and creating an environment in which complexities can be faced is, after all, what a real friend does.
Alongside this desire for supportive communities, she also names the failings of many modern forms of communication as containers for these subjects. Although many of us may intuitively suspect that emails, texts, and social media are poor ways to communicate about emotionally charged topics, few of us are able to transform that intuition into habits. In sharing examples in the book, her insistence on picking up the phone and actually calling someone (or intentionally pausing a group workshop to delve into an emergent emotional outburst) was something that resonated strongly with the practice that I am trying to build. Despite the whispering of my internal optimizer, it's not a matter of figuring out how to text better; some topics need to be talked about with our full attention, and there are no shortcuts.
Fundamentally, one of the things that I appreciate about this ethos is that it embraces the complexity of the world that we live in, with a richly textured both/and approach. Rather than replacing one rigid ideology ("don't believe X") with another, equally rigid one ("believe X"), or just giving up ("it's all too complicated"), it proposes a way to reckon with the messiness of reality in a way that insists on moving forward and on engaging with people on a deeply human level.
Here are this week's invitations:
Personal: Was there a time when you could have offered someone the possibility of growth, and didn't? What are other ways you could have responded to that situation?
Communal: How can we encourage each other to provide the kind of supportive community that promotes repair and growth?
Solidarity: Support Washington Building Leaders of Change and their work to transform school systems that have perpetuated cycles of trauma and harm through the implementation of school-wide Restorative Practices.
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