Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair Audiobook (Free)

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 Issue and Abuse, Schulman directly addresses our modern culture of scapegoating. This deep, brave, and bold function reveals how punishment replaces personal and collective self-criticism, and shows why difference is indeed often used to justify cruelty and shunning. Rooting the problem of escalation in harmful group associations, Schulman illuminates the ways cliques, communities, family members, and religious, racial, and national groups bond through the refusal to improve their self-concept. She illustrates how Supremacy behavior and Traumatized behavior resemble each other, through a distributed lack of ability to tolerate difference.

This important and certain 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, if the objects of dehumanization are other individuals in our families or communities, people with HIV, African Americans, or Palestinians.