Sarah Schulman Quotes

Politics is a consequence of how a person understands their experience.

My conclusion from this experience of noticing the similarity of behavior between the projecting traumatized person and the entitled self-aggrandized supremacist person is that both need and want dominance in order to feel comfortable. And yet the sources of this need are so different. Underlying all of this is the fact that traumatized behavior is most often caused by Supremacy. [...] These two entirely different entities, Trauma and Supremacy, operate with resonance and similarity under the same system. And, of course, these two impulses can co-exist in the one body.

We know that usually a traumatized person has been profoundly violated by someone else’s cruelty, overreaction, and/or lack of accountability. The experience could be incident-based (rape by a stranger or being hit by a drunken driver), or it could be ongoing over a long period of time (being constantly demeaned and beaten by a stepfather, paternal sexual invasion, alcoholic or mentally ill parents), or systematic (intense and constant experiences of prejudice, denial of one’s humanity, deprivation, violence, occupation, genocide). The traumatized person’s sense of their ability to protect themselves has been damaged or destroyed. They feel endangered, even if there is no actual danger in the present, because in the past they have experienced profoundly invasive cruelty and they know it is possible. Or in the case of ongoing systemic oppression, they receive cruelty from one place, and project it onto another.

People may feel angry, frustrated, upset. But this does not mean they are being abused. They could, instead, be in Conflict. Instead of identifying as a victim, they might be, as Matt Brim suggested, Conflicted. Therefore the fact that one person is suffering does not inherently mean that the other party is to blame. The expectation that we will never feel badly or anxious or confused is an unreasonable expectation and doesn’t automatically mean that someone else is abusing us. These emotions are part of the human experience.

There is a strong element of shame in Trauma that makes thinking and behavior so inflexible. The person cannot accept adjustment, an altering of their self-concept; they won’t bear it and they won’t live with it. And if their group, clique, family, community, religion, or country also doesn’t support self-criticism, they ultimately can’t live with it.

HIV criminalization assumes that society itself is negative, and that the threat to society is positive. HIV criminalization is making it easier for the negative person to avoid communication and instead call on the state to punish the positive person. It encourages the HIV negative person to see themselves as victimized instead of as an equally conflicted party in a human relationship, with mutual responsibilities, feelings, and accountability. It is a governmental privileging of anxiety and punishment over communication, thereby dividing people between those who claim to be good and clean and normal and therefore deserving of state protection, and those whom the first group wish to separate from and hurt whether it is justified or not; whether it makes things better or not.

It is unethical to hurt someone because we have been told to do so. We are required by decency to ask both the complainant and the accused how they understand the situation. And this, I truly believe, requires an in-person discussion. Asking hard questions and creating an environment in which complexities can be faced is, after all, what a real friend does.

Despite how enriching it may be for a child to learn from their parents, school should be starting them on the journey of learning how to individuate, how to develop their own world, their own habits, responsibilities, and relationships; how to live on their own, support themselves, and help others. They need to have their own secrets, dreams, private experiences, and independence.

Resisting unjustified punishment is not Abuse. And people who are being asked to stand by and passively allow shunning to take place certainly should know exactly what the accuser is claiming and exactly what the shunned party is experiencing. Without that information, the decision to be a complicit bystander is an unjustified one. Simply wanting to exclude, silence, or dehumanize someone through forced absence is not an inherent right.

Palestinians are, today, among the most victimized, scapegoated, and attacked people in the world. I watch as their suffering and mass murder is propagandized through pervasive dehumanized representations that falsely position them as “dangerous” when, in fact, they are the ones endangered and in desperate need of outside intervention.

There is something inherently stupid about gentrified thinking. It’s a dumbing down and smoothing over of what people are actually like. It’s a social position rooted in received wisdom, with aesthetics blindly selected from the presorted offerings of marketing and without information or awareness about the structures that create its own delusional sense of infallibility. Gentrified thinking is like the bourgeois version of Christian fundamentalism, a huge, unconscious conspiracy of homogeneous patterns with no awareness about its own freakishness. The gentrification mentality is rooted in the belief that obedience to consumer identity over recognition of lived experience is actually normal, neutral, and value free.

People may not know how to make things better, how to look at their own participation, how to deal with feeling badly about themselves. They may not know how to understand their own actions, and are afraid of the implications of their actions on the meaning of their lives. And this may be devastating, tormenting, and painful. But this is not being Abused. It doesn’t get resolved by organizing punishment of another person. And someone who feels conflicted in this way does not have the right to take punitive actions against another person because they feel bad.

Never, ever decide that you know who someone is, what they did, their objective, context or goal, how they feel or what they know, until you ask them. And not asking means a direct investment in not understanding the truth.

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.

“Overindulgence” is a deprivation of constructive attention, a refusal to teach social/life skills, a refusal to teach self-regulation in social situations, a refusal to teach how to distinguish between wants and needs. Desires are indulged at the place where needs are starved. This is the abandonment of the child, and the responsibility to parent, disguised.