Sarah Schulman Quotes

Feminism, or full and complete personhood for women, is an idea. And each human being has to do the work to explore it, build a relationship to it, and understand what their own changes must be in order to be part of it.

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.

At the base of the demand to refuse information/knowledge/communication in order to maintain rigid control is the belief in one’s self as human, and of the other as not-human: a specter or monster. Inherent in the insistence on a refusing party’s righteousness and the other’s blame is the illusion that the control is value-free, neutral, natural, and simply the way things are. But we are all, in fact, human. Because Trauma and Supremacy are ideological but also emotional and perhaps biological, they are compounded obstacles to peace. They are systems. These systems live within, and are expressed without. These are inabilities, limitations from the soul, and expressed through the active body; therefore they represent, as Mary Daly might say, “dis-ease.” The dehumanization involved in overstatement of harm as a justification of cruelty is a form of illness, a systemic malfunction that is produced by our humanity, mortality, and literal vulnerability compounded with levels of protection, societal placement, and reward. Unfortunately social convention that either denies the existence of mental illness in one’s own ranks or uses it as an excuse for shunning others, makes it difficult to call the Supremacy/Trauma mirror what it is: delusional, i.e., rooted in untruth. And if you can’t name something honestly, it cannot be acknowledged, addressed, and healed.

The word “violence” should be used to describe physical violence. Emotional cruelty, shunning, group bullying—these things can be worse than some violence, but they are not the same. If this wide range of precise experiences is all collapsed into the generic word “violence,” then nothing has any differentiation, therefore all the variations lose meaning. And as I have been arguing, rhetorical devices that hide details keep truth from being known and faced. Using the word “violence” without metaphor will help with the current discourse of overreaction and help us discern, with more awareness, the differences between Abuse and Conflict.

Unfortunately, groups that rely on perfection, the good/evil dichotomy, and are motivated by a paralyzing fear of ever being wrong, often deny that mental illness/distorted thinking is in play. Bad families, bad friends, negative communities, and supremacist identities hide and deny contradictions, and rely on the projection of blame onto others to maintain their cohesion as perfect. Pervasive depression gets called sadness. Anxiety that is so severe as to control one’s life gets called upset or difficult or sensitive. And no one is allowed to talk about why any of it is happening.

We all have an ideal imagined self and a real self, and there is always a gap between the two. I’ve never met a person who was exempt from this. The process of moving forward in life requires, I guess, constant adjustment on both sides. We each come closer to a more mature understanding of who we really are, some kind of acceptance, while at the same time working to change the things we can in order to get closer to our desired self. In this way, that gap narrows from both sides: acceptance, and change. But it never goes away. When we can’t move forward and the gap widens, many of us become paralyzed. The breach between the real self and the imagined self is unbearable, and the reality of our lives becomes unacceptable, undoable, and we become stuck: we can’t move out of our parents’ house, we can’t take a job that compromises our entitlement, we can’t actually fulfill our dreams and, finally, we can’t adjust those dreams.

In a healthy educational forum, students engage materials regardless of agreement or comfort level and then analyze, debate, critique, and learn from them, addressing the discomfort as well as the text.

Privilege has always been a dulling factor in one’s comprehension of human difference.

Often a real conversation would illuminate nuances and correct misunderstandings. The real question is: Why would a person rather have an enemy than a conversation? Why would they rather see themselves as harassed and transgressed instead of have a conversation that could reveal them as an equal participant in creating conflict?

To understand, compassionately, that someone is suffering from distorted thinking to the extent that they are hurting themselves and/or others is not an attack. It is the honest, loving truth. Yet in false loyalty systems, saying that someone is suffering is considered worse than the suffering itself, which everyone pretends isn’t occurring. Ironically, bullying, shunning, scapegoating, threatening, violence, occupation, racism, and other forms of cruelty are not only created by instability, they produce instability. When they overreact, both the supremacist and the traumatized person insist that others not resist or object to their orders. They expect complete control, but in reality they produce instability in others in the form of unnecessary pain.

Lack of empathy, of course, is central to conflating Conflict and Abuse. Inherent in the sequence is an absence of thought as to the consequences of the false accusations on others. This is followed by feelings of shock and rage when others resist their unjust treatment. All this, of course, is rooted in a childish but pervasive expectation that their orders will be followed. And if that obedience is not in place, huge feelings emerge of being threatened by the others who express disagreement.

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 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.

Gentrification replaces most people's experiences with the perceptions of the privileged and calls that reality. In this way gentrification is dependant on telling us that things are better than they are—and this is supposed to make us feel happy. It's a strange concept of happiness as something that requires the denial of many other people's experiences. For some of us, on the other hand, the pusuit of reality is essential to happiness. Even if the process gets us in trouble. It is very hard to get a glimpse of what is actually happening when one is constantly being lied to, and it is even harder to articulate what we realize is actually happening while intuiting that punishment awaits.

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.

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.