CONFLICT IS NOT ABUSE - SARAH SCHULMAN

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A doozy. I would say that this book holds a reputation of being vital in the larger do-gooder-sphere (where I heard about it) second (but it is a distant second) to THE BODY KEEPS THE SCORE. TBKTS might be more helpful and insightful, but is is significantly less challenging. This book, at it’s best, is a manifesto encouraging people to handle their problems face-to-face with the people. Schulman is deeply opposed to either exiling or “cancelling” or shunning a person or to calling the police. She’s ruthlessness in pointing out how it’s almost never the case that one person is totally at fault, but that everyone has a role in maintaining the conflict. Most controversially, Schulman is against people scrabbling to be the victim, I can certainly see (thought I would say I disagree) why people would accuse her of victim blaming. As someone who is reluctant to call the police and who longs for a day without police I found this book really helpful in showing how tough situations and dynamics self-perpetuate and can be short-circuited. This, of course, takes strong communities full of emotionally healthy adults, the very thing the police are meant to replace. I plan to use some of the techniques she recommends at work. As a final note, the book takes two strange detours, one into HIV law in Canada and another into Schulman’s Facebook feed w/r/t the 2014 Gaza conflict. In the case of the Canadian HIV issue, I felt the overall point (here was a community trying to police itself instead of calling the police since the police overreact and don’t have the communities best interest at heart) was lessoned because the context was so specific. In terms of the Gaza War section, I have to be clear. Throughout the book Schulman discusses Israel and it’s clear that the human rights of Palestinians are deeply important to her. I have less than no problem with this, people don’t talk about the Palestinians enough. However, for about 60 pages Schulman basically reproduces, along with the little blue and white “f” logo, large portions of her Facebook wall during the summer of 2014, when Israel attacked Palestine/Gaza. As you can imagine it’s full of news updates plus friends of her’s decrying what Israel is doing and other people praising Israel then these two groups arguing and no-one changing their mind. Schulman’s point is, as I gather, that social media increase conflict because people aren’t face to face nor are they able/interested in really understanding one another (right after this part of the book she shares a story about a time on stage where she changed someone’s mind through thoughtful engagement and deescalation). 60 pages is too many pages to make this point. We’ve all been on the internet, it’s really destroyed our ability to parse out conflict IRL. Anyway, great book, very interesting. 22 communities.