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Sarah Schulman
97 quotes
“At the 2008 Lambda Literary Awards (the awards the LGBT community gives to books ignored by straight book awards) not a single lesbian book nominated for best novel was published by a mainstream press. Our literature is disappearing at the same time we are being told we are winning our rights. How can we be equal citizens if our stories are not allowed to be part of our nation's story?”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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?”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no correlation between having the ability to punish and being right. More often than not, the wrong people get punished. And the punishers use their power to keep from being accountable.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“While perfection is never achievable, positive change is always possible. Resolution doesn’t mean that everyone is happy, but it does mean that perhaps fewer people are being blamed for pain they have not caused, or being cast as the receptacle of other people’s anxieties, so that fewer people are dehumanized by false accusation.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Change requires awareness to propel a transformation of attitude. Once there is even a glimmer of awareness, it implies the ownership of an injustice, and a consequential responsibility for its solution, which must be expressed through behavior, not just feeling.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Part of peace-making is acknowledging that we can’t know everything about ourselves, and sometimes we reveal things to others that we are not ready to accept.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Refusing to speak to someone without terms for repair is a strange, childish act of destruction in which nothing can be won. Like all withholding, it comes from a state of rage, and states of rage are products of the past. As some say, “If it’s hysterical, it’s historical.” By refusing to talk without terms, a person is refusing to learn about themselves and thereby refusing to have a better life. It hurts everyone around them by dividing communities and inhibiting learning.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People need interactive conversations, even short ones, in order to understand each other.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Romance doesn’t always start off on the right foot, two people don’t always see the potential in one another at the same time, and thankfully, other people can change us with their hope, forgiveness, and optimism. We can make each other’s lives better, despite all our fears. Sometimes one of us knows that before the other.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“While unrecovered trauma is so often a prison of inflexibility, some people do have choices about how to respond. And someone else might make that shift possible by daring to imagine what to us may feel unimaginable. Which can be love.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No answer is not an answer. It is unreasonable to expect other people to interpret our silences.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Being in a negative moment with another person can be destabilizing, hurtful, and stressful, especially if a person’s self-concept requires them to think of themselves as perfect. But it is not, by definition, Abuse. It could be Abuse, if one has power over another, but if not, it’s a Conflict. And being in a Conflict is a position that is filled with responsibility and opportunity.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Lacking the support and encouragement to successfully negotiate does not mean that someone is being victimized. True, we have to recognize that the frustration of not knowing how to solve problems and only knowing how to escalate can feel like a response to an outside force, but it is, in fact, internal. Differentiating requires awareness, and we may be dependent on our surrounding communities, including social workers, to achieve this.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Helping each other negotiate is the bedrock of a healthy and active community, clique, family, country. Instead of shunning, shutting down information and scapegoating from a place of non-responsibility, the Conflicted must express, focus, listen, and transform. It is my claim that in situations of Conflict, accusations that attribute sole responsibility to one party and then construct them as deserving of punishment or shunning are unjust.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Truths can be multiple and are revealed by the order of events. [...] Each moment is a consequence of the previous moment. So truths can be complex, and complexity is articulated by its details. Anyone who refuses to hear the details is making a deliberate decision not to understand.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The police are often the source of violence, especially in the lives of women, people of color, trans women, sex workers, and the poor. And the police enforce the laws of the United States of America, which is one of the greatest sources of violence in the world. US foreign policy is enforced by the military who are a global police, and domestic order is enforced by the federal, state, and city structures of policing. The law is designed to protect the state, not the people who are victimized by the state.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Processed awareness of one’s own experience of oppression and violation are crucial expressions that must be heard, and are essential contributions to public understanding. And expression of terrible experiences starts out unprocessed and raw. And pain must be heard. At the same time, unprocessed violation and pain cannot be at the helm of control of what information is allowed to be expressed by others, including teachers, and required to be engaged in a classroom.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Time and time again, Americans are reminded of the fact that the people who become police officers in the United States are often absolutely incapable of problem solving. There are famous examples of parents calling the police to “scare” their children, and the children ending up being murdered by the police. In cases of Conflict, calling the police is the last thing any of us should be doing unless our only objective is to cause more pain.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People do things for reasons, even if they don’t know what those reasons are.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anxiety is best addressed by support and love in trying to understand those reasons, not the false “loyalty” of aggression to escalate unjust actions. When we are in community with people who are escalating, we have to ask the right questions in order to understand what past experiences the instigator is responding to in the present. That is the responsibility of real friendship, the true definition of love.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The police are often the least likely people to be able to solve problems, to think in nuanced ways about emotional pain and its projections, and as a result are not the people we need help from if we are interested in creating peace.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We should not isolate, denounce, and punish people for being human.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Once people are given the right to punish or to threaten punishment by the state, they are no longer required to interrogate themselves and can fall back on convenient dehumanized views of the people they want to hurt. This is what Supremacy Ideology does: it provides the empowered with delusions of superiority, as the ideology itself masquerades as reality. This is why some people feel righteous in calling the police instead of facing their own anxieties, and why others reinforce them in this terrible decision, or even worse: they stand by and do nothing.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The privileged are often good at articulating injury but not always able to identify if they are actually experiencing it. There is a difference in being able to recognize the conditions under which injury has or is happening, and actually living, or having lived through it.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Privilege has always been a dulling factor in one’s comprehension of human difference.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Just as a group of bad friends reinforces unilateral supremacist thinking by encouraging group punishment and shunning of the conflicted other, good friends insist that people think twice, to look to their own participation in conflict instead of calling the police. Good groups help their family, friends, and community members recognize and dissipate anxiety rather than joining them in acting out cruelly against others.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is our moral obligation as human beings who share this time and this place to not punish, but rather to remain calm, to open up communication, and to place our hands gently on each other’s shoulders and say, “Think twice.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The force that takes Conflict and misrepresents it as Abuse is called Escalation. Escalation is a kind of smokescreen to cover up the agent’s own influence on events, their own contributions to the Conflict. By escalating in the face of nothing, normative conflict, or resistance and acting as if it is Abuse, we avoid having to confront ourselves, or our family, our clique, our HIV status, our country, our own individual and group shortcomings, our anxieties from an unresolved past. Instead, we use accusation to create an artificial furor to override or distract from our own responsibility.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Escalating Conflict to the status of Abuse obscures our desires, our own contributions to problems in relationships, our own anxieties about sex, love, and HIV, our own projections from our pasts onto the non-deserving present, and it disavows our agency in a manner that enhances the power of the state. Escalation under these circumstances is a resistance to self-knowledge.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The business of psychological studies is a messy one. There are so many and they contradict each other, but like poetry, they can stimulate thought.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Safety is an acquisition of power, often dependent on unjust structures of subjugation to satisfy the threatened person or group’s need for control. Normativity itself is dependent on the diminishment of others. We know now that determining punishment by the feelings of one party is the essence of injustice.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are suffering, and if we could all acknowledge that suffering has content, we could all understand, as a community, somewhat better how to help each other.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As Will Burton says, “pain has a story, a narrative,” and knowing it reveals human complexity which is an invitation to decency. When we try to understand, we discover causes, origins, and consequences about each other and our selves.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Suicide is often a failure of community, and claiming it as inevitable is a defense against that failure.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If someone wishes to alter a relationship, they must discuss it with the other person, negotiate the change, and listen to the other person’s account. There is no ethical way around it.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Shunning, an active form of harassment, is never useful in resolving problems; in most cases it is petty and primarily a way to avoid an adjustment of the self that is required for accountability. If it has no terms for resolution, it is simply a form of asserting supremacy and imposing punishment, and punishment, as we know, rarely does anything but produce more pain.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Shunning as an end-point to normative conflict is the definition of absurdity. Shunning is not only a punitive silencing, but it is a removal from humanity, and therefore reliant on the Making of Monsters. After all, no one owns humanity and humans cannot be removed from themselves. It’s a delusion.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When anxiety is at the wheel, we tragically project, blame, and then separate. We flee reality, which is the fact of conflict as part of life, rather than confront difference and expand our understanding of ourselves.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are options, and even though anxiety may make the reality of choices elusive, they still exist. Recognize the existence of the anxiety, then strive to overcome it in order to perceive other options.”
Sarah Schulman (born 1958) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source