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 Conflict and Abuse, Schulman straight addresses our contemporary lifestyle of scapegoating. This deep, courageous, and bold work reveals how abuse replaces personal and collective self-criticism, and shows why difference is so often utilized to justify cruelty and shunning. Rooting the issue of escalation in detrimental group romantic relationships, Schulman illuminates the methods cliques, communities, households, and spiritual, racial, and nationwide groups connection through the refusal to change their self-concept. She illustrates how Supremacy behavior and Traumatized behavior resemble each other, through a shared 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.