safe spaces

When I was younger, I was supremely conflict avoidant. A disagreement with a friend, even over where to go for lunch, could send me into a spiral where I'd doubt if they would ever talk to me again. Either that or I would immediately capitulate. Nasi lemak at that overpriced fancified mall outlet for the 5th time? Fine.
It was perhaps a natural response to growing up in a household where I'd frequently hear my parents argue. Once, stuck in a shouting match in the car between them, I impulsively opened the door while the car was at a traffic light and stormed off.
Then in secondary school, I found debate. Some may find it ironic, considering how I deeply disliked arguing with friends. But I relished it. It was the highlight of my school life, a place where I learnt argument as craft, not danger. I most enjoyed being the combative third speaker, the intent watching hawk swooping it at every vulnerability in the opposition; I usually ended up and was best at second, the bridge between the setup and deconstruction.
Debate was not without discomfort; I took sides I did not believe in, argued points I felt uncertain about. But ultimately, it was safe: disagreement without danger.
I was recently talking to my partner, who just had a meeting with her colleagues about reforming an institution's policies. Something that struck her were many of them were very anxious on not being confrontational and were worried about the way people were expressing frustration. A fixation on not being seen as combative, angry, or driving people away, a desire that people should be comfortable.
I couldn't help but think of the words of Martin Luther King Jr.:
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;" who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season."

In 1994, as Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa and apartheid ended, there was widespread consternation that there would be bloody reprisals against the white colonial class. Instead, the Truth and Reconciliation Committees were formed, a grand experiment on restorative justice. In stark contrast to the retributive nature of the Nuremberg Trials, the TRC espoused a belief that truth was more essential than punishment in healing. Desmond Tutu, who head the committee, stated:
Forgiveness is not pretending that things are other than they really are- forgiveness can be confrontational telling it as it is, looking the beast in the eye...For us, it is based on the African concept ubuntu the essence of being human-that a person is a person only through other persons, that my humanity is caught up in yours. I am fully me only, if you are all you can be.
Many scholars have debated the efficacy of the TRCs (personally I too have reservations about whether the slavish insistence on the primacy of Truth is truly rehabilitative); South Africa has had no fairytale endings. But it is undeniable that the committees represented a monumental shift in understanding of what a post-conflict/ post-atrocity transitional justice process could look like. South Africa did not see the conflagaration of racial violence many widely expected. The TRC had provided a space for staring the perpetrators in the eye, confronting the blistering discomfort of trauma.

It is often a natural instinct to want to accommodate, to want to be comfortable. Often, our exposure to discomfort or conflict comes from a less-than-pleasant upbringing. But we cannot give in to the easy but ultimately futile equation that safe space is the absence of discomfort.
In therapy, safe space is in fact a space for you to feel the discomfort, knowing that there is support and a platform to be uncomfortable knowing such vulnerability will not be exploited. It does not mean the absence of discomfort, but rather the ability to feel discomfort without danger.
My partner, who works in social services, has remarked that people bristle at the sight of the homeless, often phrasing it in terms of feeling unsafe. The statistics show us that the homeless are actually far more at risk of physical danger than we are; the gruesome murder of 57 year old Debina Kawam on the New York subway, who was set on fire, is only its most recent, most public demonstration.
Instead, the violence enacted most of the time is that of the system, the discomfort a result of being confronted with the human manifestation of that violence. We think that when we no longer see the homeless on the streets, we have our safe spaces, when in truth, we are obscuring the real dangers.
Argillet, Stéphane, and Gilles Paté. The Fakir's Rest. 2003. Video, 6 min. 30 sec., Canal Marches, Paris.