Andra Medea learned her first lesson about resolving conflict the hard way, when a bunch of toughs from her neighborhood trapped her in an alley and smashed her in the face. “I was always in fights when I was growing up,” she says. Those fights form the backdrop for her latest book, Conflict Unraveled, a clearheaded guide to finding logical ways to handle illogical people, particularly bullies who don’t fight fair. “I’ve been living this book since I was a child,” she says. “I had to learn how to resolve conflict because there was so much conflict to resolve.”
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In the fall of 1967 she started attending Harper High School, at 65th and Wood, in the middle of a racially changing community. “It was the same old story–blacks were moving in and whites were moving out really fast,” she says. “It was like a war zone around there. Inside the school people tried to get along, but it was hard, because outside the school it was a hotly contested neighborhood and stuff spilled over. We had riots on a regular occasion. You’d have kids pour into the hallway, and there would be all of this fighting. They would tear the cafeteria apart and then slide out of the school. It shows you how ordinary violence can become. We’d have a riot in third period, and by sixth period I forgot it. It’s like living in Beirut. You start to take these things for granted–the violence is like background noise.”
She also ran into trouble outside school. “There were some girls in the neighborhood who waited for me after school to beat me up,” she says. “They were white girls who went to Catholic schools. They didn’t like the fact that I was going to a black school–or a high school with a lot of black kids in it. They called me ‘nigger lover.’ These racial lines were taken very seriously–they were rigidly enforced, and they were enforced by the teenagers of the community, who learned about it from their parents.”
In 1974 Thompson and Medea coauthored Against Rape, a book that’s partly about self-defense and partly about coping with the aftermath of rape. Medea was only 21 when it was published. “It’s pretty remarkable that she did this at such a young age,” says Thompson. “The book emerged from a conference that Andra helped organized about rape.”
At level two adrenaline takes over, turning people into combatants who want to win for the sake of winning, even if their position doesn’t make sense. “In level-two conflict, nobody listens. New information can walk in, sit down and put its feet up on the table and no one will notice,” she writes. “Psychological warfare becomes impervious to facts.”
In many ways people locked in level-three conflicts are like Medea back in the late 60s, trying to fend off attacks from bullies who enjoyed beating her up if only because they could get away with it. “I learned a lot of these things growing up in Marquette Park,” she says.
