Torture without Torturers
Violence and Racialization in Black Chicago
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2227144 |
|---|---|
| Authors | L Ralph (0009-0002-9427-4768) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 61 |
| Issue | S21 |
| Pages | S87-S96 |
| Publication date | 2020-02-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Current Anthropology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0011-3204 • E-ISSN: 1537-5382 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/705574 |
| OpenAlex | W2976836185 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 9 |
| References cited | 24 |
What happens when trauma becomes a political frame for recognizing anti-black racism and police violence? I grapple with this question by illustrating the ways that survivors of police torture must present themselves as a part of a disability category. More broadly, this article demonstrates that, as opposed to being a category of difference unto itself, the idea of police torture in Chicago has been transformed through legal precedent, activism, and the resulting legislation to emerge, as it has in its latest rendition, as a medical condition. I argue that the role of trauma in producing such categories of disability is not unidirectional. Since racialized debilitation always already informs societal institutions before any contemporary incidence of state violence occurs, these concessions reify a "racial caste system" by putting the onus on the traumatized to gain state recognition. If they do not, then they have no one to blame but themselves. In sum, I show that the problem with trauma as a legal category is that it justifies inequality for black victims of police violence because these concessions betray a tacit assumption that they are debilitated by virtue of their racialized status before they can gain relief through the law
Argument (complex analysis · Blame · Caste · Criminology · Human rights · Legislation · Political science · Politics · Racism · Sociology · State (computer science · Torture · Virtue · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Healthcare Decision-Making and Restraints · Law · Medicine · Psychology · Social Psychology · Torture, Ethics, and Law
The new disability history
Race traits and tendencies of the American Negro
The Rise and Fall of Human Rights
Casualties of CareImmigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France
Improvising Medicine
Scrambling for Africa
California Series in Public Anthropology
Race and cultural production
Egypt’s Popular Uprising and the Stakes of Medical Neutrality
Extraordinary Bodies
The Right to Maim
Animacies
Extraordinary Bodies
Afrarealism and the Black Matrix
Stigma as a barrier to employment
Enforcing order
Intimacy
| Citations per year | 1.5 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2020 - 2025 (6) |
| Highly cited | No |