June is Torture Awareness Month, so this seems like a good time to
consider some difficult aspects of torture people in the United States
might need to be aware of. Sadly, this country has a long history of
involvement with torture, both in its military adventures abroad and
within its borders. A complete understanding of that history requires
recognizing that US torture practices have been forged in the furnace of
white supremacy. Indeed the connection between torture and race on this
continent began long before the formation of the nation itself.
Every torture regime identifies a group or groups of people whom it
is legally and/or morally permissible to torture. To the ancient Romans
and Greeks, only slaves were legitimate targets. As Hannah Arendt has
observed, the Greeks in particular considered the compulsion to speak
under torture a terrible affront to the liberty of a free person.
The activity of identifying a group as an acceptable torture target
simultaneously signals and confirms the non-human status of its members.
In Pinochet’s Chile, torture targets were called “humanoids” to
distinguish them from actual human beings. In other places they are
called “cockroaches,” or “worms.” In Brazil’s military dictatorship,
people living on city streets suffered fates worse than those of the
pickled frogs dissected in high school labs. They were swept up and used
to demonstrate torture techniques in classes for police cadets. They
were practice dummies.
In the photographs taken at Abu Ghraib, we see naked men cowering
like prey before snarling dogs. In one of the most famous, we see a man
who has been assigned a dog’s status, on all fours, collared and led on a
leash by the US Army Reservist Lynndie England. As theologian William
Cavanaugh has observed, it becomes easier to believe that that torture
victims are not people when we treat them like dogs. Furthermore, the
very vileness of torture reinforces the vileness of the prisoner in the
minds of the public. Surely a “good” government such as our own could
only be driven to such extremes by a terrible, inhuman enemy.
So what’s race got to do with it? In this country, the groups whom it
is permissible to torture have historically been identified primarily
by their race. The history of US torture begins with European settlers’
designation of the native peoples of this continent and of enslaved
Africans as subhuman savages. Slaves—almost exclusively persons of
African descent—are treated as literally less than human in Article 1 of
the US Constitution; for purposes of apportioning representation in the
House of Representatives to the various states, a slave was to count as
three-fifths of a person. “Indians not taxed” didn’t count as persons
at all. Members of both groups fell into categories of persons who might
be tortured with impunity.
Institutionalized abuses that were ordinary practice among
slaveholders—whipping, shackling, branding and other mutilations—were
both common and legal. Nor were such practices incidental to the
institution of chattel slavery. Rather, they were central to slavery’s
fundamental rationale: the belief that enslaved African beings were not
entirely human. As would happen centuries later in the US “war on
terror,” the practice of torture actually ratified the prevailing belief
in Africans’ inferiority. For surely no true human being would accept
such degradation. Equally surely, good Christians would only be moved to
such beastly behavior because they were confronted by beasts.
Nor did state-sanctioned torture of African Americans end with
emancipation. The institution of lynching continued from the end of the
Civil War well into the 20th century, with a resurgence during the Civil
Rights movement of the 1960s. Lynching, in addition to its culminating
murder by hanging or burning, often involved whippings, and castration
of male victims, prior to death. Lynching served the usual purpose of
institutionalized state torture—that is, the establishment and
maintenance of the power of white authorities over Black populations. In
many places in this country, lynchings were treated as popular
entertainment. They were not only permitted but encouraged by local
officials, who often participated themselves. The practice even
developed a collateral form of popular art: photographs of lynchings
decorated many postcards printed in the early part of the 20th century.
US torture in the “war on terror” has displayed its own racial
dynamic, although this may not be obvious at first glance. Those
tortured in the conduct of this “war” are identified in the public
imagination as a particular kind of terrorist. They are Muslims. Some
efforts have been made in political rhetoric to distinguish “Islamists”
and “Islamofascists” from ordinary “good Muslims,” but a relationship to
Islam remains the key identifier. But isn’t “Muslim” a religious,
rather than racial, category? Not for most Americans, for whom Islam is a
mysterious and foreign force, associated with dark people from dark
places. Like “Hindoo,” which was at one time a racial category for US
census purposes, in the American mind, the term “Muslim” often conflates
religion with race.
There is another important locus of institutionalized state torture
in this country, and it, too, is a deeply racialized practice. Abuse and
torture—including rape, sexual humiliation, beatings, prolonged
exposure to extremes of heat and cold—are routine in US prisons. Many
people are beginning to recognize that solitary confinement—presently
suffered by at least 80,000 people in US prisons and immigrant detention
centers—is also a profound, psychosis-inducing form of torture. Of the
more than two million prisoners in the United States today, roughly 60
percent are people of color, while almost three-quarters of prison
guards are white.
from here
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