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.

中文翻译：

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没有酷刑者的酷刑

当创伤成为承认反黑人种族主义和警察暴力的政治框架时会发生什么？我通过说明警察酷刑幸存者必须将自己作为残疾类别的一部分的方式来解决这个问题。更广泛地说，这篇文章表明，与本身不同的类别相反，芝加哥警察酷刑的想法已经通过法律先例、激进主义和由此产生的立法发生了转变，正如它在最新版本中所做的那样，作为医疗条件。我认为创伤在产生此类残疾方面的作用不是单向的。由于种族衰弱总是在任何当代国家暴力事件发生之前通知社会机构，这些让步让受创伤的人有责任获得国家承认，从而使“种族种姓制度”具体化。如果他们不这样做，那么除了他们自己之外，没有人可以责怪。总而言之，我表明，创伤作为一个法律类别的问题在于，它证明了警察暴力的黑人受害者的不平等是合理的，因为这些让步背叛了一个默认的假设，即他们在通过法律获得救济之前由于种族化地位而虚弱.