Dorothy Roberts Speaks to PC Students About Race and Torture

As a part of the Diversity and Social Justice Speaker Series, a lecture was given on Friday,Nov. 9, by Dorothy Roberts. The talk, which took place in Feinstein 400, was called "Torture and the Biopolitics of Race."

Dorothy Roberts is a professor of law at Northwestern University and author of the book Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, which won the 1998 Myers Center Award for Study of Human Rights in North America.

Torture has been the subject of much of the discussion regarding the confirmation of Michael Mukasey, the new United States attorney general, and whether or not he defined the practice of waterboarding as torture.

In her talk, Roberts explored past and contemporary uses of torture. Roberts drew the parallel between U.S. imperialism and white supremacy, saying the U.S. torture of foreigners is done to maintain U.S. supremacy just as violence is done to minorities to maintain white supremacy.

"Listening to her talk was a solidification and expansion of subjects I have already been thinking about and doing research on," said Dr. Mary Bellhouse, a professor of political science who teaches a capstone course on visual culture and power. Bellhouse said she is considering including the essay or the tape of the Academic Media Service recording of the lecture into one of her classes.

Roberts claimed that racial violence creates a racial hierarchy and that the justification for torture, which is being used by the United States, reinforces that hierarchy. She discussed the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and drew parallels to the lynchings that occurred for decades after the Civil War.

"It is not only that race produces torture, torture also produces race by physically forcing black victims into the most subservient posture inscribing their political position in the racial order," said Roberts.

Roberts began her discussion of the violence African-Americans endured by stating that once slavery was abolished, lynching was used to reassert white supremacy.

Roberts said lynching was a form of torture because the first stage of lynching was usually whipping and burning in order to obtain a confession. According to Roberts, the hanging was not the worst part of the lynching since the people's bodies were mutilated prior to being hanged.

Roberts also addressed American and European actions in the colonization of Africa and Asia. She mentioned the atrocities committed in the Filipino Insurrection and the torture tactics used in the Vietnam War to further her point on race and torture.

"There is something about the bodily subjugation and predication of torture that is parallel to the idea that we can classify human beings into biologically distinct people that fall into a hierarchy," said Roberts.

At the talk, the political function of torture was examined by Roberts, who said U.S. lawyers try to define torture so they can commit as much physical pain as possible and that high government officials are involved in the legal strategy for torture.

"Torture is painstakingly defined and defended by the elite legal establishment," said Roberts, who also questioned whether soldiers being convicted for prisoner abuse are the rogues they are convicted as or whether they were following orders.

Torture, according to Roberts, perpetuates the racialized view of who the criminal is. The person torturing the victim is seen as the civilized person and the person being tortured is seen as inferior.

"The act of lynching African-Americans, brutalizing colonized natives, and torturing Muslims thus validates the belief in their dangerous propensities," said Roberts.

Roberts ended her talk by saying that she believed that torture will not be eradicated until racism is eradicated.

Roberts is the second of a series of speakers to address the campus as part of the Diversity and Social Justice Speaker Series.

"Part of what I liked about it is how she provided such a rich historical context on the connection of race and torture," said Bellhouse.

According to Roberts, her essay on this topic will be published in the Miami Law Review's Symposium on Executive Power and book which will be a collection of essays called Imperial Homeland.

The first speaker in the series was Toi Derricotte, who is a poet and a professor of English at the University of Pittsburg. Her memoir, The Black Notebooks, won the Annisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction.

"It has been a wonderful series. Toi Derritcotte had an excellent poetry reading," said Dr. Charlotte O' Kelly, professor of sociology.

Peggy McIntosh will speak on Nov. 15 in '64 Hall at 4:00 p.m. McIntosh is the associate director and founder of the Wellesley Centers for Women and is well-known for her work White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women's Studies.

The final speaker for the series will be Byron Hurt, a filmmaker whose film Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats & Rhymes was selected to be screened at the Sundance Film Festival and was shown on PBS's Independent Lens series. His lecture will take place in '64 Hall at 7 p.m. on Dec. 3.