Laurence Ralph’s talk “Global Reckonings with Torture” built on his book The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence to examine corporeal connections and theoretical divergences in the torture enacted in Chicago police departments and in Guantanamo Bay. His presentation attended to the physical and conceptual legacies of police violence in Chicago, his own approach to ethnographic research, and the interplay of dialogues around domestic and international torture.
Ralph traces his work to analyze and address police violence back to community meetings in which he participated in Chicago, where residents transformed individual experiences of violence into mechanisms of police accountability, particularly through invocations of Jon Burge’s legacy. Burge was a police captain for the Chicago police who frequently employed torture to force confessions, and while his practices were a widely known open secret, they were publicly named during a civil suit by Andrew Wilson. Closely associated with Burge’s regime of torture is a particular device known as the Black Box: a hand-cranked electric generator connected to alligator clips used to elicit confessions. The physical Black Box surfaces in survivors’ rememberings as an icon for potentially memorializing the individually distinct, but fundamentally shared, experiences of torture; as Andrew Holmes, an outspoken torture survivor, says, “the Black Box is everything.”[i] Additionally, Ralph outlines a conceptual Black Box to explain the pattern of Chicago police maintaining silence around the known practices of torture. This theorized Black Box captures their refusal to explore why or how the regime of torture persists, but rather signals their acceptance that fear of retribution and a presumed criminal culpability is adequate justification for violence. Burge figures infamously within the memory of the Chicago residents with whom Ralph dialogues throughout The Torture Letters, but he also serves as an apt example, Ralph argues, of how police torture is maintained as an open secret through inaction and silence/ing of police officers.
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