I’m going to talk about trauma and PTSD in this one. It’s something I’ve studied a bit for writing and for personal reasons, but while I do my best to get things right, I am not an expert.

The US has long declared itself to be a beacon of freedom and defender of democracy, while simultaneously doing some of the most authoritarian and unjust things imaginable. I think perhaps the best illustration of this is the third verse of the National Anthem:

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
⁠That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more?
⁠Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave,
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave,
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

The slaves in question had taken up with England in the war of 1812, for the promise of freedom should the US be reclaimed by the British Empire. They had no hope for anything but slavery, torture, and early death, so they did what they could to get their freedom, and for that they became immortalized in this song as villains whose fear and death were the righteous outcome of not accepting their slavery. I feel a need to emphasize the level of sadism and cruelty that was routine for the United States, because no horror movie has ever come close to the simple truth of what this country was (extreme content warning for dehumanization and death by torture). The US national anthem was written in 1814, decades before the abolition of chattel slavery, or even the pretense of contrition for the genocide of the Native Americans. It was a land of grotesque, unrelenting oppression, and yet well-to-do white men declared it to be a nation synonymous with freedom, apparently without shame. To quote Frederick Douglas in his 1852 Fourth of July address:

Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today?

It many ways, the current Republican party does represent what the US has always been. It claims to defend truth, freedom, and justice, while it actively dismantles the infrastructure of democracy, erases history that clashes with its white supremacist ideology, and rolls back as many rights as possible. Segregation is a matter of living memory, and they want it back.

And at this point, I want to pause and ask: What does oppression actually mean? Like, on a practical, lived sense, what does it look like? I’d argue that at its most basic level, oppression is punishment without due process or recourse, often for words or actions that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in a free society. An oppressive government will fine, imprison, or kill people for saying the wrong thing, for being in the wrong place, for organizing political resistance, for touching the wrong water.

When it comes to ethnic and/or racial oppression, the oppressed group tends to be made a scapegoat for society’s ills. They’re treated as inherently criminal and dangerous, and that treatment is used as proof that they’re inherently criminal and dangerous. In the US, the belief that it’s “the land of the free” has become its own perverse justification. If this is a free country, then clearly it can’t be oppressing Black people, and since law enforcement disproportionately focuses its resources and violence on Black people, well, they must just be inherently criminal and dangerous.

Because that’s the pattern, for Black Americans. Much of the US recently celebrated Juneteenth, in honor of the emancipation proclamation being enforced in Texas. That was a huge step forward, but the moment the war was lost, the former slavers began working to ensure that that “freedom” meant as little for Black people as possible. The KKK was formed to terrorize Black people and keep them down with brutal, sadistic violence, and the so-called Justice system was largely on their side, when it wasn’t just staffed with Klansmen to begin with. Reconstruction was sabotaged and allowed to fail, and a new regime of open, violent white supremacy was imposed. The 1898 Wilmington Massacre is a good microcosm, in which the duly elected government of WIlmington, North Carolina was ousted at gunpoint for being biracial, many Black citizens who didn’t flee in time were killed, and a number of Republicans were exiled from the city. Chattel slavery in the South was not replaced by freedom, but by a different regime of white supremacy, in which the violence was slightly less open and legal.

The end of Segregation was also a huge step forward, but it also came with a quiet adjustment to maintain racial oppression. That’s the period into which I was born, and in which I believed, for much of my life, that the wins of the Civil Rights Movement had marked a turning point for the US, beyond which racism had dwindled away to almost nothing. It was a pretty myth that I absorbed despite being raised in a fairly left-wing environment. The reality is that the United States never stopped being an oppressive nation guided by white supremacy.

This didn’t really sink in, for me, until I really took the time to think though New York City’s Stop and Frisk policy, in which minorities, mostly Black people, were effectively presumed guilty until proven innocent. What do we, as White Americans, fear from an oppressive regime? The invasion of privacy. The inability to go where we please without being harassed. The feeling that every encounter with an agent of the state is dangerous. The fear that we’ll be locked up in some torturous hell-hole and left there to rot without recourse. Dare I say, the fear that we’ll be treated like Black people?

Kalief Browder was 16 when he was accused without evidence of stealing a backpack “full of valuables”, and tossed into Rikers. For those who don’t know, Rikers Island is a prison complex that holds thousands of people in “pre-trial” detention. On the face of it, the notion of such detention is that if someone is deemed a risk to the public, they can be held until the speedy trial to which they have a right. For white people, that’s sometimes how it works, usually depending on their wealth. For black people, well, they tend to be deemed a risk to the public for being black. In most cases where people can’t buy their freedom pending trial, they are slowly tortured into confessing to crimes they didn’t commit: the very thing that legal concepts like habeas corpus and the presumption of innocence were developed to prevent.

Browder was kept in Rikers for three years. He spent roughly two-thirds of that time in solitary confinement, a practice now widely recognized as torture for its devastating effect on human neurology. He was arrested in 2010, and released in 2013, by which time he had attempted suicide three times. In 2015, at age 22, he hanged himself, and died.

After he got out of prison, he made a statement about the effect that his imprisonment had had on him:

People tell me that because I have this case against the city I’m all right. But I’m not all right. I’m messed up. I know that I might see some money from this case, but that’s not going to help me mentally. I’m mentally scarred right now. That’s how I feel. [There] are certain things that changed about me[,] and they might not [change] back. … Before I went to jail, I didn’t know about a lot of stuff, and, now that I’m aware, I’m paranoid. I feel like I was robbed of my happiness.

I want to take a moment to go into what’s going on in this quote.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is what happens when a person’s nervous system locks into defensive mode in response to traumatic conditions. When discussing trauma, it’s important to understand that the exact nature of the reaction is going to change depending on the person’s neurology, on their life before, on the traumatizing incident, and on the conditions in which they lived in the aftermath.

For a personal example, I got a full-blown case of it as a child, after a full kettle of boiling water spilled on me. For a long time I had a strong reaction to boiling water, and if the sound was too close to what I heard while it was pouring on me, I’d get nauseous. In simple terms, my nervous system programmed in an automated response to keep me far away from boiling water, so it wouldn’t go through that again. I got over it with time and support, but I do still have occasional intrusive memories when I’m boiling water.

All that was from a few minutes of indescribable pain, and a couple hours of believing I was going to die.

When you expose someone to repeated or continuous traumatic events, combined with the belief that there is no escape, they’re very likely to develop what’s called Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD). The effects of this tend to be farther-reaching, and more insidious, even when the traumatic events seem comparatively mild. Where the burn left me with boiling water as a severe trigger, CPTSD affects everything in your life. It can make it difficult, or even impossible to feel positive emotions, and it tends to come with anxiety, depression, shame, and various forms of self-hatred. It affects how you see yourself and others, it can be a source of suffering for a victim’s entire life, and it can be a big driver of self-harm and addiction. As with PTSD, the exact nature of the traumatic response will vary from person to person.

CPTSD is common for people who’ve been victims of domestic abuse, emotional neglect in childhood, systematic bullying (peer abuse), war, poverty, oppression, and prison. In all of these cases, the trauma is inflicted through relationships and interactions with other humans. That means that if you have CPTSD, your nervous system usually sees interactions with other people as a threat. It might not be all interactions, but the way CPTSD develops means that it often means most of them. When you’re in a social situation, your nervous system goes on alert at a subconscious level, and that quite literally drains your energy. Being “on alert” like that is a biochemical process that both consumes calories, and causes literal wear on your systems. People with CPTSD often develop other chronic health problems that plague the rest of their lives, and can lead to an earlier death.

All of this can also get worse over time, even without additional traumatizing experiences. The disordered emotional reaction sends the message that even benign or positive social interactions actually went badly. This can lead to self-isolation, and the reinforcement of the disorder as those interactions are interpreted as a continuation of the patterns that created it in the first place. Simply existing in society, untreated, can cause CPTSD to get worse.

You can argue whether the people running our jails know or care about trauma research, but the fact of it is, the US “justice” system depends on traumatizing people into waving their right to a trial. Some people take a plea deal before it gets to that point, but only because the threat is there. Everyone in the US knows that prisons are intentionally horrifying places, where abuse is considered routine.

Prison isn’t the only way for this to happen, either. Forced institutionalization is still a thing in the US, and it seems to require little to no process to force someone into a situation in which they’re forced to take mind-altering drugs, and told that the realities of their lives are delusions. As with solitary confinement, I would consider this to be a vicious and twisted form of psychological torture, and it sounds like something from fiction. In fact, I’ve brought this up in conversation, and been told that “If that was happening in the US, we’d know about it!”

The US is a free country, and therefor oppression cannot be happening.

I’ve written about this before, so I’ll just quote my piece on forced institutionalization from 2022:

In 2014, Kam Brock was pulled over “on suspicion of driving under the influence of marijuana”. People commenting on the story at the time noted that she was a black woman driving a BMW in Harlem, and that she was really pulled over for Driving While Black. This explanation is made stronger, in my view, by the fact that while they didn’t find any drugs on her or in her car, they impounded it anyway, and when she went to pick it up the next morning, they decided she was too emotional, handcuffed and drugged her, and threw her in a mental hospital.

“Next thing you know, the police held onto me, the doctor stuck me with a needle and I was knocked out… I woke up to them taking off my underwear and then went out again. I woke up the next day in a hospital robe.”

She responded pretty reasonably, in my opinion. She told them who she was, and asked to be released.

For eight days.

They had the means to verify what she was saying, but instead they dismissed all of it as delusions, forced her to take powerful psychoactive drugs, and demanded that she convincingly lie about herself before she be released:

According to the New York Daily News, a treatment plan for Ms Brock at the hospital states: ‘Objective: Patient will verbalize the importance of education for employment and state that Obama is not following her on Twitter.’

This was torture. They imprisoned a person, and for nine days they told her she was insane. They forcibly drugged her, and denied her reality over, and over and over again for days. And then, one day, they gave her discharge papers, and put her out the back door of the hospital. A few days later, she got a bill for $13,000 worth of “treatment”. The idea of holding anyone criminally responsible for this nightmare was apparently never even on the table, so she went with the option left to her – she sued them.

And lost in 2019.

Several jurors said that Brock was less credible than three doctors — Elisabeth Lescouflair, Zana Dobroshi and Alan Labor — and NYPD Officer Salvador Diaz, who all determined she was in need of mental health treatment.

The jurors noted that Brock did not call her father or sister to the stand. Both, according to testimony, had told Harlem Hospital staff that Brock had recently been acting erratically.

“We view this verdict as a total vindication for the defendant officer and doctors who sought to help Ms. Brock through her troubling episode. The jury rejected any notion that the actions of these officials was anything but appropriate under the circumstances,” a Law Department spokesman said.

While at the hospital, Brock was injected three times with powerful anti-psychotics. The experience, she said, left her traumatized. She frequently broke down during the six-day trial.

Jurors deliberated for three days before reaching a verdict. At the beginning of deliberations three were in Brock’s favor and five were against, Rella said.

Brock began sobbing as the verdict was read.

“It’s reasonable for them to diagnose me with bipolar even though I’m telling the truth?” Brock said through tears.

“What am I supposed to do? I’m crazy because of this verdict.”

In the United States of America, it is apparently legal for police to decide that you’re “in need of medical treatment”, restrain, drug, and imprison you, and for doctors to keep you prisoner, keep you drugged, and demand that you deny reality because they said so. Not only is it legal, it’s apparently barely newsworthy

In 1979, an attorney named Malcolm Feeley published a case study called The Process is the Punishment. In it, he showed that the process of getting to trial was so onerous that the vast majority of people waved their right to a trial, to avoid an expensive legal process that would end up costing more than the punishment they ended up accepting. It’s a situation in which punishment cannot be escaped, even by the innocent. They can accept the punishment that police and prosecutors decided to inflict upon them, or they can insist on their right to a trial, for which they are punished through legal fees and sometimes pre-trial detention.

That remains the case today. It’s widely acknowledge that if every defendant were to insist on the fair trials to which they have a right under US law, the US legal system would collapse. Rather than trying to fix this problem by investing more in the system so everyone has the rights they’re supposed to, the US punishes people for trying to exercise their rights, as a matter of routine.

That’s the default. 90% of defendants don’t get a trial, and that’s been the case for decades. Meanwhile, US prisons have only gotten worse.

The US was already an oppressive nation, when Trump entered national politics. It never stopped being an oppressive nation, and that’s without considering the endless atrocities of US foreign policy.

There’s a phrase you’ve probably heard from time to time: If it can happen to them, it can happen to anyone! MAGA shitheads liked to say that about Trump’s arrest and conviction, but it’s more correctly applied to the treatment of the people with the least power in society. If they can torture Kalief Browder to death, they can do it to you. If they can declare Kamilah Brock insane for telling them the truth, they can do it to you.

Because this is a society that has already decided this kind of treatment is not only acceptable, it is inevitable and necessary. The only question is who will be at the receiving end, and if you think your whiteness might protect you, you’re only partly right. It protects you until it doesn’t. Until you take up the cause of Black liberation. Until you take action to resist oppression. Until a cop having a bad day decides you’re looking at him funny.

America is a land of trickery and illusions. I don’t like it, but in many ways, a sadistic, abusive con man like Trump is a perfect reflection of what the nation has been, as an institution. The promises of liberty and justice for all were never intended to apply to everyone, and just as we’ve never had democracy without a ruling class putting its thumb on the scale, we’ve never actually had all the rights and freedoms that white folks thought we did. The stated ideals of the country have never been important enough to the nation as a whole, to be worth serious investment.

The fact that that was the normal state of affairs meant that when a fascist came to power, the machinery of oppression was already in place, just waiting to be used on a larger portion of the population, who didn’t understand that their freedom was always a lie.

None of us is free until all of us are free.