by Maurice Stevens
(illustrations by Bobby Cardos)
More than a year now and more than ever, it seems, we need new ways to think about harm and redress.
In this space afforded by Oppositional Conversations I have been sitting with two basic questions generated by my uneasy and always ambivalent experience of the world. The first is, “How do we access and enact liberation in a social context of brutal oppression that feels ever more resistant to transformation?” The second is, “What does it mean that it is in the wake of catastrophe and trauma that the new now seems to enter the world?” I find myself applying these two questions (or some version of them) at every scale and to every action and every moment of my existence in the world. I sense these questions operating continuously in my body, in my parenting, in my relationships, in my work as an academic, and in my participatory activism. In short, I find them at the center of my individuality and my interrelatedness.
The iterative and self-organizing nature of this journal and, indeed, the movement between its two most recent themes of Identifications and Contestations, have allowed me to take up these reflections in the form of an extended conversation. In dialogue with my fellow editors/writers and as an interlocutor with all of you who read and share in conversations hosted in this space, I experience the import of what can happen here and feel the satisfaction of the needs it fulfills. This issue’s orienting concept has brought me to reflect on the past year and what it seems to be revealing within and to me right now.
So many around me seem electrified by the emergence of a spring promising the imminent end to the long winter of COVID-19 as they run toward a post coronavirus world. Here I am, though, hooked to a magic fulcrum, pinioned between the catastrophized memory of the year past (which often feels like a numbed failure to remember at all) and fantasies of a better tomorrow based on the pandemic’s always false promise of a normalized future. The “worst year ever” is behind us, so many say. Yet something within me braces, rages even. Why?
So much of what usually sustains me has been curtailed for more than a year now. The hugs, handshakes, time with loved ones, leisure activities with friends, classroom interactions, community gatherings, and the sociality and exchange I create through Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Committing myself to limiting the spread of COVID in my community and beyond has meant being cut off from modes of contact central to my being in the world. The world has felt beyond my reach. I, like so many around me, have suffered from COVID confinement. Shouldn’t I too now celebrate a “return to normal”?
I have listened carefully to, and taken part in, the discussions of the myriad forms of trauma and injury wrought by these fourteen months of deaths, shutdowns, physical distancing, job loss, social isolation, police violence, demonstrations, civil unrest, racialized violence, and calls for dramatic reform. The loss, the mourning, the melancholy, and the depletion have been delineated and catalogued exhaustively. Many of us have seen our roles as individuals, family members, community actors, employees, and organizational leaders radically altered and rearranged in different configurations within the confines of a single physical space. Some of us were newly driven by necessity into spaces that exposed us to previously unexperienced levels of risk.
The pressures all this has created have been palpable and damaging—traumatic. Quiet as it’s kept, I also acknowledge some secret pleasure at the jam of suffering being spread more evenly across the bread of society. Yes, the disabled, women, people of color, trans folks, and the poor are having their precarity so unbearably amplified that it makes me start to weep and then not want to stop. Who precisely languishes in COVID hotspots of residence and employment? Who exactly finds vaccines plentiful and quarantine possible? Who specifically faces the brutal constraints (body after body dead in the street) of the police in the face of everyday acts of living while Black, and who for a fact does it turn out may bring armed insurrection to the seat of government without immediate rebuke or punishment?
From all sides we hear claims of injury. But in the midst of these cries, we neglect—or refuse to face—the recognition of so much this pandemic has forced into view. We ignore, for instance, the knowledge that our present world is structured such that one person’s well-being requires the debasing injury and negation of another; that one group or person’s repair feels destructive to another group or person’s sense of heritage, legitimacy, livelihood, or privilege.
We do not have far to go to remember the energies of mass protest sparked by the murders of African Americans—to feel again the rage against the systemic and institutionalized disregard for the value of Black life throughout the world. That protest exemplified resistance to the consistent physical, social, and emotional violence rained down upon Black people across generations in the United States. Violence against racialized bodies is so ubiquitous in the U.S. and across the globe that it feels trite or superfluous to note it. But within that ordinary ubiquity lies a deeper, more unsettling truth: the dominance of one group actually requires this suffering. Redress in power relations is often felt as injurious to those in positions of dominance. Volumes have been written on this as a matter of individual and social psychology. My point here is to claim the necessity of making the centrality of the dynamic of unjust power relations intrinsic to everyday life on a scale, with an intensity, and with a specificity that the pandemic has revealed as crucial to any adequate response to it as a shared catastrophe.
Power Dynamic #1: One body’s undoing is another’s nourishment; one soul’s demise, another’s resurrection
How many of us remember back in June, during the very heart of the Black Lives Matter protests, when Mike O’Meara, head of the New York Police Union, claimed that officers were being treated “like animals and thugs” and demanded that they be given “some respect”? We all should. With so many videos capturing police violence and all of the statistics revealing the high number of officer-involved shootings each year, O’Meara’s insistence that officers were harmed and needed repair felt like an insult. O’Meara’s statement was an additional injury in the form of a reminder of the capacity of our racial-caste system to both disavow and flip scripts of reality in order to seamlessly reproduce that system and its habits of domination.
Now, a year later, as the Chauvin trial and sentencing unfolds, I am remembering that back in July, 20% of its police officers intended to file disability claims with the city of Minneapolis on the grounds that they were suffering Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the aftermath of the political unrest following the killing of George Floyd and the burning of the 3rd Precinct. The harmful impacts of the emergent trauma to law enforcement officers were said to include a “highly diminished capacity to live and socialize, extraordinary rates of divorce, and alcohol dependency.” PTSD, depression, and suicidal ideation are also said to be common among correctional officers reportedly due to their exposure to the threat of witnessing or being injured by violent behavior or cruelty. Such reports never mention the experiences and the costs of their carceral dominance to themselves or, of course, to the imprisoned whose dignity they destroy and demean day after day, year after year.
I am not saying that law enforcement officers are not injured under the conditions of their labor. On the contrary, the structure of training and implementation of a hyper-militarized policing apparatus is deeply damaging to the people who populate it. Having to harden themselves to more and more thoroughly dehumanizing those they police does great injury to both police and prison guards’ humanity. It twists it. Indeed, the injuries claimed by the officers in Minneapolis (difficulty living and socializing, high rates of divorce, alcohol and other drug dependencies, and suicide) for the past three decades have been acknowledged quietly as a major problem among law enforcement agencies across the country.
What I am suggesting is that our de-historicized, uncontextualized understanding of trauma has left unaddressed baked-in contradictions that block our ability to clarify the lines of contestation concerning contemporary catastrophes.
Power Dynamic #2: Dominant frameworks for trauma allow a person to be simultaneously a perpetrator and victim
Our recent upheavals have been extreme, their onset often unexpected, and their impact overwhelming. Extreme, unexpected, and overwhelming. Proof, in the minds of many, that we have undergone trauma on a global scale. Indeed, early on the unifying effect often seen in the aftermath of shared disaster moved many to call for joint action and mutual care under the banner “we are all in this together!” or “Black Lives Matter!” Unifying or orienting around a shared sense of belonging doesn’t always produce the public good, however. We have also seen responses to preventative or reparative actions, actions grounded in community care (like police reform, mask mandates, and school closures) met with rage, refusal, and violence.
It really didn't take long for us to see that in times of extreme upheaval—when safety, belonging, agency, being enough, and worthiness come into question and our taken-for-granted ways of knowing the world are shaken—that dominant individuals and groups who feel threatened rely on habitual patterns of response. They do so in their attempts to restore a sense of control, orderliness, and predictability. Being confronted with—and being forced to acknowledge—the basic level of disenfranchisement, precarity, and suffering so many experience daily and across a lifetime, does not sit well with those who have long enjoyed the myth of protection at the core of supremacist privilege and racial capitalism. Repressive and destructive patterns of reaction are as old as colonialism and are deeply woven into the American DNA: deny, deflect, forget.
Individually the emotional and physiological habits of denial, rage, depression, and numbing are common. At the level of group identity, we see familiar patterns of inclusion and exclusion emerge. Generic blame and recrimination are projected onto racial, ethnic, or political “others.” Our institutions, relying on obsolete strategies of response and organizational protocol, reveal familiar fault lines of systemic oppression and harm. Poor people and people of color see much higher fatality rates from COVID-19. Racism, classism, homophobia, ableism, ageism, transphobia, and sexism are now undeniably the deadly “underlying conditions” determining survival in immediate and visible ways.
How might we make sense of our current moment and move forward toward increased stability, predictability, and more just social relations that are life giving, freeing, and more generative? Getting to the “more that is possible” in the midst of ongoing financial and community health crises and doing so in ways that serve everyone will require that we simultaneously work at systemic, institutional, community, and individual levels. We have no choice. All are deeply interconnected.
However, working across scales requires that we have shared agreement about injury. In order to work together we have to agree about who is being injured and in what ways, and whose injuries will count, and how much. This is precisely what is always being contested in both manifest and subconscious ways! The tensions and frictions this dynamic generates can be handled along a few pathways of development.
The first line of flight and possibility rests in reconciling the tension through empathy based on radical identification. One way we might think about empathy is as our capacity to develop within ourselves a generally accurate resonance with the experience of another person. When we identify with some feature of another’s experience and can see ourselves within them and imagine their feelings, we can empathize. “That is me, over there,” we might think. On a more profound level, though, identification involves actually incorporating into our own self-image some aspect of another person’s experience. “They over there, are me right here.” This form of empathetic identification creates a level of mutuality that encourages action on behalf of another person even when our own well-being may be put at risk. Indeed, with this form of identification-based and action-oriented empathy, the other’s well-being literally is our well-being.
How we define injury can inhibit radical or action-oriented empathy. The categories we typically use to differentiate ourselves, such as, among others, race, gender, ability, and sexuality, are understood to be so dramatically opposed, in such drastic contestation with one another, that they are experienced as incommensurable and irreconcilable. This makes it exceedingly difficult to see and respond to injury to the other within ourselves. Moreover, we lack a shared agreement about what actually counts as injury, who is able to be injured, and what we, as individuals and as a collective, should do to repair injury. The primary cause of our confusion is the impoverishment of our ability to imagine the other and inability to understand trauma in a way that allows us to address it socially and collectively.
Is trauma even the best framework for making sense of injury in a context such as ours? Does it help us understand the suffering of others or injuries to the aspects of the other we have internalized? Does using the concept of trauma to frame injury move us along the paths of reconciliation that can respond to the tension and friction created by the reality that one person’s suffering is requisite to the well-being of another—that repair can be felt as an attack? Although it seems to be the preferred and dominant model people use in clinical and popular settings, I do not believe that it can meet the complexity of our times. “Trauma” as a concept cannot reconcile this tension, and worse, using it as an explanatory framework is actually preventing us from creating a generative path forward.
One significant limitation that arises from seeing injury or upheaval through the lens of a neo-liberal framing of trauma is that some forms of injury are excluded from the category based on its very definition and focus. The narrative of injury and redress becomes one about individuals and individual choices rather than the structures of exploitation and extraction that create the contexts out of which injury arises. Particular forms of injury are illegible under this regime. These include injuries to large groups, or institutional harm, or trans-generational injury, or injury caused by slow or non-sudden events, or injury that leaves no traces. None of these are seen through the dominant trauma lens and are consequently excluded or misunderstood. Such failures of imagination severely limit how we imagine repair.
Just like the injury that requires it, healing is imagined as a solitary endeavor. We marginalize modes of healing that are rooted in group activity (such as community rituals or collective protest) or through policy change with larger-scale impact (such as repair made through major legislation). Healing, or not, gets framed as individual success or failure, and not as an effect of broader systems. Additionally, many of these types of injuries, those that are excluded or misunderstood, impact communities marginalized by race, class, ability, gender, and sexuality. Instead of simply describing structured events, the neoliberal conception of trauma makes atomized decontextualized individual morality tales. It creates victims and perpetrators, it creates generic human behavioral causes, and it defines with data and statistical risk analysis what will and will not count as meaningful injury or justified repair. Perhaps worst of all, it renders—through denial, deflection, and forgetting—nearly impossible any reconciliation of the friction caused by the fact that the suffering of the oppressed feeds the well-being of those who dominate. Indeed, trauma and trauma-informed models are explanatory narratives for understanding injury that provide an alibi for larger forces like neoliberalism and racial capitalism.
The constraints built into the dominant models of trauma typically applied to our contemporary assessments of injury and harm make resolution of harm and redress difficult, precarious, and ephemeral. There are just too many structures of feeling and relating impeding action-oriented empathy based in radical identification. We must face the reality that we lack ways to face not being able to reconcile the cultural and social fact that one body’s undoing is another’s nourishment and that one soul’s demise is another’s resurrection. We must accept that reconciliation will rarely, if ever, be on offer. It is time to ask ourselves, “What would happen if we did not seek to reconcile the tension of this impasse?
In my experience working in participatory leadership and community engaged work I have seen two general kinds of response to being faced with the intransigence of basic American conceptions of identity as self-determining, meritorious, moral, and efficacious. On one hand, there is the inclination toward sedation or “bypassing.” People inure themselves to the suffering they hear witnessed to them by imagining the other to not “feel” in the ways they feel. People also engage in straight out denial or disavowal (“That is not so!” or, “I know this very well, but nevertheless I will behave as if I do not.”).
On the other hand, another response has been for people to sit with this friction and the discomfort it elicits within them. “Sitting with oneself and with others,” leveraging the “and,” creates space enough to decouple certitude from being right. “Your life matters, and my well-being has depended on your ongoing suffering.” Or “My life matters, and I believe and act on my belief that it does not.” Sitting with ourselves together builds collective power that can ground the tension in a unity that is deeper and wider than that tension itself. “Holding” the tension together leads to the realization that tension doesn’t actually require resolution in order to move toward planning together.
A third possible pathway is using a theoretical frame for injury that is sufficient to the complexity of the moment. Instead of conceiving of “trauma” as if it were an object in the world, I believe we should speak of “traumatization.” We need to understand traumatization as the cascading social, psychological, and material process by which typical structures that manage everyday disruptions such as suffering, deprivation, humiliation, physical endangerment, emotional strain, scarcity, and danger are gradually stressed and brought under unbearable pressure resulting in their seemingly sudden, surprising, and catastrophic collapse. Traumatization is the slow development of the conditions of possibility out of which the “traumatic” event arises. Traumatization is the enabling condition for what we call “trauma”—a condition that requires an act of absolute human forgetting or denial because of both a social and psychological failure of generative processing.
There is no better example than the simultaneous crises of COVID-19 and ongoing unrest over police violence to highlight the limits to using conventional notions of trauma to talk about, understand, empathize with, and respond to, this cultural moment that is producing injury of so many types. Taken separately, each of these complex crises manifest as emergent and unique, as “traumatic events” that are radically distinct. A virus jumps species lines and spreads with a very high rate of contagion and an extended asymptomatic period creating a global pandemic; a “bad apple” police officer kills a Black man and protests then erupt across the country and the world. Protestors disappointed by an election not overturned storm into the U.S. Capitol to shut down national political functioning. Conventional neoliberal notions of trauma—something sudden and overwhelming that impacts an individual or a group of individuals—would call our attention to the individual impacts and individual choices connected with these moments and frame mass action or mass impact as something happening to an undifferentiated body politic.
Instead of thinking of “trauma” as primarily individualized affect, as in “viewing the murder of a Black person by the police traumatized me,” or “COVID-19 is having a traumatic effect on our whole economy,” or “having to shelter in place or school remotely is traumatizing my children,” we need to think of traumatization as the underlying processes creating a collapse in the conditions of possibility for healing and redress.
How we understand “trauma,” what we think it means, powerfully informs how we feel in response to witnessing injurious events as they unfold. How we feel, in turn, determines around what issues we have intense affect and guides our actions in response to them. Shifting to an understanding of traumatization as the emergence of irreconcilable damage and catastrophe over time and across domains can bring new understanding and response to the tension embedded in the reality of one person’s suffering being necessary to another’s well-being.
When we engage current challenges from the perspective of traumatization, longer-term systems come into focus. The system of economic relations that emerged from, and flourished within, a constellation of highly racialized practices of land theft, genocide, imperialism, and enslavement (racial capitalism) becomes radically re-imaginable through the lens of traumatization. This perspective makes the killing of George Floyd, for example, about much more than the sudden action of one person upon another. Without ignoring the facts of this specific murder and the particular decisions and actions of individuals, we can also name and hold accountable the history and function of racialized policing in the U.S. and its connection to, and support of, racial capitalism. From the perspective of traumatization, redress should be focused on developing iterative law and policy changes that amend the dynamics of racial capitalism. Free higher education, loan cancellation, and bail and sentencing reform would all be measures that contribute to truly overturning social systems derived from an economic regime originally designed to create death-as-profit at scale.
We are facing into a moment where interrelatedness will be crucial to engaging in experimentation and shared learning as we seek the more that is possible. We are indeed all in this together but in very different ways. Those differences and the frictions they produce must be held in the shared generative experience of the recognition of the slow creation of the conflictual context of contestation out of which today’s explosive and tumultuous moment has arrived. This bold move is both liberative and highly unpleasant, and we must attempt it together because more is possible.