The Oregonian reports:
A Portland lawyer says suffering by African Americans at the hands of slave owners is to blame in the death of a 2-year-old Beaverton boy.
Randall Vogt is offering the untested theory, called post traumatic slave syndrome, in his defense of Isaac Cortez Bynum, who is charged with murder by abuse in the June 30 death of his son, Ryshawn Lamar Bynum. Vogt says he will argue — “in a general way” — that masters beat slaves, so Bynum was justified in beating his son.
The slave theory is the work of Joy DeGruy-Leary, an assistant professor in the Portland State University Graduate School of Social Work. It is not listed by psychiatrists or the courts as an accepted disorder, and some experts said they had never heard of it.
DeGruy-Leary testified this month in Washington County Circuit Court that African Americans today are affected by past centuries of U.S. slavery because the original slaves were never treated for the trauma of losing their homes; seeing relatives whipped, raped and killed; and being subjugated by whites.
Because African Americans as a class never got a chance to heal and today still face racism, oppression and societal inequality, they suffer from multigenerational trauma, says DeGruy-Leary, who is African American. Self-destructive, violent or aggressive behavior often results, she says.
Noting the theory has not been proven or ever offered in court, Washington County Circuit Judge Nancy W. Campbell recently threw out DeGruy-Leary’s pretrial testimony.
But the judge said she would reconsider the defense for Bynum’s September trial if his lawyer can show the slave theory is an accepted mental disorder with a valid scientific basis and specifically applies to this case. . . .
(That last paragraph means, I’m pretty sure, that the judge will indeed exclude it at trial, because no such showing could be made.)
I’m not entirely serious in the title of the post — I don’t think even The Onion would make this up. But this is just such a perfect unintentional self-parody, consisting of the mix of (1) infantilization of the very group that one is supposedly trying to defend (they can’t be treated as responsible citizens, because they’ve suffered so much), (2) such a deep obsession with psychological trauma that the trauma is said to somehow get passed down five or six generations, (3) theories of causation that sound more like sympathetic magic than anything else (the evil overseers beat my ancestors, so I think it’s good for me to beat my child), and, best of all, (4) the deployment of all this to justify . . . the killing of a black child (much as many race-based defenders of criminals of various racial groups conveniently ignore that most of their victims are themselves of the same racial group).
If my fellow Jews came up with similar excuses to defend a killing by a Jew, I’d hope that all Jews would feel appalled and insulted (and that non-Jews would condemn it as well). Likewise, I hope, here. It is funny, as unintentional self-parody often is. But it’s also sad and contemptible.
Thanks to Dan Gifford for the pointer.
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