Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes. James Doucet‐Battle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. xviii + 228 pp. (Cloth US$100.00; Paper US$25.00)

Abstract

constituents that include the book’s readers, torture survivors, a police superintendent, Chicago’s youth of color, future mayors of the city, and others. We are introduced to the egregious behavior of figures who have perpetrated torture, such as Jon Burge and Richard Zuley, but also the tenacity of Chicago’s communities of color who have resisted police violence. I was particularly moved by Ralph’s engagement with both the living and the dead, and his recognition that the living can serve as “messengers for the dead” (p. 120). The prose is consistently beautiful. For instance, Ralph develops the metaphor of the “torture tree” as “rooted in an enduring idea of threat that is foundational to life in the United States. Its trunk is the use-of-force continuum. Its branches are the police officers who personify this continuum. And its leaves are everyday incidents of police violence” (p. 2). The “black box” also emerges as a nuanced metaphor, representing a literal torture device used against prisoners. It is also a symbol of the open/ public secret of police brutality and a tool for the recovery and exposure of torture. Ralph uplifts the voices of grassroots groups such as We Charge Genocide. Ralph traces how this collective of Black youth from Chicago defied all odds to speak truth to power at the United Nations in Geneva in 2014, declaring, “We charge torture. We charge genocide” (p. 122). He emphasizes that every human has the right not to be tortured, regardless of any suspected criminal activity. Ralph takes his argument further, explicating how for Black Americans in Chicago who have been protesting police violence in the city since the 1890s, torture became a form of genocide. Ralph writes, “Deliberate exposure of African Americans to torture by our government is a form of genocide.... [T]o live a life of perpetual debilitation, to be subjected to ‘slow violence’ with no end in sight, is hardly to live at all. Having one’s humanity steadily annihilated, well, that is torture” (p. 104). The Torture Letters reveals the culture of silence and rationalization that enables this system to persist; so many Americans, including Black police officers, are complicit in statesanctioned violence. This book is a call for accountability and reparations. Ralph’s vision for racial and social justice is also expansive, reminding us that “the damaging effects of the torture tree do not stop at Chicago’s borders. The torture tree makes the entire world less safe” (p. 153). He connects torture’s transnational branches to anti-Blackness, Islamophobia, “the militarization of the police and the policification of the military” (p. 150), and US violence within its borders and beyond. Ralph captures this nexus with the experience of a Mauritanian man, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who was tortured at the hands of a former Chicago police officer as a prisoner in Guantanamo Bay. In 2020 Ralph produced a powerful short animated film based on his open letters and published it as part of the New York Times Op-Docs series alongside an essay. This showcased the innovative work that anthropologists can do to reach a broader audience. The Torture Letters is a must read, not only for anthropologists but for all social scientists, representing the urgency of ethical and ethnographically grounded research. Ralph’s masterful genre of ethnographic lettering is a laudable model for public-facing, engaged scholarship in a world yearning for more principled and courageous voices.