Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. -Karl Marx

Also being the first generation to break out of that opressor mindset is tough. Like your family, lots of friends, etc are all evil. And you have to rebuild your social life from scratch or just put up with being surrounded by evil assholes.

I keep going back to Fanon, how he observed that colonialism dehumanizes the colonized and the colonizer. Torturerers and butchers and slavers traumatize and twist themselves into inhuman things, and that trauma surely gets passed down to their kids and grandkids. I suspect it might have epigenetic effects as well, although I shouldn’t speculate too hard about that.

Yes, but also, USians cannot possibly think themselves as belonging to this national community or think as their wealth as a legitimate thing to have without a complete mythology of racism and liberalism

The superstructure maintains the structure, if you could magically remove racism from the psyche of americans the revolution would be immediate

i’ve thought for a while now that white people are congenitally evil and this is a good explanation for why

(i’m white myself)

I think this is a false equivalence. Trauma is a…(sorry, im not a mental health expert) primal thing(?). As in, trauma is a part of your flight/fight/freeze/fawn response. The things that cause fear and despair and such that impact your survival can be passed down to your offspring to help them survive. But superiority and racism are something that’s taught. There is a somewhat basic impulse (possibly) to be secure and to be wary of other “tribes” but it’s not something passed down into offspring’s subconscious, but something taught at a higher level.

I don’t think we should forget that the woman who avenged Che Guevara was the daughter of a nazi

If we all agree that a people can experience trauma on a large scale and that trauma can then pass onto the descendants, then the reverse must also be true – a people who have inflicted trauma on a large scale pass that experience onto the descendants.

Let’s start with attempting to define what generational trauma is. Here’s an okay medical source on it: https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/what-is-intergenerational-trauma

If you have ancestors or older relatives who went through a very distressing or oppressive event, their emotional and behavioral reactions could ripple through the generations of your family and affect you.

The exact causes aren’t clear. But some experts think the original traumatic event could affect your relatives’ relationship skills, personal behavior, and attitudes and beliefs in ways that affect future generations of your family.

How your parents talk with you about the traumatic event (or fail to talk about it) and the way your family functions seem to play important roles in whether trauma gets passed down. For example, a parent’s experience of trauma might affect their parenting skills and play a role in their children’s behavior problems.

Researchers are also looking into the possible role of “epigenetic changes.” The idea is that your environment could cause changes that affect the way your genes work, and these changes could be passed on to younger generations.

The last part doesn’t appear to be anything more than “looking into” so I think it’s safe to say we can consider that speculative at best and ignore it for now. So what we’re left with as the most agreed upon cause appears to look something like: traumatic thing happens -> people pass it down through a warped nervous system and worldview (perhaps by sort of reliving/recreating the stress levels of the traumatic event, which then traumatizes their descendants).

Not exact, but it’s something to go on. Then, how does this compare to inflicting trauma on others?

I think this question is going to depend a lot on what drove the, we’ll call them “oppressor” to make it simple, what drove the oppressor’s behavior and how did they experience the event? Were they also traumatized in some way by participating in a brutal/abusive/etc. act? Or was it more like that memey line from a movie “for me, it was Tuesday”? If it was the first one, then we’re probably talking about another form of generational trauma, just from a different end of it (starting point of the trauma being oppressor rather than oppressed). If it was the second one, I’d think the primary attachment they’re going to have is based on system level stuff; how they materially benefit, the belief systems they have that justify their position in the world, etc. Which can get passed down, but I don’t think sticks as easily as trauma does. Trauma can change how you react to a loud sound before you even have time to think. A belief system can change how you react to a loud sound after you have time to think, but probably not before.

That’s not to say physiology and belief are entirely separate. For example, if you have an anxious thought and you feed that anxiety, it might give you a physiological reaction. But if the worst of it is coming from what you believe in that moment and when the belief passes, you’re fine again, I don’t think that’s the same as trauma; consider here how someone could healthily enjoy a horror movie by suspending their disbelief and inducing temporary fear, but when the movie is over and the reality comes back that none of it is real, the reaction passes and they can go back to living their normal life. Comparatively, I would expect a traumatized person may have a hard time letting go. The reaction may linger for longer and need more soothing to get back to their normal, which might not even be the other person’s normal because they may be keyed up in general (ex: generalized anxiety). In other words, the healthy person’s regulation of their nervous system functions pretty well; the traumatized person’s nervous system is wounded somehow.

So what I’m trying to get at here is, are we talking about the simple passing down of beliefs and systems of privilege or subjugation, or are we talking about wounded nervous systems and their consequences. Though these surely have some overlap, I don’t think they are quite the same. As an example, some white people need only befriend a black person to start questioning racist views they have. On the other hand, a black person who has been traumatized by racist police may deal with the impact on their nervous system for the rest of their life, even with conscious therapy; they would hopefully be able to heal somewhat, but given everything I’ve heard about that stuff, I get the impression there’s a lot we just don’t know about how to actually fix the problem. That there are therapeutic techniques, but getting at the root of the problem can be hard. (If someone knows otherwise, of research in consistently healing the nervous system or standout cases of doing so, feel free to let me know. I myself have anxiety, so I have a personal interest in it, not just curiosity over what’s correct.)

I don’t think this is the correct way of framing this idea. Using the words “People who are descended from people…” makes it sound like eugenics.

Generational trauma is a shorthand explanation of the flow on effects of trauma and the feedback loops it can cause. If you have trauma to your arm you can’t use it properly. Mental and emotional trauma impedes people from thinking and acting rationally. Generational trauma is when truma isn’t mentally and emotionally healed properly and then the trauma prevents the protection of the next generation. Each generation using coping mechanisms that inflicti the same wounds their parents inflicted on them.

Having your worldview shaped by oppressors can warp one’s morality but it doesn’t impede one’s ability to think critically and act rationally. People born to horrible people do have a higher chance of turning out horrible. The inherent irrational immorality of racial supremacy leads to its decay but improved material wealth because of said racial supremacy can tip the scales. Throw some trauma in there and the immorality becomes acceptable to the emotionally crippled individual even without any material benefits.

The western world is founded on slavery, colonialism and genocide. All its institutions are founded in white supremacy and chattel slavery. Yet, the majority of western white people are only passively in support of white supremacy as far as it is material beneficial to them. They don’t mind the treats but they want to have plausible deniability. They want their government to act like it is addressing racism as long as their standard of living isn’t threatened.

The ones who are frothing for the blood of POC are the Rich who benefit the most from the oppression and exploitation and… The poorest white people. Their trauma (often generational from substance abuse or physical or sexual abuse) and their constant stresses obtaining the minimums of food and shelter make them less rationally and emotionally equipped to correctly apply morality and ethics.