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.
People who are descended from people from slave-owning and imperialist nations carry with them the scars of slave ownership, genocide, oppression. It shows in the way they act, speak, think. Their worldview is informed by their history as masters of “lesser people”.
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.
^This. Fanon’s decolonial science cuts deep. If the generations after are brought up in the same material conditons they too will be in the same mold as their murderous ancestors. However, I don’t believe it is set in stone; the dialectics between the person and their environment is significant, not withstanding epigenetics can change within a lifetime and has a complex relationship with phenotype.
We don’t even have to bring in epigenetics into this. You spend your time oppressing and abusing those you seeas lesser than, that will carry over into your behaviour as a person. Infamously cops go home and beat their wives.
I mean, humans who work in slaughterhouses experience mental anguish and other adverse effects. Imagine inflicting that kind of pain to humans. I think even prison guards, who could somehow logically justify what they do, also experience mental health problems. No wonder many of them “break” and become abusive monsters. But then how can one be an abusive monster 9-5 and then “switch off”? One can’t, it’s now 24/7.