Micro: White People Hold InterGenerational Trauma
Intergenerational Trauma 101. We inherit the chemicals which transcribe and translate our DNA from the people who made us. These chemicals are modified by our diets, exposure to pollution, and even prolonged or profound social events. Data suggests these chemicals are passed down for five generations. Meaning: the diets, pollutants, and major social events that my great-great-great-grandparents lived in still impact my body today.
Inter-Generational Trauma:
An Introduction
It’s tough to alter our genes or our DNA.
Yet, a field in biology known as Epigenetics studies how our bodies interact with DNA.
Epigenetics seeks to understand how social or environmental factors impact our body’s ability to read or act upon a DNA sequence.
Most importantly, our bodies’ chemicals that we use to read or act upon a DNA sequence are inherited from our biological parents.
These chemicals which transcribe and translate our DNA can be greatly modified by our diets, exposure to pollution, and even prolonged or profound social events.*
Currently, there’s data to suggest that these chemicals are passed on for five generations.*
Meaning:
how our
great-
great-
great-
grandparents
bodies read their DNA is how we, today, continue to interpret our genes.
This means that the diets, pollutants, and extreme social events since the early/mid-1800’s still impact our body’s ability to read and act upon our DNA sequence in 2021.
Keep in mind that to make you, over five generations, 62 people passed on how your body will read its DNA.
That’s 62 different human experiences of diets, pollutants, and major social events that inform our bodies today.
It’s fascinating to know that how my ancestors responded and experienced anything firsthand from
the potato famine in Ireland 1850…
the smog of the industrial south of Poland…
the enslavement of more than 4 million Africans and their descendants in the US…
…lives within me today.
We study history to know ourselves.
All White people are descendants of the Celtic tribes of Europe. Yet, we have removed ourselves from connecting to our tribal heritage in Europe. For many White people, our family histories begin only a handful of generations ago. Simply because: We learned how to colonize ourselves first.
We Learned How to Colonize Ourselves First: Or, The History of White People (pt 1)
Colonization far pre-dates the often cited first wave of cross-continental colonization of the 15th Century. That’s when Europeans/White people began extracting resources and people from different continents.
Before the common era, Europe was almost exclusively populated with tribes and cultures who—by the definitions of Classical Antiquity—were indigenous to the land of Europe.
These cultures later translated into what we now call
“Celtic Tribes.”
(*We’re painting in broad brushstrokes here. This is social media, not an Advanced Placement course for college credit. It’d be great if you wanted to fill in some nuance in the comments!)
Today we mostly associate Celtic ancestry or culture in the United States with Ireland and England.
Yet, the Gauls, Irish, Gales, Britons, Galatians, and more than 100 different tribes were all Celtic tribes across what we now call “Europe.”
All White people are descendants of these tribes.
US History never goes this far back. Or it never goes in-depth because it’s seen as irrelevant to the origin story of our country’s founding.
We experience this as “European History,” not as a history of White people.
This is a huge disservice in understanding our country’s founding since much of US History is taught through the lens of European (White) settler colonialism.
Keep this in mind as we look at the main threat to the Celt’s survival in Part 2.
We often defang the violence of our colonizer ancestors within Europe and call them “Empires.” Within decades of the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire in 1453, the Spanish and British Empires sprang up. As White people, we may never know our ancestry because of this continual cycle of colonization within Europe.
We Learned How to Colonize Ourselves First: Or, The History of White People (pt 2)
In Western terminology, we often defang the violence of our colonizing ancestors within Europe, and we call them “empires.”
Perhaps we attempt to neutralize this violent history to distance ourselves from our historical trauma.
The Greek Empire*
(*We’re painting in broad brushstrokes here. There was also MASSIVE knowledge extraction from/and occupation of Egypt by the Greeks around 30 BCE (The Ptolemaic Kingdom)
begat the Roman Empire,
begat the Byzantine.
By the downfall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, within a generation, cross-continental colonialism formalized with the creation of the Spanish Empire in 1492 and the British Empire within the decade.
The Belgian, British, Portuguese, Danish, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Swedish, Italian, & Russian cultures originate from a larger culture that perfected colonization on what we now call “White people.”
But race as a social construct wasn’t formally invented until around when the Byzantine Empire fell.*
(*Frederickson, G. (2002). Religion and the invention of racism. In A short history of racism (pp. 15-48). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.)
The early empires were predominately expanding via class warfare. Today they expand under the banner of globalization/trade.
And yet, somewhere deep inside many white people, we can connect to the notion that we, too, may never know our ancestry because forced assimilation and colonization destroyed our ancestral heritage.
When White people celebrate ancestry, we focus more on geographic location than people. Like Genoa, where Christopher Columbus was born. Today we call this “Italy.” But since its founding, Genoa has been under French, German, and Italian rule. Claiming Columbus is Italian started when Italian families sought to assimilate faster into US culture. There weren’t even statues of Columbus in “Italy” until around the mid-1800s. (Which coincides with the great migration of Italians to the US.)
Christopher Columbus wasn’t (fully) Italian: Or, The History of White People
Because colonization (read: rape, coercion, murder, assimilation) so severely disrupted our bloodlines—as White people—back to our Celtic tribes, White people now ascribe national ancestry as more of an identity than European tribal affiliation.
When White people celebrate ancestry, we’re celebrating geographic location and less tribal affiliation (read: people).
The best example is, perhaps, Christopher Columbus?
Genoa, in what we now call “Italy,” was mainly repopulated by the Ostrogoths, a Germanic Celtic Tribe after the fall of the Roman Empire in ~476 CE.*
Over the next 600 years, Genoa changed hands to the Byzantines (East Roman Empire) to the Lombard (Germanic) to the Frankish Empire (France).
By 1451, when Columbus was born, Genoa was an independent city-state.
Genealogically, the citizens of Genoa were a (a least a) combination of people whose culture stretched into what we now call Germany, France, and Italy.
Even after Columbus set sail, Genoa was incorporated into the Kingdom of Savoy (now France) in 1815 and later by Italy in 1946.
Geographically, the land that Genoa occupies has been claimed by countries we now call Germany, France, and Italy.
It wasn't until the Revolutionary War that Columbus was even thought of as a key figure in US history.
Petty as it was, the new country wanted a non-British narrative of its founding.
Desperate to assimilate faster into US culture, immigrants from Italy began claiming Columbus (despite Genoa’s complicated history) to show a, somewhat, ideological allegiance to their new home.
Historically, affiliation to Columbus meant safety and access to resources for new Italian-American families traveling through Ellis Island.
Columbus became a dual symbol for Italian Americans that many other US citizens can’t understand. Even though geologically and culturally, it’s safe to say Columbus was only 1/3 Italian.
We continually say that the actions of the founding/colonization of The US began in the search of religious freedom and economic opportunity. The emotional text of this narrative says that White people left Europe because of the harm they experienced from Christianity and capitalism. What they fled from they merely replicated (and we can continue to).
The Emotional Subtext of the Founding of White America
Part One: ”Freedom”
Operating from the science that tells us that intergenerational trauma is passed down genetically five generations, this averages about 150 years.*
Taking this further, 150 years ago, our ancestors were holding the intergenerational trauma of 150 years before their birth, too.
Putting it all together: the traumas starting between 1646 and 1696 can have biological implications for the earliest Boomers and the youngest Millennials.
The first immigrants to Turtle Island, or what we now call “The United States,” came primarily from Spain, England, Sweden, and Denmark. They came not only for religious freedom but for a chance for economic opportunities. We know this, though.
This concept is not new or controversial, but there’s a deeper emotional subtext here: White people came to this land to escape the harms of Christianity and capitalism.
And we don’t talk about it.
In search of this religious freedom, Puritans only held space for the rights of other Puritans.
Within fifty years of settling in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (1630-1680), Puritans executed at least four Quakers— white people—for their religious beliefs. Puritans banned Quakers outright by 1658.
What they fled from, they merely replicated:
ideological righteousness
violence
murder
On Quakers.
On citizens of the Wampanoag Nation.
Hurt people can believe they are healed because they transferred that harm onto someone else.
Part of being a White person without supremacy or shame in the US is holding the truth that we can be both the victim and the perpetrator even in our history seeking freedom.
To make sure that English, Spanish, and French settlers held power in the US, White ancestors felt it justifiable to murder an estimated 50 million Indigenous people and enslave an estimated 12 million African people. To be White in the US is to know we are simultaneously the perpetrator and the victim of race and racism.
The Emotional Subtext of the Founding of White America
Part Two:
”Economic Opportunity”
One of the dominant narratives about the founding of the US is White people’s desire to pilgrim from Europe…
to colonize…
to immigrate…
to travel to…
…in search of economic opportunity.
“Economic opportunity” didn’t translate into “starting a new financial system.” Instead, settlers reproduced the conditions of capitalism they sought to escape.
Settlers reproduced these conditions independently and despite the Native Nations already operating sustainable economies and governments.
Yet, to impose their own governance and economic systems…
to make sure that English, Spanish, and French settlers held power in the US:
White ancestors felt it was justifiable to systematically murder an estimated 50 million Indigenous people while simultaneously attempting to assimilate Native and First Nations people into White culture. People who called this land “home” for tens of thousands of years before White people showed up.
And then, as White ancestors had to dominate their new economic system, they rationalized enslaving an estimated 12 million African people in chattel slavery prioritizing profits over people.
Unfortunately, White settlers chose to continue these systems even after their first-hand knowledge of the pain they experienced from capitalism and religious fundamentalism.
Whiteness without supremacy or shame is about simultaneously holding the ability to be a victim and perpetrator.
Remember, our intergenerational trauma starts anywhere from 1646-1696. This trauma predates Benjamin Franklin who was born in 1706. Or Sacagawea (Sakakawea) born in 1788. Or Frederick Douglass, born in 1818.
Our body's chemical responses to our DNA can be impacted by these events still today.
One of the dominant narratives about the founding of the US is White people’s desire to pilgrim from Europe…
Intergenerational Trauma manifests in the belief of meritocracy (that power should only be held by skilled or educated people). If you don’t have power it’s because you’re not skilled or educated. Victim-blaming is a textbook trauma response.
White Intergenerational Trauma pt. 1
“It is a rare peasant who, once ‘promoted’ to overseer, does not become more of a tyrant towards his former comrades than the owner himself.”
-Paulo Freire
(He’s basically saying that it’s rare that once you get a promotion, you’re not going to become any different than the rude managers you used to complain about.)
In his transformative 1970 manifesto,
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire writes that the revolution must confront the idea that the role reversal between the oppressed and the oppressor is inevitable.
In the project of colonization and empire-building, we have a near-perfect example of Freire’s words.
The history of White people is a well-documented history of self-inflicted and regenerating physical, emotional, and mental violence to ourselves and to others.
White people who were the ‘peasants’ of Europe (for various reasons) became ‘a tyrant’ once White settlers ‘promoted’ themselves.
This dance between the proverbial “peasant and tyrant” has created a genealogical chain of trauma that White people pass down in
our homes
our families
our communities.*
(And when Whiteness is expressed through supremacy or shame, we can pass this down to homes, families, and communities of Color.)
This intergenerational trauma is a hurt that believes, among many things, that an idea like meritocracy is healthy.
What meritocracy says is “the now-extinct Celtic tribe didn’t try hard enough to survive.”
“If I don’t pull myself up by my bootstraps, I’m going to continue to be a peasant. And I traveled all this way from Europe for a new life.”
Why do we lose value if we’re not educated or “skilled?”
Victim-blaming is a textbook trauma response.
And yet, the paradox of being White without supremacy or shame is to know we are both victims and the perpetrator.
If we interrupt the violence of meritocracy, we interrupt our paradox of Whiteness.
“Most White immigrants to the New World didn’t heal from their trauma… Then they blew much of their trauma through the bodies of Africans and their descendants. This served to embed trauma in Black bodies, but it did nothing to mend the trauma of White ones. Much of our current culture—and most of our cutest cultural divides—are built around this trauma… None of us asked for this trauma. None of us deserves it. Yet none of us can avoid it.” -Resmaa Menekem, My Grandmother’s Hands
White Intergenerational Trauma pt. 2
Trauma responses have been passed down, Millenia after Millenia through White people.
Notably, the history of over 300 years ago doesn’t impact us biologically in the same way it can mentally. Therefore, we call it historical trauma.
When we look back at the Celtic tribes that were forced to assimilate and morph into the Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Empires, this is historical trauma.
However, Epigenetics tells us that the diets, pollutants, and events 300 years before our birth can impact our body’s ability to read our DNA.
In Resmaa Menekem’s work, he calls this trauma entrenched through our bodies as “intergenerational trauma.”
“Most White immigrants to the New World didn’t heal from their trauma…
Then they blew much of their trauma through the bodies of Africans and their descendants. This served to embed trauma in Black bodies, but it did nothing to mend the trauma of White ones.
Much of our current culture—and most of our current cultural divides—are built around this trauma…
None of us asked for this trauma. None of us deserves it. Yet none of us can avoid it.”
-Resmaa Menekem, My Grandmother’s Hands
As White people, we currently experience this as a functioning—not necessarily a debilitating—trauma because it’s all many of us have ever known.
To address this intergenerational trauma, we need to heal.
At The Spillway, we seek to (re)focus the unique experience of being a White person in North America without supremacy or shame.
We do this by expanding our compassion, connectivity, and empathy for ourselves and each other with the belief that our healing is possible.
SAD people can hurt people ANGRY people can hurt people FEARFUL people can hurt people BAD people can hurt people STRESSED people can hurt people BITTER people can hurt people INSECURE people can hurt people DISGUSTED people can hurt people FRUSTRATED people can hurt people PERSECUTED people can hurt people DISAPPOINTED people can hurt people REJECTED people can hurt people ANXIOUS people can hurt people THREATENED people can hurt people DISHEARTENED people can hurt people SKEPTICAL people can hurt people REMORSEFUL people can hurt people INDIGNANT people can hurt people DISRESPECTED people can hurt people CRITICAL people can hurt people AWFUL people can hurt people OVERWHELMED people can hurt people ISOLATED people can hurt people PRESSURED people can hurt people NUMB people can hurt people APATHETIC people can hurt people HOSTILE people can hurt people VULNERABLE people can hurt people EMBARRASSED people can hurt people VICTIMIZED people can hurt people
Defining White “hurt”
You’ll notice at The Spillway, we talk a lot about how hurt people hurt people. And White people are hurting.
“Hurt” and “Hurting” are tiny words that have a huge footprint.
There’s “hurt” as a verb. As in:
White people are hurting
Defined* as
physical pain or injury to.
(*We’re using Google for all of the definitions in this post. It’s not the most in-depth, but it’s the most accessible.)
Physical pain refers to — physical suffering or discomfort caused by illness or injury.
Then there’s “hurt” as an adjective. As in:
White people experience a lot of hurt around intergenerational trauma.
Defined as: physically injured
“Physical” meaning: relating to the body as opposed to the mind
Injury—having come up in both the definitions of hurt and pain & in the verb and adjective—becomes incredibly important.
Injury is defined as:
an instance of being injured
damage to a person’s feelings.
“Injured” is defined as:
harmed, damaged, impaired
offended
Without any explanation, in the definition of “hurt,” Google ties together our bodies and our feelings.
Peer-review research would agree with Google:
feelings greatly impact our bodies.*
[*Assari, S. (2017). Hostility, anger, and cardiovascular mortality among blacks and whites. Research in Cardiovascular Medicine, 6(1), 2-2.
Hadley, W., Houck, C., Barker, D., Wickham, B., Bogner, J., & Jelalian, E. (2020). Preliminary impact of an adapted emotion regulation intervention for adolescents with overweight and obesity attempting to lose weight. Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, 41(9), 706-715.
Heydari, S. (2017). The relationship between happiness, general health and life expectancy of cancer patients. European Psychiatry, 41(S1), S608-S608.
Lesko, C. R., Hutton, H. E., Fojo, A. T., Shen, N. M., Moore, R. D., & Chander, G. (2021). Depression and HIV viral nonsuppression among people engaged in HIV care in an urban clinic, 2014-2019. AIDS (London), 35(12), 2017-2024.
Liu, B., DPhil, Floud, S., PhD, Pirie, K., MSc, Green, J., Prof, Peto, R., Prof, Beral, V., Prof, & Million Women Study Collaborators. (2015;2016;). Does happiness itself directly affect mortality? the prospective UK million women study. The Lancet (British Edition), 387(10021), 874-881.
Miething, A., Mewes, J., & Giordano, G. N. (2020). Trust, happiness and mortality: Findings from a prospective US population-based survey. Social Science & Medicine (1982), 252, 112809-6.
Saimaldaher, Z. H., & Wazqar, D. Y. (2020;2019;). Relationships between caregiving stress, mental health and physical health in family caregivers of adult patients with cancer: Implications for nursing practice. Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences, 34(4), 889-898.
Tuck, N. L., Adams, K. S., & Consedine, N. S. (2017). Does the ability to express different emotions predict different indices of physical health? A skill‐based study of physical symptoms and heart rate variability. British Journal of Health Psychology, 22(3), 502-523.
Willy-Gravley, S., Beauchemin, J., Pirie, P., Gomes, A., & Klein, E. (2021). A randomized controlled trial of yoga with incarcerated females: Impacts on emotion regulation, body dissociation, and warnings of substance relapse. Social Work Research, 45(1), 20-29.
Zhao, W., Wu, Z., Chen, J., Jia, H., Huang, Z., Chen, M., Gu, X., Liu, M., Zhang, Z., Wang, H., Wang, P., & Cheng, W. (2017). Survival prediction of anxious emotion in advanced cancer patients receiving palliative care: Survival prediction of anxious emotion in advanced cancer patients. Psycho-Oncology (Chichester, England), 26(10), 1463-1469.]
“Hurt” being this thing that is informed by damage, harm, impairment, or the offending of our feelings—which, in turn, can impact our bodies—becomes an umbrella term, covering a broad category of emotions.