Look to History

The Persistence of Intergenerational Trauma

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.” - William Faulkner, Requiem For a Nun

I am not a trained historian, but the heavy hand of history is clear in today’s America. As the Potemkin Village of Trump’s celebration of the 250^th year of the USA proceeds, the ugly undertow of bigotry and enslavement in this country has not vanished.

Americans are a uniquely a-historical breed, prone to think that the past is always receding behind us, the future is ever new and exciting, and the young shall inherit the earth early.

The race-track ready elimination of black districts in Alabama and Louisiana and Tennessee following the Supreme Court’s April 2026 decision to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act tells us how profoundly deluded and misleading the American myth truly is.

We will confront the reverberations of our history as long as we ignore its heavy hand in the present day.

I was deeply struck by the profound consequences of history during a recent two week trip to Ireland and Northern Ireland. I thought understood the “Troubles,” as they are called. Catholics in Northern Ireland were oppressed by Protestants, who controlled wealth and political power in that carved-out section of the United Kingdom.

Unhappy with their condition in the late 1960s, they began to protest, demonstrate and demand equality and an end to the 1921 separation of Northern Ireland from the rest of the independent Irish nation.

The response was growing political repression, rising violence including para-military forces on both sides, and the deployment of British soldiers into the region. In 1972, British soldiers occupying the town of Derry (Londonderry to Protestants) fired on street demonstrators in the Bogside neighborhood, killing 14 and wounding another 15.

It took another 16 years of open struggle for both sides to arrive, exhausted, at a peace accord – The Good Friday Agreement – that ended the violence.

We toured Derry’s Bogside this May, looked at the building sides painted in angry and sad murals that memorialize the conflict and its victims. Visited the Museum of Free Derry, where those years are chronicled.

In Belfast, we walked through the neighborhoods of Falls Road and Shankill Road, deeply Catholic and Protestant, respectively. As part of the Good Friday agreement 28 years ago, tall walls separate these communities. Gates between the neighborhoods, close at 8:00 at night. Catholics don’t go to Protestant pubsand vice versa. Schools remain largely segregated.

I thought I knew the history of The Troubles. Thought it sad that two communities of faith felt such strong hatred that they preferred struggle rather than living in peace. After all, both were Christian communities. I thought the memory of the struggle, had eroded even disappeared.

Some of it has. Violence is sparse, the battles are political, where power is now shared. Catholics now slightly outnumber Protestants in Northern Ireland.

But the memory and mistrust lingers. You can guess that the point I am making is that Ireland, like the US, has suffered intergenerational trauma. As psychotherapist Resmaa Menakem put it in My Grandmother’s Hands, “trauma in a person, decontextualized over time, looks like personality. Trauma in a family, decontextualized over time, looks like family traits. Trauma in a people, decontextualized over time, looks like culture.”

The history of Catholic-Protestant violence goes way deep in Ireland. It is the expression, in the guise of a religious conflict, of British colonialism.

In the Glens of Antrim, a good musician friend, raised Catholic, took us on back roads to a site we would never have found on our own. We walked through an overgrown field to a fence line that gave us a view of a metal arch concealed by trees. Under that arch, he explained, Catholic priests conducted outdoor masses. In the 17^th Century.

The sight line from this unmarked outdoor chapel went to a hill perhaps a kilometer away. There, signal fires could be lit to warn the celebrants that Cromwell’s forces had been spotted and the worshippers needed to disperse to avoid being discovered and killed.

Cromwell’s occupation of Ireland in 1649 was only the latest British effort to colonize the Irish people and their land. As early as the 12^th Century, Norman kings had conquered parts of the Island and Henry VIII completed that domination at the beginning of the 17^th Century. Cromwell’s success was a starting point for another 270 years of British domination, including efforts to eradicate Catholicism. Over this period, Protestant English and Scottish settlers were encouraged to migrate to Ireland where they held political and economic power. Irish Catholicism was continually under siege.

To me this explains the trauma, the hatred, the mistrust that still exists in Irish and especially Northern Irish culture. The historical trail that led to The Troubles is centuries old and riddled with communitarian and political violence. Religious faith and political and economic power were intertwined. The Irish people paid the price.

That cultural trauma still weighs on Ireland and, especially, Northern Ireland today.

We know more about ancestral trauma than we once did. The trauma of the Holocaust, passed down to generations that were never near a pogrom or Hitler’s Nazis. The trauma of the Balkans in the 1990s, where the geographic lines of Orthodox Christianity, Catholicism and Islam slammed into each other, with well over 100,000 dying in a political struggle masquerading as a religious war. The trauma of the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, brought to power by Belgian colonial authorities to rule over the majority Hutus and paying with a million deaths. And many, many more.

These events are all in memory; all traumic. They color the present; they are the hand of history that is not past. Today, we are reliving, once again, one of the deepest wounds in American history – enslavement and the legacy of the Civil War. (The other deep wound is the genocide against indigenous peoples.)

The persistence of this wound is clear – in the battle over flags and confederate monuments, over civil rights legislation, over gerrymandered districts that throw black members of Congress out of office.

Four hundred years of history do not just vanish from our souls. They go deep in our bones, our classrooms, our declining education system, in the struggle of Black Americans for housing, jobs, opportunity and respect.

White Southern Republican legislators were primed for the Supreme Court decision. They seized on it to accomplish today what the enemies of Reconstruction and the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th amendments to the Constitution did 150 years ago, after the Civil War, when they dismantled Reconstruction.

Some of us were shocked by the readiness of Southern Republican legislators to stuff Black Americans back in the box of the unrepresented.

Some of us recognize that the past is never dead; it is not even past and the struggle continues.