On Juneteenth, Black People Are Using Protest to Shed Intergenerational Trauma – Teen Vogue

In this op-ed, Ignacia Fulcher explains how this Juneteenth, Black people are working to shed intergenerational trauma by protesting for justice.

Ill never forget my first run-in with the police. It was the summer after I graduated high school. My friends and I went to a popular beach town in New York. Sure, it was after hours, but there were tons of other teenagers hanging out, most of them white. My friends and I were not. After an hour or so of hanging out in the sand and finally talking to my crush (swoon) with our toes in the water, a cop came up to our group telling us to disperse. And so we started to walk towards our cars thinking that the warning would be the end of our encounter. It wasnt.

The officer asked where we were from, and not believing us, asked for our IDs. The panic started to set in. My friend Kirsten messed up on one of those rules our parents taught us always keep your ID on you. Kirstens ID was in her car and that got this particular officer annoyed. He asked her where she lived and when she answered, he didnt believe her, or the fact that her name was decidedly Irish when she, according to the officer, was obviously not.

While this was happening, the boy I liked had clammed up and clenched his fists while standing next to me. In that moment I felt the anger and fear he was feeling. As we were reprimanded, the white teens on the beach stayed unbothered. Usually you feel invincible when youre that young like you can do anything and nothing can touch you. That isnt the reality for Black youth. Standing on the beach I went to thousands of times before, I realized being Black was a liability.

Instances like these are ingrained in the bodies of Black people. For so long, people in positions of power most often white people have directed violence toward us, causing the trauma we experience to be passed down from generation to generation. So, when I first got news of police killing of George Floyd, everything paused in this familiar way. I thought to myself, here we go again. Having to witness video after video of Black people being killed already takes a toll, and in the midst of a pandemic in which Black people are disproportionately dying its a recipe for sheer exhaustion. But this Juneteenth, as people continue to take to the streets to demonstrate against police brutality, to say Black Trans Lives Matter, to call for justice, I can see the hope that we not only inherited trauma from our ancestors, but joy and resilience too.

I saw the names of the individuals killed as a result of White supremacyGeorge Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arberyand thought, not a damn thing has changed. Im going through what my parents went through, what my grandparents went through, and their parents all the way down the line, over and over again. History repeats itself and the wounds it makes dont heal in one lifetime if at all. And, how could we heal when we keep being killed?

Intergenerational trauma was originally researched in Holocaust survivors and their family members. Since then, researchers found that other survivors of mass trauma passed down an array of behaviors such as authoritarian parenting styles, lack of community trust, anxiety, and shame. In an article on intergenerational trauma for the American Psychological Association's Monitor on Psychology, Tori DeAngelis wrote that researchers found transgenerational effects, are not only psychological, but familial, social, cultural, neurobiological, and possibly even genetic. Dr. Joy DeGruy coined the term Post Traumatic Slave Disorder, which is a theory that describes the phenomenon of certain survival and stress traits being triggered in the descendants of African slaves passed down generation to generation, resulting in adaptive behaviors for the better or for the worse. Intergenerational trauma is funny like that.

Read more:
On Juneteenth, Black People Are Using Protest to Shed Intergenerational Trauma - Teen Vogue