“But this framing is dangerous since makes these problems seem more intractable than they are, when they can, in fact, be addressed by changing the material conditions Black Americans experience today.”
In the paper, the authors emphasize that there is no direct evidence for the transgenerational trauma hypothesis: There is no data spanning the five-plus generations to the period of U.S. slavery. Moreover, as free and enslaved blacks both experienced racialized trauma, there is not a valid control group to isolate the effects of the trauma of enslavement.
The authors then proceed to review the studies often invoked in indirect support of the transgenerational trauma hypothesis. The authors note, intergenerational epigenetic transmission has been demonstrated in laboratory animals but not in humans. The human studies invoked typically analyze the effects of Holocaustinduced trauma in subsequent
