Cathy,

The recent 2018 Dutch study, wherein it followed the lives of those children, either in relative infancy or who were in utero during the winter famine of 1944-45, and their progeny, corroborates your transgenerational DNA activation thesis.

Absolutely chilling reading.

https://www.nytimes.com › 2018/01/31 › science › dutch-...

Jan. 31, 2018 — Babies born during the Dutch Hunger Winter became adults with higher rates of health problems. Now researchers may have found the genetic ...

As an aside, perhaps less germane to your thesis, but it is tough to determine how many Southerners owned slaves, some 25% I believe, and even harder to accurately figure out what the average Confederate soldier thought he was actually fighting for, other than slavery, as battlefields.org opined:

"Men on both sides were inspired to fight by patriotism, state pride, the chance for adventure, steady pay. Union soldiers fought to preserve the Union; the common Confederate fought to defend his home. " (https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/reasons-secession

IOW, as it is with all wars, the propaganda mixed in with societal expectations, if you're a man you will heroically defend us all, played the two most important roles.

And as the lowest rung on the social ladder of post Civil War America, the children's children of America's former slaves were forcibly and violently kept in apartheid penury.

But has that changed in the last 50 years, more particularly in the last 20?

Arguably and thankfully yes.

And it begs the question, how did all those Black people manage to override their DNA-linked trauma?

And how can those gains, and the forces that fostered them, be protected now that they are, as you so accurately and lamentably state, once again under attack?

I would say more celebration of and gratitude for the gains and less concentration on the blame, in particular how all white people must accept and atone for the legacy of the sins of the past, a past they had no hand in creating.

The process of turning the concept of white guilt into a deafening chorus, and often conflating the idea that only BIPOC people have trans-generational trauma, will have the opposite effect: more white people deciding to vote for the sorry likes of a Trump and his party, who not only just love but further inculcate the divisive effects of identity politics.

And that would be a shame.

Thanks for such a good read.