If we accept that events in life can scar or even just affect you for life (as this article claims) then why stop there? These people have children. Do you think that habits that form out of trauma, housing insecurity, food insecurity or were in fear of their lives don't subconciously impact their children?
We don't even have to imagine that. We have physical evidence that the conditions a woman faces can impact her grandchildren [1]. Remember that a cis-woman is born all the ova she'll have so pregnancy conditions can affect grandchildren.
But even if you ignore the physical, you'll find cultural and psychological effects on children from people who, say, fled a war zone or survived the Holocaust or whatever.
If you accept all that you've then accepted that generational trauma is real (which it is).
So what do you think that slavery did to people long after chattel slavery (officially) ended?
At least from the conversations I've heard about this topic, the issue isn't acknowledging that slavery and Jim Crow has caused problems for generations of blacks. The problem comes when measures to address it are discussed, like reparations or quotas. People see it as monumentally unfair because, while being black is a handicap, it's only one of many that are too endless to enumerate. For example, there is no affirmative action for poor whites who grow up in broken homes. There is no affirmative action for simply having parents who are a standard deviation below the population in IQ. Insofar as student spots at high-tier institutions go, here poor whites see favorable action to benefit blacks when they themselves never played a part in their oppression. Black, well-spoken immigrants from Nigeria who never experience discrimination in their home countries get benefits merely by dint of their skin color, and not actual suffering.
Even if you limited it to some way to only US blacks who could prove lineage to an actual enslaved individual, suffering is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify. So... why action on this topic is politically impossible. I think color-blind welfare policies based on economic resources would be much more feasible, but... good luck raising taxes to increase the size of the welfare state.
If we accept that events in life can scar or even just affect you for life (as this article claims) then why stop there? These people have children. Do you think that habits that form out of trauma, housing insecurity, food insecurity or were in fear of their lives don't subconciously impact their children?
We don't even have to imagine that. We have physical evidence that the conditions a woman faces can impact her grandchildren [1]. Remember that a cis-woman is born all the ova she'll have so pregnancy conditions can affect grandchildren.
But even if you ignore the physical, you'll find cultural and psychological effects on children from people who, say, fled a war zone or survived the Holocaust or whatever.
If you accept all that you've then accepted that generational trauma is real (which it is).
So what do you think that slavery did to people long after chattel slavery (officially) ended?
[1]: https://www.science.org/content/article/moms-environment-dur...