Wikidworld (#177) / Racial Dynamics in America (#8) - How to Think about Intergenerational Trauma and Systemic Racism
An enormous wealth gap separates white and Asian households from African American households. Instead of wealth, what gets transferred to black Americans across generations is trauma.
In this series on racial dynamics in America, we’ve travelled from the Snoqualmie ski resort to Bellevue and are now back in Seattle. I live near the Seattle campus of the University of Washington, one of the STEM capitals of the world. When I stroll the UW campus, I see many Asian students, often with family members. I literally almost never see any black students.
There’s obviously something deeply wrong with this picture. Not the presence of the Asian students. But certainly the absence of Afrian American counterparts. And I’m not sure this absence is merely reducible to racism, at least in any superficial sense. We need to dig deeper.
[These impressions reflect the reality. On the Seattle campus of UW, 40 percent of the student body is white, 22 percent is Asian, and 3 percent are African American.]
My goal in this series been objectivity. I’ve wanted simply to look at the data from Bellevue about race, technology, and inequality — with no preconceptions — and see where it leads. In this final essay, I’d like to interpret the data we’ve uncovered; use it to refine how we think about notions such as systemic racism; and clarify why the conflation of personal racism, white racism, and systemic racism — at this stage of our history as a nation — is misleading and counterproductive.
This will be the final newsletter of Wikidworld 1.0. Going forward it will be all Wikidworld 2.0.
[ Please be forewarned that it is long article, probably close to a 20-minute read. But I think it will be worth your while.]
[Also, I’m aware that my focus on data to tell my story — along with my generalizations (based on the data) about Asian American and African American communities (ignoring all the ways it can be countermanded), and with my decision not to include Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, and rural Americans in this analysis — may raise some hackles. Or at least some eyebrows (I’m actually not sure what a hackle is). For those who would like to learn more about my methodology, I refer you to the “Notes on Method” at the end of this newsletter (there you might find the definition of hackle).]
The Color of Money and the Color of Blood
Let’s start by looking at this table, which is a heatmap that visually represents the contrasting intensity of 28 measures or indicators of human flourishing for the major racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Consider the shimmering, trout-like incandescence of these heatmap colors. Green the color of money. Red the color of blood.
Three Initial Conditions
What does this heatmap disclose? Notice, first, the three “initial conditions” for the identities of these five groups. Asian, European, and Latin American residents of the U.S. arrived as immigrants. African and Native American residents were either enslaved or conquered as the initial conditions for their identity as Americans.
These indicators are relational values, not objective. No cell value exists in isolation. Instead, the heatmap assigns a hue to the cells in each row by comparing the values in these cells. Yellow is neutral. Higher (or more positive) values receive a more intense green, lower (or more negative) values increasingly intense hues of red.
If you scan each column, you’ll notice how the colors, in quite a consistent manner, shade from green to red as you move from left to right. Green indicates high levels of flourishing across all of these measures of well-being. Red, of course, indicates high levels of not-flourishing. What this heatmap is telling us is that it matters enormously whether one becomes American as an immigrant, a slave, or a subjugated people. Far more, perhaps, than the color of one’s skin.
Immigrants to the United States from Europe, Asia, and Latin America have certainly experienced intense amounts of personal racism over time. But as we see from this data, they ultimately prevail. The same cannot be said for those who became American under circumstances of enslavement, subjugation, and colonization.
How to Think about Systemic Racism
By definition, complex systems — such as weather patterns, ocean currents, population dynamics, traffic flows, and economic cycles — have their own rules that generally don’t bend to the intentions and behaviors of human individuals. Complex social systems that perpetuate racism and inequality possess many of the same properties of other complex systems.
Systemic racism emerges from countless interactions, policies, and cultural norms. It has multiple interconnected components (education, justice, healthcare, employment, etc.). It contains feedback loops that create self-reinforcing cycles that can make it nearly impossible to escape the systemic effects of racism (one is always swimming upstream against a strong current). It operates at multiple levels (individual, community, institutional, and societal).
Perhaps most importantly, systemic racism is inertial. It carries with it a “memory” that carries across generations, perpetuating the effects of historical injustices long after the policies and behaviors responsible for these injustices may have changed. In what follows, using the data points in the heatmap, I’m going to deduce the effects of systemic racism in families and schools, with specific attention to criminal justice and religious beliefs (I’ll reference the relevant row for each assertion).
What Passes Across Generations
Largely because of household income differentials, an enormous wealth gap separates white and Asian households from African American households (10,12,14,19). As of 2021, median wealth for black households was $45,000, compared to $285,000 for white households, and $321,000 for Asian households. An ongoing intergenerational wealth transfer from Baby Boomers to their children — estimated to approach $85 trillion in the next 20 years — will exacerbate existing racial wealth disparities (and technologically-driven accelerants will further intensify them).
Unfortunately, instead of wealth, what gets transferred to black Americans across generations is trauma. Trauma is almost certainly an overused term at this point, certainly within public discourse. But it is real. And it does reach across generations, creating the conditions for a phenomenon known as Complex PTSD, which means that the trauma emerges, not from a single event or moment, but from within the entire web of circumstances in a person’s life. In other words, with Complex PTSD of the sort that characterizes generational trauma, one cannot escape from its effects. It is enormously difficult to eradicate.
The Ultimate Systemic Inequity
Intergenerational trauma is its own complex system, the ultimate systemic inequity. It is what distinguishes the experiences of immigrant and non-immigrant minority populations in the United States. It explains a vast amount of the differences in their progress as group across generations.
Simply put, immigrant families are the product of a journey voluntarily undertaken. Given what they might be escaping from, perhaps not solely by choice, of course, but voluntary nonetheless (as in, for the most part, no one forced immigrants to come to these shores). Psychologically, this makes all the difference in their sense of the possibilities for their children and grandchildren of full participation in American life.
By contrast, native Americans never asked Europeans to settle the continent. They certainly never asked for the consequences of this settlement, which were genocidal. And black Americans never asked to be enslaved, herded across the Atlantic and sold like livestock into permanent bondage. These harms do not go away.
What is the essence of these harms? At a visceral level, it’s the difference between being wanted and not wanted. Between inclusion and exclusion. It’s an awareness — one that bores into the soul — that some of us can belong and others among us will never belong. And what that difference means, not merely for oneself, but for the lives of one’s children.
When they arrive here, voluntary immigrants leave versions of their past aside for the brighter promise of the future. Minorities who never asked to be here to begin with, or who never asked those who subjugated them to arrive, do not have that luxury. The past imprisons them. The future is a shadow.
It’s for these reasons that the white-BIPOC binary has both conflated and concealed so much about the contemporary racial landscape in the United States, with disastrous political effects — confusing the concepts of personal racism, white racism, and systemic racism; generating a powerful and well-organized backlash; and accomplishing few of its goals.
Families and Households
Diverging data from Bellevue for Asian and black residents indicates that stable two-parent (and extended family) households and networks play an enormous role in social outcomes (1,2,3).
Consider these data points. In the United States, the teenage birth rate for Asian Americans is 9 percent. Among African Americans, it is 39 percent. About 12 percent of live births among Asian Americans are to unmarried women, compared to nearly 70 of live births to African American women. At the age of 51 percent of Asian Americans are married. Among African Americans, the number is only 22 percent.
Why does this matter? Households do not only produce income and wealth. They also produce culture and impart values. This is largely true because early childhood years establish emotional templates that we carry with us for the rest of our lives. For this reason, family structure determines opportunity and outcomes in a way that schools or churches cannot.
A second point. Because family ties are kin to community ties. Two-parent households connect family members to extended communities and networks of other families with whom they share affinities. These are essentially communities and networks of trust and belonging that reinforce the basic foundations of secure attachment established during infancy. That one is welcome and wanted, both at home and in the world (16,17). That one “fits.” The way in which a key fits a lock.
Intergenerational trauma shreds these structures of attachment, trust, and belonging. Higher percentages of children from single-parent, early-parent, and broken-parent households experience behavioral problems that impair school performance and are more likely to result in self-destructive or anti-social behavior.
This is partly because these household are more likely to experience both economic and emotional insecurity. The core belief that one will never fit. That the doors opening for others will never open (or at best open with difficulty) for them. That one can only gain access illicitly, by sneaking over the wall or breaking down the gate.
But the deeper harms result from the fractured and unstable community networks that emerge when neighborhoods experience single-parent, young-parent, and broken-family tipping points, in which insecure attachment, depression, anger, and suspicion inform interactions with others — again, the deeply embedded sense that the world is an unwelcoming, dangerous place.
[To be clear, with an emphasis I cannot more forcefully underscore, I am talking here about probabilities, not inevitabilities. This is conceptually crucial, because all complex systems are governed by millions, billions, and trillions of probabilistic outcomes. Nothing is inevitable, but some outcomes are always more likely than others under specific conditions, and even a modest shift in the odds can over time make a vast difference.
With reference to family structure, I’m not saying that two-parent households are not often dysfunctional and the single-parent, early-parent, and broken-family are not often fully stable, sufficient, and nourishing. I’m making no judgment on the heroic efforts of single parents to give their children every opportunity to flourish in life. I’m only making a statistical argument about household outcomes based on the probable outcomes across large populations and over long stretches of time that have compounding effects. Across these horizons, the impacts are devastatingly clear.]
Crime and Punishment
We’re not supposed to talk about black-on-black violence — although one cannot find a more distressing and tragic example of behavior that shreds while it scales — but the prohibition on conversation is direct evidence about how much we actually need to talk about it. Here are some facts.
According to the CDC, the rate of firearm-related homicides for African American males is 53 per 100,000 population. For Asian American males, the rate is about 1.5 per 100,000 population, a differential of nearly 35 times (the national average for all males is about 11 deaths per 100,000 population) (21) As of 2021, at least, African American males also account for 56 percent of known homicide offenders, compared to 3 percent of known homicide offenders for the “Other” category, which includes Asian American males.
If all of that weren’t sufficiently heinous, as of 2021, the incarceration rate for African American males was 1,826 per 100,000 population, compared to 141 per 100,000 for Asian American males (20). These numbers probably understate the disparities, as incarceration rates for black males are substantially down from previous decades. In 2001, 4,600 black males were imprisoned per 100,000 population. In southern states, black males have at times been incarcerated at rates upwards of 25 times that for white males.
If one reads enough Wikipedia biographies, one learns two things. A huge number of famous actors have parents who divorced when they were young. And distressingly large number of young black athletes lost fathers to violence or imprisonment. This stuff matters. And when one considers that 90 percent of black inmates are fathers, you can imagine the catastrophic impacts of both violence and imprisonment upon African American families and children.
The symbolism and the messaging are horrific — how we as a society apparently delight in maximally punishing those who are already inclined to maximally punish themselves. This is the definition of a sociopathic civilization, tumbling into a dark age from which it may take generations to emerge. Talk about punching down.
One additional point about black-on-black violence. Despite the discomfort this term creates, from the perspective of intergenerational trauma, these patterns fit within the large framework of “deaths of despair.” (23) On the heatmap, the only green cell for African Americans is in the cell for male suicide rates, which are higher than for Asian Americans, but lower by factors of 2 and 3 than the suicide rates for European American and Native American males. At the same time, drug overdose deaths have skyrocketed among African American males.
When one combines these two measures of despair – death from suicide or drug overdose – African American males have rates 4 times higher than the rates for Asian American males. If one adds homicides by firearm to the list, African American males are 7 times more likely than Asian Americans to experience deaths of despair, the same differential that exists between Native Americans and Asian Americans. The point being that we might not want to so clearly distinguish what it means to harm others and to harm oneself, that both are in similar ways acts of self-abnegation.
[African Amerian males are 13 times more likely to be homicide victims than white males. However, white males take their own lives at a very higher rate. If one combines sucides and homicide rates for white American and African American males, the ratio shrinks to “only” 2 times more likely.]
Education
The premise of everything that I’ve written in this series is that early childhood experiences matter enormously in adult outcomes. So much so that one can judge the humanity and health of any society by the attention and resources their public and private institutions lavish on the well-being of its youngest children and their parents. Everything follows from this. One cannot imagine a more cost-effective way to invest in our future.
But in our current dispensation, education also matters more than ever, and because of its scaling effects, STEM education can now often seem like the only form of education that can make a difference in creating opportunity and access — other words for inclusion — for otherwise marginalized groups.
Taking me to my final point, which is that Asian families bring a laser-like focus on educational achievement unseen among other racial and ethnic groups in the United States, one that their children absorb at an early age (hence the firm grip upon them of the “model minority” trope, which one can imagine is so difficult to shake because it too is internalized pre-consciously.
I wouldn’t say this transactional emphasis of Asian families on educational achievement communicates any special commitment to ideas and to the life of the mind, to what one might call an “intellectual disposition.” But it doesn’t exclude such a disposition.
We’re definitely dealing in stereotypes here, but if one is trying to explain disparate race-based educational, and occupational outcomes, one would be remiss in ignoring the relationship between immigrant status, family structure, and the expectations established early in childhood — that one not only can succeed by playing the “rules of the game” in America, one must and will succeed. For Asian families — and as we’ve seen in Bellevue, particularly Chinese and Indian families — a thick culture that celebrates education as the key to unlocking all other opportunities establishes almost the inevitability of success.
Acting White
As a boy, I frequently experienced the well-known vibe among my black schoolmates that to succeed in school was to “act white,” a tension between academic achievement and cultural authenticity that expresses suspicion about the “rules of the game” and an oppositional instinct not to follow them. There are many ways to think about this, but none of them lead to great outcomes.
Black families obviously value education and there is a growing generational emphasis within the black community on the value of higher education. However, whereas 56 percent of Asian Americans over the age of 25 hold a bachelor’s degree from a four-year college, the rate for African Americans still hovers around 24 percent, an outcome that partly reflects skepticism about the value of a college degree. Surveys suggest that where 86 percent of white adults and 89 percent of Asian American adults believe higher education leads to more job opportunities, compared to 69 percent of African American adults.
These numbers foreclose opportunities to even be considered for well-paid career track employment. At the same time, black Americans are also underrepresented in the more highly skilled manual trades (plumbing, electrician, etc.) and overrepresented in low-paid, dead-end jobs such as nursing assistants, home health aides, security guards and gambling surveillance officers.
This might be what “not acting white” gets you. But if we can successfully decouple notions of white racism, systemic racism, and personal racism, perhaps these choices would not be so binary. Because these days, “acting white” also doesn’t get you too far. And because learning how to play by the rules is what ultimately gives someone the freedom to break the rules.
Religious Habits of Mind
I’ve already mentioned the life of the mind and its relationship to the pursuit of both intellectual and technical mastery. Religious belief (or the lack thereof) also matters enormously in the perception and the pursuit of formal education. Within communities and cultures, a straight line seems to run between levels of educational attainment, religious affiliation, belief in God, belief in the literal truth of the Bible, and trust in science. (24,25,26,27,28)
Here we need to consider the historical role of the black church in African American faith communities, not merely in how it has sustained and strengthened its members, but also for the ways in which the church — with its roots in American Protestantism — has informed the belief structures and habits of mind of African Americans.
The bias of American Protestantism itself — with its frontier agglomeration of schismatic denominations — has historically been anti-intellectual. The diverging views on science and religion that characterize Asian Americans and African Americans illustrate this instinct to bypass formal institutions and systematic traditions of learning (a mistake the Catholics do not make).
[Which might be another way in which one can decide to not play by the rules.]
And so we see that among Asian Americans, educational attainment (56.3%) correlates closely with lower rates of religious affiliation (64%), less widespread belief in God (81%) and in the literal truth of the Bible (17%), and increased trust in science (77%). Among African Americans, the correlations run the other way, with significantly lower levels of educational attainment (24%) linked to higher levels of religious affiliation (81%), belief in God (98%) and the literal truth of the Bible (42%), and suspicion of science (43%). These are meaningful distinctions that cast a new light on the systemic dimensions of racial inequality.
Where Do We Go From Here
This is a very long essay that needs to be wrapped up. Here are some bullet points to take away from this exercise in data analysis and data storytelling.
Playing the Long Game — We understandably want justice and restitution now. But harms across generations require solutions across generations. In thinking about solutions, we need to think not about ourselves but about the next generation. We need to play a long game and set goals and expectations appropriately.
From Correlation to Causation — My heatmap is a map of correlations. And in any complex system, including systemic racism, it is nearly impossible to tease out causation from correlation. However, since we can’t do everything, we should focus hard on doing the one thing that will make a difference. And I’m persuaded the data points in only one direction, which is the importance of investing in families and, especially, in young children. If I were any public or non-profit or private organization, that would be my focus. To claim a future worth living for anyone born in the 21st century. I would scale back spending on nearly everything else and adopt a Scandinavian model, with enormous amounts of support for young families with young children, providing any and every opportunity to establish the secure attachment and basic trust needed to welcome oneself into the world.
Systems Are not People — Personal racism is episodic and bounded in scope. Which isn’t to say that it can’t do enormous harm. But is not systemic harm. White racism has obvously been a brutal reality in American history. But its enduring and damaging effects across generations have been upon black and native individuals and communities. The immigrant saga is not an easy one, and white racism has certainly taken its pound of flesh from immigrant communities (including formerly “non-white” or “less-than-white” Irish, Italian, Polish, and Ashkenazi Jewish migrants from Europe). But the openings for immigrants and the changing composition of American society tell us that when we imagine white power, what we’re really considering is the power of elites. Power structures can change while preserving historic forms of systemic racism.
Embracing Complexity — By conflating systemic racism, white racism, and personal racism, progressives have fallen into a trap that has them waging a brute-force, take-no-prisoners war that they cannot possibility win because they are operating on their enemy’s terrain. I did not mention the mult-racial demographic category, which is growing rapidly, and which eludes many of the characertistics of single-race groupings. Perhaps this emerging multi-racial landscape can help us to imagine ways to dissolve racial binaries, rather simply attempting to destroy them.
We all need a picture in our mind of what the future can look like. In my mind, I return to Snoqualmie ski resort with my son and see hundreds of African American skiers on the slopes.
Notes on Method
Because I’m dealing with data on loaded matters concerning race and inequality, I’m making general statements — about families, education, and public health — for which literally millions of exceptions exist, each of which might indicate that I’m leaning into generalized bias and stereotypes and ignoring and ignoring boots-on-the-ground reality.
To which I plead guilty. My point isn’t to deny or cancel out anecdotal or localized stories that tell a different story about the lives of Asian Americans and African Americans in the United States. But the data is the data. Like systems, they follow their own rules and tell their own stories. They don’t really care what stories we tell ourselves. These stories told by the data are complicated and can be quite distressing. But it helps no one to ignore or whitewash them.
My widening of the social aperture to include Asian Americans alongside European Americans (whites) at the apex of key institutions and systems within the United States — particularly technology, but also media, finance and, increasingly, politics — is in no sense a judgment. It’s merely a reflection of fact, and more apparent to the degree that until very recently, not much income and wealth data has been broken out for Asian populations in the United States.
Not judging is not the same as saying something doesn’t matter, however. Indeed, what thie Bellevue data specifically discloses about the rapid ascent of highly educated Chinese and Indian Americans in this country speaks volumes about openings for assimilation and inclusion on terms that are not culturally self-abnegating.
As I’ve written previously, despite the discomfort that the “model minority” label surfaces for Asian Americans — particularly given the vast differences in the experience of specific Asian immigrant and Asian refugee populations — insights about their success do bear the weight of generalization.
Important parallels exist between the harms done to, and structural challenges facing, African American and Native American populations. However, I’ve mostly excluded indigenous Americans from this analysis because their numbers are small, the data on inequality is lacking or imprecise, and the complexities of their status and condition in the United States are beyond the scope of my knowledge
I’ve also not included Hispanic Americans in this analysis to keep my lens as sharply focused as possible. I’ve not included Middle Eastern and African immigrants for similar reasons.
There is another chasm in American society, of course. Which is the economic and cultural divisions between urban and rural America. I’ve written about this in a separate series of newsletters, so don’t want to pretend this cleavage isn’t also important and concerning. But these are discrete phenomena.
Finally, I’m not including links to referenced sources, but am happy to provide support for my data claims and assertions at anyone’s request.
Hackle
hackle • \HACK-ul\ • noun. 1 a : one of the long narrow feathers on the neck or back of a bird b : the neck plumage of the domestic fowl 2 : a comb or board with long metal teeth for dressing flax, hemp, or jute 3 a : (plural) hairs (as on a dog's neck and back) that can be erected b : (plural) temper, dander