H.R. 40 seeks to establish a commission to study the effects of slavery and its subsequent racial and economic discrimination, and its physical, economic, and psychological impact on African Americans today, and then make recommendations for repair and reconcilliation. In 1989 John Conyers, (D) Rep. MI, introduce H.R. 40 (40, from 40 acres and a mule) and today it might finally have some teeth. Therapists familiar with rupture and repair might have some insights to offer the US Congress on healing. While a few presidential candidates have come out in favor of reparation, one, Marianne Williamson, is an author and activist who actually knows a few things about healing the soul of our nation evident in her ideas about poverty alleviation, peace building, women’s advocacy, and feeding the hungry, to name a few.
Therapists are well aware of how insidious and pernicious intergenerational transmission of trauma is on families across time. Attachment research and Infant-mother research have shown that anxiety and dissociation are not merely inherited but are created from experience, that is, encoded in the brain and built within central and peripheral neuronal connections that become a default position for future experience. Huge retrospective and prospective studies have documented the physical and psychological consequences of adverse childhood experiences (ACE).
Is any trauma so heinous or span centuries as slavery did in the United States? Dehumanization of people, the calculated splitting up of families (seen recently at our southern border), the terrorization to body and sense of self (continued by Jim Crowe segregation laws, the KKK, lynchings, and today, the inequitable incarceration and shooting of black men) all create long lasting sequelae to traume. Reparations (more than eigthy billion dollars) were paid by Germany to Jewish Holocaust survivors and refugees. The USA compensated Japanese interned during World War II (Civil Liberties Act of 1988). Is there a way to recognize the early economic prosperity of America established on the backs of unpaid slave labor that can heal the soul of America?
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