On the appropriate handling of historical trauma
Bullfrog
Shipmate
in Epiphanies
This post comes out of a confluence of thoughts from other conversations.
I see people talking about traumas that date back 500, 1000 years. And on a human level, I can relate. History is terrifying. At the same time, is it healthy for a person living now to still carry grief from garbage behavior that happened to their ancestors? Why? And where is the limit?
And of course, there are also present injuries that stem from prior traumas. I have no intention of denying those. Segregation of all kinds has passed down from generation to generation where "if you robbed my grandparents, and then you robbed my parents, you robbed me as well." But at some point, that's real not necessarily because of the history, but because of the present context. The present injury is the one that matters. You can't do anything for people who are already dead, I think.
Is there ever a way - to borrow an ugly old American expression - to bury these bloody shirts instead of forcing our children to wear them?
Here's an article on intergenerational trauma from WebMD if you're not familiar with the conversation.
I see people talking about traumas that date back 500, 1000 years. And on a human level, I can relate. History is terrifying. At the same time, is it healthy for a person living now to still carry grief from garbage behavior that happened to their ancestors? Why? And where is the limit?
And of course, there are also present injuries that stem from prior traumas. I have no intention of denying those. Segregation of all kinds has passed down from generation to generation where "if you robbed my grandparents, and then you robbed my parents, you robbed me as well." But at some point, that's real not necessarily because of the history, but because of the present context. The present injury is the one that matters. You can't do anything for people who are already dead, I think.
Is there ever a way - to borrow an ugly old American expression - to bury these bloody shirts instead of forcing our children to wear them?
Here's an article on intergenerational trauma from WebMD if you're not familiar with the conversation.
Comments
How to deal with racial trauma, according to Black experts
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I'm skeptical of an approach to this question that seems to be premised on the idea that it's the duty/responsibility of those who have been wronged (or whose ancestors have been wronged) to erase or suppress that part of their heritage so that their oppressors (or the descendants of their oppressors) can feel good about themselves. A lot of discussions along these lines seem to be asking "how can we get those people to shut up about X?" rather than "what, if anything, can/should be done to fix the damage done by X?"
A post by me from an earlier, potentially related thread [ via ]:
I'm not sure those two things are all that separate, ISTM that at least part of why people feel intergenerational trauma is that the cost of those things have been carried into the present, [and part of the reason other people want them to stop talking about it is because of the cost of rectifying things in the present]
When we're talking about "generational trauma", the wrongdoers are all dead.
Some of us inherit, to a greater or lesser extent, some benefits from that wrongdoing, and some of us inherit, to a greater or lesser extent, some costs.
Is that necessarily the case? One could regard the Holocaust as generational trauma, and yet according to Wikipedia there are still living Nazi war criminals.
This is after all the original meaning and origin of the word "meme" - elements of cultural meaning/value which are passed on between generations. It's not just that trauma is passed on directly; it also shapes culture, which is then passed on. It also seems to me that the traumatic elements shape the reception of the culture as it is passed from generation to generation, somehow, so that the trauma is perfectly preserved between generations.
If each generation arrived in the world, and in particular arrived at adulthood, entirely pristine and unshaped by their upbringing and the culture they had absorbed, I could go with @Bullfrog, because the continuation of the trauma feels like a conscious choice. But I don't think that's true, and therefore I can't go along, much as I would like to.
The problem is that the past is never really past. We carry our ancestors with us - in our collective memories, in the ways in which we are culturally formed, in the behaviours passed on to us from our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents. Therefore, the garbage didn't happen only to our ancestors. It happened to *us*.
I work with First Nations students in Canada. The attempts at genocide have harmed the capacities of communities, and the continued racism and abuse mean that harms of the past are not past.
Perhaps you are thinking of incidents from a long time ago? But if so, and people are still living them as if they are current, then they are not "a long time ago;" they are now.
My discomfort with your question comes from wondering whether your question is really, "Why can't *they* just get over it?" From what I can tell there is no hope of releasing the destruction of the past until the stories of the past can be told with honesty by those who were on the receiving end of the oppression. Then there is the need to reclaim identity, culture, and community structures that are self-defined and not imposed by those who oppressed in the first place.
It's not up to me to delineate what someone else's individual or communal healing journey looks like, or how long it takes. If that makes me uncomfortable, that's the price I have to pay for being part of a world that is a work in progress.
I see part of my role as regularly asking my students questions like, "What do you need to be safe enough to learn?" "There's something going on here that I'm not understanding. Are you willing to help me see it from your perspective?"
In the area where I live we have one of the highest global incidences of juvenile Huntingdon's chorea among poorer communities of slave descent. The key reason for this is genetic. The Dutch settler farms to which slaves were brought are lonely and socially isolated and slaves had no freedom of movement so intimate relationships and resulting pregnancies took place within a shrinking gene pool. Many of the sexual interactions were coercive and Huntingdon's chorea is believed to originate from Holland, so in earlier generations we're talking about slaves impregnated by their masters. Although slavery officially ended in 1834, most slaves on these isolated farms had nowhere to go and the last woman born into slavery near here and sold as a child in the 1930s to another farmer, died in 1978. Her great-grandchildren all suffer from juvenile Huntingdon's chorea and it is a hellish illness.
Slavery continues to affect many people here and one small example indicates the ongoing enigma of lost identity: many of those descended from slave families have the surnames given to their ancestors when they were sold at auction outside the Slave Lodge in Cape Town, names taken from classical mythology or simply the month in which the slaves were sold: Apollo, Titus, Hannibal, Cupido or September, July/Julies, Februarie, April, Oktober. They came from SE Asia, India, Abyssinia/Ethiopia, Mozambique, Madagascar, Japan, Guinea, and Angola and for many there was no way to go home again or get news of the families left behind. If after the Emancipation of Slavery they sought refuge on mission stations, they were baptised and given a second Christian name: Abraham, Magdalena, Jacob. Their stories have survived in fragments and song, a handful of memories passed down and treasured. If they surrendered those memories what would be left?
Archives and Human Rights: the Case of Slavery at the Cape
Maroon: narratives of slavery and incarceration
Cape Colony Economic History Project
Even in the community where I now live in the Hebrides, I'm only beginning to get a sense of the pain of those who have deep roots here and are seeing the long march of Anglicisation approach its (inevitable?) conclusion. A friend of mine's grandfather kept all the rent receipts, for fear that the factor would claim they hadn't paid and turf them off the land. The township where I live was formed on a thin strip of land near the shore by cottars evicted to make way for sheep. And yet many of those forced off the land here made their way to Canada, and their desire (or that of people much like them) to secure the land was presumably a contributor to the oppression and trauma of the first nations community I mentioned before.
I wonder, therefore, whether part of the managing of generational trauma is how to avoid it leading to more of the same. The clearances begat (in part) the crimes against the first nations; the Shoah begat the Nakba. The Nakba begat Hamas. What will the current war beget?
The impetus to try and mitigate the effects of trauma is, then, not to make life more comfortable for those who inflicted it (the "get over it" narrative) but to heal it to avoid further trauma being inflicted on others.
Synchronicity. Yesterday I came across a tribute by the nature writer Rob Macfarlane to his friend Finlay MacLeod who shared with him a copy of the ‘Peat Glossary’, a list of 100+ Gaelic terms for aspects of peat & peat culture.
"Finlay grew up in a Gaelic-speaking crofting family. He left school at 15 and knew the names of the winds, the grasses––& the holy wells & the Norse mills & so much more besides. He was a scholar, writer, teacher, cartographer & a quietly towering figure in Gaelic culture of the past half-century. He lived his life on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, a stone’s throw from the machair & the full fetch of the Atlantic Ocean."
On Instagram so can't link, but it made me think a whole culture died with this one person determined to keep a suppressed Gaelic world alive.
OK.
So do you think it's possible to get to a point where the population is no longer split into "those whose ancestors were wronged" and "those whose ancestors did the wronging"? Or are those statuses indelibly etched into the very fabric of who each and every one of our descendants are, yea even unto the thousandth generation?
I mention here Scotland but it happens everywhere and not just with nations but with families and individuals. Just think of the story of Romeo and Juliet and the bad blood engendered over generations, leading to the tragic death of the young couple.
Has no-one here ever acted in an arrogant and condescending manner to someone else or some other group of people which has left or may leave grievances festering over generations. ?
Over the years, we visited a similar camp in Southern Idaho where many Japanese and their descendants were relocated during Wold War II. I knew some of the families that had been interned there.
Tonight, my son was telling me of a project he is working on for Portland Metro, Multinomah County just transferred some property to Metro which was used to detain Japanese Americans from Western Oregon to the Relocation Camp in Southern Idaho. The property had previously been used to detain Native Americans and Blacks. Metro is looking at restoring the buildings to use as a historical monument to how certain ethnic groups have been detained in the Portland area.
I've met a few men who lived in those as kids. They're wizened now, but it's a reminder that it wasn't that long ago.
Brandon Shimoda's grandparents came to the United States from Hiroshima in 1919 and gave up Japanese citizenship to live in the US. Two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt signed Exclusion Order 9066, declaring most of the West Coast an exclusion area and ordering Japanese people to be treated as enemy aliens. Shimoda's grandparents were taken to what were then called 'indoctrination centers for Americanism,' internment camps in the desert, several on Native American reservations. Their unpaid labour would be used on irrigation projects, soil conservation projects and road building projects.
Chimoda segues between his family history and the 'fake history' produced after WWII about the American desert in cinema, a romanticised version of "how the West was won" starring cowboys played as folk heroes by John Wayne, Cary Grant etc. This fantasy of finding freedom in an 'empty' desert or wilderness concealed the brutal conquest and displacement of Native Americans, as well as the secret military installations and weapons testing of the Cold War and finally the carceral network of border surveillance, detention centres and prisons for migrants. Shimoda describes the Sonoran desert and other remote areas in the US as 'a landscape of co-ordinated disappearance'.
Reading his insights, I could see that while it is important to begin with the specificity and uniqueness of historical traumas (Rwanda's genocide, the nakba, apartheid in South Africa) and not conflate them, it is also crucial to make connections between repeated and continuing historical atrocities and abuses, how the traumas are repeated when the memories have been lost or minimised.
It might be a while before we get to a point where the population is no longer split into "those who are still suffering from the wrong done to their ancestors" and "those who are still benefitting from the wrong done to those other people's ancestors."
The other day I heard someone talk about the war now raging in the Middle East. He said that the British were those really responsible for the present day situation and that the British were the real terrorists.
Were we to accept this how would we define the 'British' ? Do we mean everyone with a British passport ? Do we mean only those British who are white and of a Christian background ? ?Do we include those who may be black,brown ,Hindu,Jewish or Muslim ?
If we don't include everyone then would we not be considered to be racist ?
If we do include everyone with a British passport,or even possibly everyone living in the British state, then at least some of those who are still'suffering from the wrong done to their ancestors' will at the same time be those in some way 'benefitting from the wrong done to their ancestors'.
And what is now called neo- or global colonialism, staying with the UK: the degree to which British companies now control Africa’s key mineral resources, notably gold, platinum, diamonds, copper, oil, gas and coal. Companies listed on the London Stock Exchange— most of them British — have mining operations in 37 sub-Saharan African countries. They collectively control over $1-trillion worth of Africa’s most valuable resources. The UK government has used its power and influence to ensure that British mining companies have continued access to Africa’s raw materials.
Worldwide, almost every ethnic group has owned slaves and at other times been enslaved. (This may depend on the precise definition used.)
I think we need to deemphasize the ideas of inherited guilt and inherited glory, and perhaps, to some extent, of inherited wealth.
At the very least a lot of these issues are a powerful argument for fairly high levels of progressive taxation.
Nevertheless the issues resulting from race based chattel slavery continue to reverberate down to the current day, and can't just be classified alongside other types of slavery that may have happened in the past.
There are second order issues due to the failure to properly implement Reconstruction: https://www.npr.org/2020/01/14/795961381/racist-housing-practices-from-the-1930s-linked-to-hotter-neighborhoods-today
as well as somewhat more direct effects (that albeit affect fewer people) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OXbJHsKB3I (Vice Magazine short on the practice of slavery in the US into the 20th century - cw: descriptions of torture and killing)
There's a great film called "Manzanar Diverted" about the Owens Valley, Payahǖǖnadǖ in the indigenous tongue, meaning "place of flowing water." The Piute people fought and lost a war with the US army in the 1860s; many were massacred, and others were force-marched to Fort Tejon a couple of hundred miles south. Some found their way back north, where the US forced them onto reservations. White ranchers took over. The city of Los Angeles bought land in the Owens Valley in the first decade of the 20th century and built an aqueduct to take the water from the Owens River to LA. Thus LA was able to grow, supporting an increasingly large population, some of whom were immigrants from Japan and their descendents, while Owens Valley agriculture was no longer viable. So the US stole the Owens Valley from the Piute people, and LA took the water supply and thus livelihood from the ranchers. The US compelled LA to lease Owens Valley land to the federal government to incarcerate Japanese Americans at Manzanar, site of a ghost town abandoned by the ranchers; those from LA were forced into making a reverse trek from that the Piute had made 80 years prior. Many people incarcerated at Manzanar developed life-long lung problems due to breathing in particulate matter from the dried-up Owens Lake.
Japanese immigration to the US took off in the 1880s. In the early 20th century there was a series of legal actions to limit and discourage Japanese immigration, culminating in the Immigration Act of 1924, which banned all immigration from Asian countries. In California, home of the greatest number of Japanese immigrants and their descendents, we had Alien Land Laws meant to severely limit the ability of Japanese immigrants to buy or even lease land. Japanese Americans and immigrants were incarcerated 1942-45. Most of them lost everything, selling homes, businesses and farms at hugely cut-rate prices or having them confiscated outright by the government. They were forced to live in camps in desolate areas of the American west. Like @Gramps49, I've been to Manzanar -- it's really hot in the summer and pretty cold in the winter, not a place where you want to live in an uninsulated shack, with an inadequate water supply, crowded conditions and no privacy.
When they were released, tens of thousands of people had nowhere to live, having been given only $25 and a train or bus ticket. Many wanted to come back to Los Angeles, where they came from, but post-war California and especially LA were already short of housing due to massive internal migration during the war. Formerly incarcerated Japanese Americans lived in camps, barracks, trailers, hostels -- all sorts of inadequate temporary housing, many of them forced to move multiple times. And they faced the same racist anti-Japanese sentiments and behaviors that had led to the executive order in the first place, as well as racist property covenants that restricted where they could buy land, all while they were trying to rebuild their lives from next to nothing. Over 40 years later, the US government authorized payment of $20,000 each to living former detainees. This doesn't come close to what they would have had if they had been able to take full part in the enormous post-war US economic boom, and it doesn't begin to compensate for their suffering. It cost about $1.6 billion, and wasn't nearly enough.
In 1942, my grandfather was a laborer working for a Japanese American farmer in California's Central Valley. When that family was going to be taken away, my grandparents made a deal with them to take over the farm and work it for the duration of the war. My grandparents saved enough money in that time for a down payment on their own farm, a major step up out of poverty. My father soon after benefited from a public school system that made a university education and medical school easily affordable. Post-war California was a great place to be if you were white, like the vast majority of my dad's classmates.
So when will the population where I live no longer be split between those descended from people incarcerated during World War II and folks like me descended from people who directly benefited? Maybe when there are no longer anti-Asian hate crimes, which spiked most recently when Trump was calling covid "the China virus" but which are fueled by the same underlying racism that led to the anti-Japanese immigration policies of 100 years ago.
And that's just people of Japanese descent. There are all the other groups of Asians, hundreds of indigenous groups, Black people, people from Mexico and countries in Central and South America -- basically everyone who isn't white and descended from Europeans has one way or another suffered some kind of shit at the hands white European-descended people, and that shit to one degree or another is still happening.
These campaigns take many forms related to the kinds of human-rights violations and/or slavery involved. It isn't just about about money.
In 2021, Germany agreed to pay Namibia €1.1bn (£940m) as it officially recognised the Herero-Nama genocide at the start of the 20th century, atrocities carried out between 1904 and 1908. The statement acknowledged genocide but refused to use the terms 'reparations' or 'compensation' for fear of setting a legal precedent for other nations to demand reparations from Germany. The money was earmarked for aid programmes involving surviving descendants of the Herero and Nama peoples. This payment followed the return in 2018 of the skulls of Herero-Nama people used for medical experimentation and used to demonstrate notions of racial superiority in Germany.
None of this history was taught to students at school in then German South West Africa or in apartheid South Africa or in Germany until very recently. The outrage felt by those in Europe as well as in Namibia who learned about the realities of this first genocide of the 20th century fuelled the demand for compensation.
Germany also returned stolen artifacts (the Benin Bronzes) to Nigeria in the same year that Belgium returned the body of independence leader Patrice Lumumba to the Democratic Republic of Congo. The British Museum holds about 73 000 objects looted from various African former colonies: the British Museum Act of 1963 and the National Heritage Act of 1983 preclude any return of artworks now considered part of British cultural history. France has so far repatriated 28 African objects: a 19th-century sabre to Senegal and 26 items to Benin. It has also returned the crown of Madagascar’s last queen, Ranavalona III, as a long-term loan from France’s Army Museum. Negotiations are underway for the return of major pieces from the the Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac museum in Paris: there are an estimated 90 000 African artefacts in France, most from sub-Saharan Africa.
This week we have a colloquium taking place at the university of Stellenbosch on “The Colonial Wound and the Practice of Repair”, headed by the project team for Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma. With more education in revisionist histories, along with restoration, reparation and repatriation efforts, a more hopeful note is emerging.
I well remember visiting an elderly couple in Darlington who had married in the summer of 1939. He was in the Navy. After the honeymoon he was posted to the Far East. They didn’t meet again until 1945!
I tend to think that inherited guilt and glory are pointless, but I'm not sure it's apt to de-emphasize inherited wealth. Maybe we ought to pay more attention to it, or reduce its influence via taxation for a more equitable and honestly "meritcratic" society.
Source, should be a freebie.
I reflect on this from the point of view of Isaiah 9:5: "For all the boots of the tramping warriors and all the garments rolled in blood shall be burned as fuel for the fire."
The warriors' boots are symbols of the power of violent triumph. The garments rolled in blood are symbols of the powerful cry of victims for justice. The advent of the Messiah points to the end of both of those things.
Until then, as with feeding the hungry, we have a duty to be peacemakers as best we can. So to me it's a both/and: we probably won't be able to solve this by ourselves, but we do what we can in the meantime, living in the light of the reign of Christ in which neither kind of "trophy" will eventually matter.
In the meantime, ISTM that violence and the terror of it outweighs irritation with the cry for justice and amends. Those who have been robbed in many ways, and their generations who suffer from those thefts, have the right to cry for justice and amends. We have an obligation, civic and religious, to listen and to work on actual real-world amends.
This wasn't a problem when it came to reparations for Japanese internment. Countries are legal fictions, but they're very useful ones. One part of the fiction is that "the United States" is the same entity today as it was in 1988 and in 1942. From a legal perspective the legal entity that paid reparations to Japanese and Japanese-American internees was the same one that wrongfully imprisoned them, even if the constituent members of that legal entity were (mostly) different people.
For some reason people get uncomfortable with the idea that the United States similarly also existed in 1935 or 1850.
That's always the argument, isn't it? I remember some magazine (I think it was Harper's) arguing shortly after the American Civil War that the newly freed slaves were not entitled to any kind of support from the American government since the wrongs committed were in the distant past. In this case the wrong, as Harper's saw it, was not ongoing enslavement that had ended only a few years prior but the original slave taking of the ancestors of the then-current generation of freedmen. The U.S. had banned participation in international slave trade in 1808. (Domestic slave trading was another matter entirely.) There's always some way to push current wrongs back into distant antiquity. So people like to throw up their hands about how difficult it is to "identify the descendants of slaves" rather than talking about convict leasing (slavery by another name) or redlining and contract buying. We know which neighborhoods were redlined and who lived there and how the federal government enforced this policy through its control of FHA loans. Or rather the information exists in readily available form if anyone cared to compile it. But that kind of thing isn't so distant in time (a lot of those involved are still alive) so we prefer not to look too closely.
If you are forced to work, and you are not allowed to quit, and you are paid a pittance, at some point it starts to sound like slavery.
I remember somewhere such experiences will extend into four generations.
I know, growing up, a family story of my great grandfather dying in a well cave-in impacted the whole family, but my kids never heard the story. This weekend, I was sharing some of the ancestry history with one of my sons. He was surprised he had never known what happened to his great-great grandfather. Will he tell his kids? Probably not.
Those who benefit from social capital have access to people with insider knowledge, wealth or influence. It often involves cultural capital, those who have been able to travel, study abroad or have had 'gap years', have learned to play musical instruments, study literature in different languages, ride horses or take art courses, grow up in owned or inherited homes surrounded by books, art, gardens. When they need job references, they can ask favourite uncles or godparents with clout in the community or in corporate life. They are more likely to attend the same churches, clubs and holiday resorts as those with whom they work, their children are likely to go to the same schools and universities or join family businesses, inherit property or wealth. Much of this is covered in Peggy MacIntosh's still pertinent White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.
When it comes to historical trauma or ongoing abuse or violence, those who have backgrounds with educational privilege and what is sometimes called 'emotional literacy' are those who are most readily given access to therapeutic and psychological resources and do not have to depend on over-crowded State-subsidised facilities. They are more likely to find their family's histories preserved and respected in Imperial War Museums or annual ceremonies at the Cenotaph, ensuring their histories are kept alive in public memory. This doesn't mean those memories are healed or resolved but when we think of the forgotten colonial Black troops who fought for the Empire, or defeated nations unable to honour their own dead or those victimised in war, the difference is evident.
After the end of apartheid in South Africa, many younger Black students gained access to Model C schools or expensive private schools in South Africa offering 'township scholarships'. Many students did well academically but could not find employment or afford university. Bank managers were reluctant to offer loans to students from poor families. Those who did enter formerly white-dominated professions found it hard to gain promotion because they didn't 'belong'. Language differences played a role: most students spoke fluent English in the workplace but a different language at home. They were expected to help younger siblings financially and with unpaid tutoring. Lifestyle differences made socialising hard: in South Africa, the most popular sport is rugby and yet soccer is preferred by Black communities. Those Black academics doing post-grad research struggled (and still do) to get visas to attend international conferences or funding for study in the West. The old pattern has been for West-based white academics to study ethnological or anthropological field subjects in rural Africa and then publish their findings back in universities in Europe or the United States: Black academics had access to local research but not the status of those published in the West. Academic peer reviews favour those who have English as their home language and come from prestigious universities (Harvard, Oxford). In recording or analysing historical traumas in Africa, most published research on transatlantic slavery, colonial abuses or the flaws in colonial psychiatry has been done by white scholars based in the West and often it is distorted or incomplete.
And then you get into racial segregation and...what you describe in S Africa feels a lot like the US. Had a friend tell me that affirmative action doesn't work because it launches people into college who are ill prepared and crash and burn for the lack of aptitude. And I guess I can see that? Sorta? But it grinds my gears that a lot of these "aptitudes" are social graces and skills that have a tenuous - at best - relationship to actual competence or intelligence.
It gets really weird for me sometimes because I have enough education to clearly pass for educated but I'm also - either for neurodivergence or whatever - often not very socially graced in person and can come off as cold or awkward. Part of being a comfortable adult in society has meant learning to be comfortably awkward, and then it becomes someone else's problem, but it takes a certain amount of social privileged to cultivate that willingness to just be yourself. I've noticed it's one reason I get drawn to online discourse, I'm a lot better at writing than talking.
It's frustrating.
One example isn't well known. Cecil John Rhodes, aged 18, comes out from England at the start of the diamond fields rush around Kimberley. He is a vicar's son and his health is terrible, congenital cardiac disease. He isn't expected to live for more than a year or so and the miracle is that he would live to the age of 48. Rhodes makes some money on the diamond fields and returns to England to attend Oxford. He isn't interested in a degree. He joins secret societies, including the Freemasons, and debating or dining clubs (the Piers Gaveston, the Bullingdon). In these social circles he found allies and funders. In Kimberley's Masonic Temple, there is a magnificent stained glass window of Illuminati symbols donated by Rhodes in 1899. I doubt Rhodes believed the arcane ideas in these societies (he had no time for conspiracy theories) but the connections mattered. By the age of 27 he was Prime Minister of the Cape Colony and had a monopoly of the world diamond market in his De Beers company. He created the Rhodesias & Nyasaland and planned a Cape to Cairo railway. He also established his own secret society for British rule worldwide.
It all sounds very Victorian men's clubs, but Oxford hasn't changed that much. Here's Simon Upton reviewed in the Guardian on how a tiny group of Oxford 'chums' took over the Tories via the Oxford Debating Society and the hard-drinking Bullingdon. Another example for an earlier generation would have been the Bloomsbury friendships formed in the Apostles or at Eton.
Invisible influences to those who weren't part of the inner circles, friends and mentors and valued connections.
You wrote:
I have a grandson, age 10, who is on the Spectrum. I see him having to learn these same things. He is highly intelligent, but socially awkward. His peers are beginning to change rapidly as pre-teens. He will be a little slower likely, but he does have a therapist working with him.
But, in reality, I think most adults have to learn the same thing to some degree. It was certainly awkward for me to be around girls who were maturing faster than my male peers and me. Dances were embarrassing when I was 11, if you know what I mean.
I would even say throughout life, there will be those awkward moments: entering the job market, meeting your permanent mate, beginning a family, moving into mid life and even retirement.
The trick is to learn the skills necessary to meet those moments of transition.
Hang in there. You will do well.
@MaryLouise : And that's the intentional organizing, not just the passive power of being surrounded by a bunch of successful people. It's one thing I've come to realize about undergraduate in general, didn't get while I was there. The social networking is - for many - at least as important as the formal education.
What happens though when somebody with awkward social skills encounters those struggling with severe PTSD or survivors of trauma who also find groups threatening or uncomfortable ? In a church function or in the corporate workplace in urban South Africa, many of those present will have had long intergenerational histories of verbal abuse from white people, their parents may have worked as domestic cleaners in white households, they have been patronised or ignored by white employers or lecturers. So they come into a gathering feeling anxious or defensive. In many Nguni traditions it is a sign of respect to keep eyes lowered and to nod rather than speak until the traditional formalities and introductions have been gone through. Because of the prevalence of sexual violence, women and queer people may experience flirtatiousness as predatory and unwanted attention, inappropriate. In terms of, say, isiXhosa kinship, the most important people in the rooms are those with kinship seniority and they must be greeted first before speakers or those in charge of the function. For those from the white minority in South Africa, a key issue relates to whether or not they can speak vernacular languages or have at least made an effort to speak the languages used by most of those present. There are cultural taboos relating to avoidance speech around death, mourning and exile that need to be respected. And then there is shyness, cultural differences around touching or hugging, speaking loudly or softly, which name or title to use because many people have differing names depending on context. Layers and layers of discomfort and misreading.
The South African conceptual artist Willem Boschoff held an exhibition called Blind Alphabet some years ago. He made small sculptural objects intended to be held or played with and a number of small boxes holding other concealed objects. All the signage and captioning was in Braille and 'seeing' visitors would need blind guides to help them move through the exhibition. Only one sign was in English on the wall and read "No Touching". Because the blind people present could not see this sign, they ignored it and began touching and holding the objects designed for tactile knowing. They could read the captions and then explain to sighted visitors what the boxes held and what was the meaning. For many sighted visitors this was an uncomfortable immersion into the reality for people with sight disabilities for whom art galleries are unwelcoming places. It was uncomfortable and baffling to walk around that exhibition and find myself (partially sighted) dependent on a blind guide as expert, unlearning things we take for granted.
Slavery in the US was not merely a private crime perpetrated by slaveholders. It was the policy of the US government, which passed and enforced the Fugitive Slave Act, among other oppressive laws. Governments are undying, and the US government of 2023 is the same government that enforced slavery until 1865. It does not matter that all the individual officeholders from that era are dead.
If I were an inheritor of ill-gotten gains (and arguably by my position on Treaty lands, I am) that would certainly be the position I would want to take. Makes it all so much more convenient.