In the past couple of weeks I’ve had multiple friends on social media share their belief that violent protests are never appropriate. I’ve done my best to listen and engage, but I’m not entirely convinced. I can think of multiple scenarios where my friends would either condone a violent uprising, or at least understand what’s driving the violence. The first two scenarious that come to mind are the lawless protests that lead to the American revolution, or a poor guy destroying an ancient Jewish market place armed with a scratch-made flogging device.

What I hear my friends saying isn’t “violent protests are always wrong,” what’s underneath their sentiment is the idea that whatever the Black community is protesting, it doesn’t merit physical violence, arson, destruction of property, etc. Anything other than peaceful assembly is lawless behavior, in this particular instance.

As a white Christian who suffers from PTSD, I prefer that these demonstrations be as peaceful as possible. Like everyone else, I’m struck by the power of Dr. King’s methods and the mountain of change that was brought to America at the hands of the most marginalized people group of that day. I grieve when I read news and watch video footage of stores being looted, fires, beatings, and how this kind of violence affects the bigger message that so many more from the Black community are trying to get us to hear.

To my Facebook friends who are disappointed in my failure to condemn the violence on my feed, let me explain why I haven’t, and why it grieves me to find no mention of George Floyd’s death, only a condemnation of the violence, on yours.

Generational Trauma

Using 1700 as a “beginning” point for slavery in the US, and the Emancipation Proclamation as its end, we have 150 years or so of extreme physical and emotional abuse of an entire people group. “PTSD” doesn’t begin to describe what Blacks from that era brought into the 1900’s.

And beyond.

For the past 10 years or so, the psychiatric world and the genetics community have been talking about the relationship between trauma and epigenetics, i.e., the idea that trauma can be passed down to multiple generations. We know that’s true on a purely psychological level – traumatized adults are more likely to struggle with abusive behavior, creating traumatized children who’ll grow up to be traumatized adults, etc., etc. But the epigenetics evidence argues that the problem can be inherited regardless of the emotional/physical relationship between parent and child. It’s a relatively young field of study, and it’s not without its critics, but when I consider the generational trauma evident in my own family, I don’t have a hard time embracing what a growing number of researchers are inviting us to consider.

“Our review found an accumulating amount of evidence of an enduring effect of trauma exposure to be passed to offspring transgenerationally via the epigenetic inheritance mechanism of DNA methylation alterations and has the capacity to change the expression of genes and the metabolome.”

In so many ways, abuse travels much farther than the abused, so when an entire generation is systematically mistreated, as in our chattel slavery years, that pain can and does travel well into today.

Rest assured that whites were traumatized as well. The only way a human can reconcile itself to the horrors of slavery is to downgrade its victims. In our attempts to cope, we forced ourselves into the belief that there was something wrong with these people, that they were less than human and somehow benefited from this arrangement. If we struggled with racism before slavery, we wove it deep into our fabric in these 100 years.

That trauma, I’m convinced, is also alive today.

After a couple of failed attempts at “post slavery” restoration and reconciliation (think “10 Acres and a Mule”), we transitioned into a chapter of American life commonly referred to as Jim Crow. Many argue that this era wasn’t much better than slavery, filled with intimidation, lynchings, unjust legislation aimed at keeping as many blacks behind bars as possible, etc.. You can’t expect much from white lawmakers spawned from a generation of people who rationalized the horrors of slavery.

So, to the generational trauma from America’s first 100 years, add the pain that was piled on afterwards.

By the time we get to the Civil Rights era, Blacks in America were dealing with a mountain of unresolved pain, something whites could never relate to. In light of that, the peacful protests of Dr. King and his friends were beyond heroic.

Unfortunately, in the 10 years that transpired between Eisenhower’s Civil Rights Act and the legislation passed by President Johnson, we added to the trauma bill more abuse, imprisonment, lynchings, intimidation, dogs, fire hoses, segregation, etc.

In the years between Dr. King’s assasination and today, we added more.

Systemic Racism

Liberals in America love talking about systemic racism; the idea that there are economic, cultural, and political systems rigged in favor of whites at the expense of non-whites. Some have compared this problem to Jim Crow, claiming that America hasn’t travelled far beyond the arrangement that few in America would call a good thing.

If you lean towards the conservative side of this argument, dismissing it as a mindless, liberal, anti-America sentiment, I think it’s appropriate to at least be aware of the following facts, and to be able to articulate them to the point of defense, though you might not land on my planet.

First, black unemployment is twice that of white unemployment. With few exceptions, it’s been that way since the dawn of unemployment statistic tracking. Regardless of the fact that blacks in America are more educated, resourced, empowered and motivated than ever before, they’re still twice as unemployable as whites, still the first to be fired in an economic downturn, the last to be hired when things are good.

That’s a system.

Second, again, regardless of the mountain of changes we’ve made since the Civil Rights Movement, blacks earn 2x less than whites and again, it’s been that way for a long time.

What these systems communicate is that, no matter what you do, no matter how hard you work, there’s a cieling, a limit to your potential that will always be 2x lower than whites.

Third, according to the past twenty years of arrest and incarceration statistics provided by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, we’ve imprisoned blacks at a rate approximating 5x more than whites for the same crimes.  I wrote about it here if you want to look a bit deeper, and/or, do an online search for “mass incarceration,” and read both sides of the argument. There’s much to consider.

This is a systemic thing too, but, in addition to the often negative effects of incarceration, this one ensures that a significant number of the Black community will be labeled “felon” when they’re relased, living with restrictions on voting, housing, and unemployment that remind too many scholars, activists and Sunday morning bloggers of Jim Crow.

Unfortunately, the only people who’ll see this are a) the people on the business end of it and/or b) people willing to risk the time and emotional pain required to check the data.

You don’t have to call it “systemic racism” if you don’t want to. I know how it sounds like a political agenda, and rest assured that there are politicians who’ll try to weaponize it for their own personal gain. But it’s a thing, and one of the reasons why our black brothers and sisters are begging us to listen.

Add to all of this the problem of generational trauma, then throw in George Floyd and all the other pictures and footage we now have, and you get a level of injustice that nobody should tolerate, especially the people who have the power to change it. But the change that’s needed isn’t going to happen anytime soon. We might find a way to bring a relatively meagre level of law enforcement reform, but the other mountains won’t be easily moved.

So to the trauma, the systems, and the day-to-day micro/macro agressions that so frequently attend black America, add a significant level of distrust, and for many, a thin hope at best.

When I see fires, broken windows, folks resisting arrest, etc., I see pain, generations of it. I see unfair treatment and inequitable systems symptomatic of deep sociological problems that will require painful effort and sacrifice from whites in America. The way forward lies nowhere in the arena of judgment and condemnation, but in compassion, self examination, humility, and a conversation about racism in America that requires an unprecedented openness to black authority.

As a white, southern born-and-bred Evangelical, myself and others like me will have some difficulty with that last sentence. The act of giving a black person authority, in any arena, won’t come easy. There’s a part of our soul that wants the easy way out, to spin these cries for injustice into something that’s easier to dismiss, and much less costly for us.

But when my racist inclinations collide with the truths discussed above, as well as multiple face-to-face conversations and encounters with people on the business end of all of this, I realize that I’m one of the victims too – a sucker who swallowed the wrong story, now trying my best to swim against the powerful current of racism at the personal level.

In all of this, I’m much less inclined these days to pass judgment on people who are dealing with pain and systematic realities that I could never relate to.