If we all agree that a people can experience trauma on a large scale and that trauma can then pass onto the descendants, then the reverse must also be true – a people who have inflicted trauma on a large scale pass that experience onto the descendants.
People who are descended from people from slave-owning and imperialist nations carry with them the scars of slave ownership, genocide, oppression. It shows in the way they act, speak, think. Their worldview is informed by their history as masters of “lesser people”.
I got prompted to it by trying to reconcile a contradiction that I experienced. As an immigrant in Western/Northern Europe I think to myself “How can these people be polite to me, yet not see me as a human being equal to them?”
The conclusion I came up with is that because of laws and societal pressure, in public they will go through the motions, they’ll do what is expected and required. But as soon as you leave that space of expectations even by a tiny bit, then it is full mask off. And they don’t care, because in their “rule-based order” as long as you follow the rules, you can do whatever you want once those rules don’t apply.
So as someone who is ND, this has been bothering me a lot. I am not surprised when I meet duplicity and hypocrisy in an individual person, but that it exists on a national level, that is surprising to me.