by Lisa Moore

2024

We do not often have opportunities to talk about what it is to parent as a Black or Brown person. Nobody reminded me, when I was preparing to parent as a Black woman, that I was about to revisit the “firsts” of oppression. The experience of parenting is bound up with the histories that have created us. Often, we just press forward, not quite prepared for revisiting all of those “firsts” that we experienced when we were children. And if, like me, you live a life that is full, the doing sometimes gets in the way of the reflecting as conscientiously as one would like on how one is doing it.

What I have found is that whether my child is attending a predominantly Black school or a predominantly white one, racism always comes up, along with other themes of oppression that persist in daily life. For many of us parents who are also BIPOC, we raise our children through a lens that recognizes the ways in which racism harms, and systemic forms of oppression harm. Many (though not all) of us who are adoptive parents recognize that our status as parents has emerged, in large part, because of the ways systemic, intersectional, and interpersonal forms of oppression have harmed the first parents of the children we raise. This adds another layer onto the context in which we are parenting and the ways our children understand how oppression operates and what it can do.

We enter into our roles as adoptive parents with a blend of pragmatism and fantasy. In our process of preparing to become parents, some of us confront insecurities about being a good enough parent.  How we initially engage with parenting may not be adoptee-centered, but rather drawn from the parenting we know. Those formative experiences shape how we parent. How one chooses to parent is so deeply connected to how you were parented (or not) and how you, as a person, transform those experiences into something that is your own. You strive to parent in the context of the moment and most importantly in response to the needs of the child who you love.

As a Black parent, daughter, and social worker, I hold a complicated relationship to the term “intergenerational trauma.” I will use the term liberally here, but I want to contextualize how I think about it, so you understand I am not using it without deep thought and intention. I both appreciate that it has created a language for describing what trauma has done “to” people, and its transmission across generations, and that it has offered a space to address the fact that intergenerational trauma is both explicit and implicit.

When I speak of the transmission of trauma, I am drawing on the idea that certain behavioral expectations, as well as family roles (mother, father, children) have been shaped in response to traumatic experiences. For example, many Black people have stories of family members experiencing harm because of the color of their skin, so they may make a point to avoid close relationships with people of those particular groups who may have done harm to them, or be suspicious of people who say they want to help them.  The ongoing transmission of trauma is often oppression-based, or there is an element of oppression baked into the traumatic experience itself. Whether it is race, sex, gender, age, disability or other statuses, the transmission of trauma is facilitated by the persistence of harms that are systemic and institutionalized, passed and deployed by individuals across generations. When I speak about intergenerational trauma, I am reflecting on the passing down of responses to trauma, often framed by family stories of harm, sacrifice, or upheaval.

What I find complicated when talking about intergenerational trauma, and working with it therapeutically, is that in its popularization I have seen in my profession (social work/social work education) misinterpretations of its meaning that come dangerously close to blaming the victim. These lead to becoming overly transfixed on the ways people “overcome it.” These narratives around “overcoming adversity” and “resilience” are not meaningless, yet when we bring them into our parenting we are challenged to contend with how we understand what intergenerational trauma is and the ways it emerges in our actions and responses to our children.

I have observed that many conversations about intergenerational trauma become rooted in how much a family passes on that which is “bad” or “hard,” versus describing the manifestations of intergenerational responses to the violence of systemic oppression. The phrase “intergenerational trauma” does not capture this nuance: Those responses are expressions of how people cope and survive. The corollary to the increasingly popular expectation that we are to understand ourselves as being adversely impacted by intergenerational trauma is that we are to understand also how to heal ourselves. Yet how does one “heal thyself” when the oppressive systems that have necessitated strategies for survival are still intact? When is personal healing the appropriate response, and when is it systemic change?

For example, consider setting aside time for self-care. If taking this time out is an important result of understanding what we need to be functional, is that healing, or survival? The stories we create about our legacies of trauma and our approaches for survival contribute towards our efforts at healing, but I think it is critical that we stay focused on the idea that intergenerational trauma is not about Black and Brown people consciously passing down harm, rather it’s about passing down mechanisms for survival that may reflect differential access to resources for coping with the trauma itself. What I think many of us seek is the opportunity to be liberated from being required to engage in survival strategies in spaces where we send our children to learn, where we go to work, and when we walk down the street. We seek liberation from the strategies necessary for survival in the midst of our mundane experiences of living.

As adoptive parents, we bring children into a new family constellation in addition to the one they were born into, and we are charged with sharing with them the story of their existence and how they came to live with us. As we strive to understand how to parent in a way that centers the reality that our children have multiple sets of parental figures in their life, the initial story we tell them about their existence in the world may be bound with histories that are unknown to us or, if they are known, may be deeply challenging. Our strategies for supporting their survival and their needs are bound by the legacies that have shaped the family storytelling of our own existence.

For example, I am the oldest of three, raised by parents who were raised in the Jim Crow South. My father’s family were sharecroppers on a North Carolina tobacco farm, and my mother’s family is part Gullah, with an extensive legacy of educators and preachers, as well as people who profited from running the numbers and selling alcohol during Prohibition. For my parents, the intergenerational trauma of Southern racism, slavery, and race-based homicide characterized the way they grew up. So you can imagine that raising children in the suburbs of Washington, DC, as well as in the District itself in the 70’s and 80’s, was a culture shock for them. Despite the Blackness of DC then, my parents sent me and my siblings to predominately white schools, seeking access to resources that would meet our learning needs. All aspects of their lives were immersed in Blackness, and that was not the choice they made for their children. I would describe our upbringing as very Black and Southern at home and on the weekends with family friends, but school was very white and quite global/cosmopolitan during the week. What both my parents held in common through the challenges of their marriage was a commitment to raising us “right.”

The experiences they had growing up in spaces that were deeply segregated and racist meant that for them, parenting was deeply fixed on ensuring we children presented well and would not bring attention to ourselves. One of the ways they did this—and as a parent I also did this—was insisting on impeccable, perfect manners. In my family, manners were one of the first of many survival strategies they gave us to get by and get through predominately white settings. It is pretty natural to want one’s children to act respectful towards others, but for my family, with the manners came an explanation of what it meant societally, racially, and in terms of class to behave in particular ways. This survival strategy was born out of a response to the intergenerational trauma of my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents in the Jim Crow South.  Raising kids with good manners translated well in predominantly Black spaces too; our manners demonstrated that we were being raised right.

One way in which my parents’ upbringing in the 50’s and 60’s shaped them was to respond to white people by working twice as hard and striving for excellence. Both were raised with an intense dose of what we now refer to as respectability politics, which at that time was how they understood how to survive. There were not many choices in their world for navigating the Jim Crow South without threats to their lives. My father’s brother was killed by white supremacists. For my mother, manners were about likeability in predominately Black spaces. Her family was poor, so demonstrating good home training was very important to her, and good manners equated to not being harmed. It seems so benign, but they are such a core survival strategy of many families of color.

I now have a better understanding of how my parents responded when we came home from school with stories about racism we were experiencing. There were moments where they didn’t hide their anger with the people who did us harm. There were other times where they told us to move on, ignore it, even though to us it may have been a big deal. There were other moments where their self-awareness kicked in and they chose a response that addressed the need of the child in front of them. I don’t characterize the response a parent of color may have as bad, because that would be diminishing the deep care for the child that is at the core of the response itself.

Each week my parents gathered with old friends from the HBCU they attended.  All of us children would overhear them swapping stories of how they were dealing with white teachers, principals, or parents. While I couldn’t catch all the details, what I knew was that their shared experience of what it meant to be Black, Christian, and Southern was a site of joy for them. They would laugh about how they imagine their parents would respond to the things that happened to us kids, and congratulate themselves for not doing more than maybe losing some words in front a white teacher or parent.

To be a Black parent, to be a parent of color any place, is to have to understand the ways in which the trauma of the past informs the way you have survived, but also the ways in which you have learned how to live. As adoptive parents, we are connected with children whose narratives of intergenerational trauma are tied to the very traumatic moments of their separation and placement. The narrative of my child’s placement speaks to the realities of the systemic conditions that led inexorably to adoption. My child and I speak openly about the criminal legal system and the injustices of the prion industrial complex, we speak to the surveillance of families through the child welfare system, and the realities of poverty in the United States and the ways that tender hearts sometimes numb themselves to the pain of the oppressive violence through addictive substances. We speak to the profound effort, care, and love of people who centered my child’s well-being in a way that prioritized his survival and opportunity. These are narratives of the family I grew up in, as well as those of my child’s birth parents. All of these narratives are those of the children I parent.

So, when we discuss intergenerational trauma, we are also holding the sometimes-dark humor of the ways we get through institutions that have harmed us and will likely harm our children. When we gather with friends and family, we pass down our experiences with oppression and the ways that we have been shaped by the experiences. We go beyond describing actions that caused harm, we speak to what got us through. There is a face on this notion of intergenerational trauma, because it is familiar, it is shared, it is something we have in common and are working to unravel, individually and in community.

Our experience of knowing what it is to feel free and to feel joy is what keeps us going. In the same story where we speak of harm, we speak of escapes, and in that in-between space of sheer terror, there is laughter at one’s ability to survive. There is an understanding that anger and sadness co-exists with joy and peace.  So while intergenerational trauma shows up in the way we parent, we also need to be committed to demonstrating the ways we hold and transmit joy. Though intergenerational trauma is not always conscious, it is always present in our parenting and in the interactions with those who have either directly or indirectly parented us.

One of the most absolutely powerful and profound experiences one has is parenting a child. The reality of parenting is that we are never quite sure if we are doing it well enough, until we see the ways our children handle certain moments or challenges, or the ways in which they embrace joy and life itself.

Lisa L. Moore, LICSW, PhD, is mom to two beautiful sons. She is a Senior Lecturer and Director of the MA Program in Social Work and Social Welfare at the University of Chicago.