@ jsonitsac
Have to concur with you there mate. It affects different people within a culture, but there is no doubt in my mind that a culture as well as individual people can be traumatized.
From a non American perspective it's pretty obvious to anyone who has worked out in the Outback in Australia with the Aboriginal people as I have.
Australia is a very stable, very wealthy first world country - but you wouldn't know it visiting some of the shanty towns out in the desert - the conditions out there are literally third world - in the community I was working in male unemployment was around 90%.
There were huge problems with alcoholism, preventable diseases, domestic violence and gang violence. Many of the houses are burned or in severe states of disrepair, the place is full of litter and burned out cars and some folks don't have homes to go to.
For decades the people out there have had no access to proper medical services, secondary and tertiary education or readily available sources of employment.
But the problems really started with white settlement, whole tribes were killed off by leaving poisoned food for people to find, farmers routinely went on "abo hunts" while the police looked the other way and engaged in what can only be called ethnic cleansing.
After things settled down marginally in the early decades of the twentieth century Christian missionaries with the full and active oversight and protection of the state removed any "half caste" children with any white parentage and placed them in missions where many of them suffered from emotional, sexual and physical abuse.
This continued until the late 1960's and only stopped when Aboriginal people were granted the vote around the same time.
In all the time I spent out there the people were thoroughly decent and kind to me, but problems in the community with sexual abuse, domestic violence and family breakdown were all too evident.
That's not to say that all aboriginal people live like this, plenty of aboriginal people have jobs, an education and get on with their lives. But in the outback towns and the inner cities, unemployment, early incarceration and domestic violence are still the norm unfortunately.
There are plenty of people in my country who scorn aboriginal people, who say they don't get jobs because they are lazy or claim that they are predisposed towards crime.
My answer is that these people have come through a long and bloody war that we inflicted on them, how can you get jobs when the government won't fund secondary schools for remote communities, how can anyone be surprised if someone is predisposed towards crime when they are forcibly removed from their parents and then traumatized by malevolent missionaries?
America has also had it's people whose cultures have been traumatized, I don't think anyone would claim that native Americans or African Americans got an easy deal in your countries history.
I don't excuse any persons bad behavior, black or white. A prick is a prick in my book regardless of how much melanin they have or lack. But past history affects present realities and people need to acknowledge that. Guess this is why I sometimes give TRAC a hard time.
Scuse' the rant folks, this issues pretty close to my heart.