Epigenetics & Racial Violence
If you know anything about me, you know that human behavior is something I am genuinely passionate about – and not only passionate about, but compelled to hold like a diamond glistening in my hand, constantly turning it over, and dissecting it. Living outside the norm runs in my veins. The real intersection that captivates me is why a person would buy into the majority norm, especially when it actively hurts them or yields no benefit. When I say passionate, I mean I can go down a rabbit hole for hhhoooouuurrrs.
So let me take you down one I have been sitting with for about seven months.
*Turns to camera one*
For those of you brought up in the Black church, I am fairly certain you received the sermon: If Spirit gives you something and you don’t act on it, Spirit will give it to someone else. I don’t know if that is actually true — or if the algorithm on my phone simply started feeding me content on this subject — but either way, I was glad to see this particular topic moving to the forefront.
I was on TikTok doing my nightly doom scroll, getting a world POV because I know we look like fools out here and I inadvertently landed on a piece of history. On April 13, 1937, Roosevelt Townes and Robert “Bootjack” McDaniels — two Black men accused of murdering a white storekeeper in Duck Hill, Mississippi — were kidnapped from a courthouse mid-trial, chained to trees in the woods, and tortured with a blowtorch in front of a crowd of hundreds, women and children amongst the attendees. McDaniels was fatally shot in the head and Townes was burned alive. The New York Times ran the headline the next day: “Lynchers Torture, Burn Two Negroes.”
*Turns to camera two* And who is cited in the New York Times? Moí. Clearly I am in good company. 😜
By 1937, Mississippi was leading the nation in lynchings, despite local and federal officials lying about the numbers. What makes this particular event significant is that it was the first time *images *of a lynching were published in the national press – thank you, Time and Life magazines. And let me tell you what was happening across the big pond: German newspapers picked up those same photographs and used them as propaganda, stating that Nazi Germany, with its Nuremberg racial laws, was more humane in its treatment of people. The Nazis looked at what America was doing to Black people and said: see, we are the civilized ones and used the photographs as evidence.
We are seeing firsthand how our current government skews information. How since American investors got their hands on TikTok, censorship is truly apparent. Minneapolis still needs help. Flint still doesn’t have clean water. Global warming is affecting our soil. Epstein files are not being taken seriously. Legal citizens are being kidnapped and murdered. And when was the last time you seen any coverage of these topics? Huh? When?
I see the posts questioning why the majority don’t see. How can they not be empathic? How would it feel if they were treated as such? Don’t they understand they are not exempt? And let me offer you another angle to these questions.
We are well aware — well, some of us — of what slavery and its aftermath did to African American people epigenetically. The broken family structures. The intra-racial division. The innate distrust and hypervigilance around white spaces and white authority. The physiological stress responses that live in the body before a child even has language for what they are carrying. We know this. The research is there. The lived experience is there. And the evidence is not abstract — it is in the historical record. George Washington’s dentures were reportedly made from the teeth of enslaved people. Black people’s skin was used to upholster furniture — to literally make leather for chairs that families sat on for generations. Enslaved men were raped in public as a demonstration of dominance. There were documented cookbooks containing instructions for cooking and eating Black infants. Black people’s heads were used in kicking games — bodies buried to the neck, the “game” being who could kick the head from the body first. Black women were forced to stand naked on auction blocks while their bodies were assessed, sold, and violated. We know what this did to Black people.
I live it every single day.
I think I was in year one or two after my mother’s transition when I was gifted a reading by one of my psychic mentors. This particular reader specialized in birth charts woven together with intuitive hits — and she also happened to be a social worker. Perfect fit for me, right? I cannot recall the specific topic we were addressing, but something in our session prompted her to share a research study she had recently come across. It was about fear, mice, and lavender. The researchers had mice sniff lavender and then shocked them. Yes — I know. I know. It only took an average of three shocks for the mouse to associate lavender with pain. The brain’s capacity to associate stimuli with pain, control, and threat response is well documented. Don’t believe me? Google: Pavlovian conditioning. For three generations, the offspring were afraid of lavender. THREE GENERATIONS. Not one of those offspring was ever shocked. Not one of them had a single direct experience with pain connected to lavender. Lavender equaled fear, and that information was passed down through the body, through memory, through genes. One could say their genetics had been altered.
(Note: My mentor described the scent as lavender — the actual study used acetophenone, a chemical described as smelling like cherries and almonds. The science, however, remains the same.)
Dias, B.G. & Ressler, K.J. (2013). Parental olfactory experience influences behavior and neural structure in subsequent generations. Nature Neuroscience, 17, 89–96.
If you ever want to do generational spiritual cleansing, I thoroughly recommend a practitioner who specializes in Psych-K.
So, if we know the effects of slavery. If we know the effects of those mice.
What happened — epigenetically — to the children who watched Black bodies burn?
No. Really. What happened to them?
We cannot talk about the oppressed without talking about the oppressor. What happened – epigenetically? I am not even talking about those reared within this rhetoric – I am talking about those who sat on human skin at the dinner table. Every single day.
I will hold your hand while I say this appealing to their humanity ain’t going to cut it. To make them feel what is happening, to help them see what this current political moment is doing to marginalized communities, 13.8% success rate. I understand the impulse, I really do! But I keep coming back to this question: What if empathy is not the obstacle? What if the cellular memory of participating in – and witnessing, and normalizing, and benefiting from – this level of violence has actually changed something in the body, in their mind? What if white supremacist worldview is not just a choice, a bias, or a failure of education – but a genetic inheritance, passed down the same way fear of lavender was passed to mice who were never once shocked?
I have been cautious about publishing this piece for one specific reason: I already know someone will read it and say, “See — my racism is in my DNA. I can’t help it.” I want to be precise here.
Epigenetic transmission does not absolve. It does not excuse.
What it does is raise a necessary and deeply underexplored question about the nature of inherited worldview — and what it means to be the descendant of people who did not merely witness dehumanization, but participated in it. Repeatedly. Across generations.
Have you ever heard the phrase, Know your audience? Know. Your. Audience. And this is especially for my spiritual folks who have been PrAYInG and FaSTinG and doing all the things — baby, know your audience. You are trying to appeal to morality. To financial self-interest. To basic human decency. And I hear you. But what if the problem is not a failure of will or awareness or conscience? What if the problem is in the D.N.A?
Before we can have an honest conversation about empathy, about policy, about what it will take for people to see — we may need to ask a harder question first. Not why won’t they feel it, but what if feeling it is not as simple as choosing to? What if the work is not just political or educational, but biological? Generational? I don’t have a clean answer. But I think that question — sitting with it, refusing to let it go — is exactly where we need to be right now.
Because if we keep asking for empathy from people whose cells may have been shaped by centuries of torture and dominance — what, exactly, are we asking them to feel their way back from?
Nikenya Hall, MHR (she/her) is the Founder & CEO of Achieving Balance Counseling & Holistic Center, LLC, a published author, and a psychic medium. Her work sits at the intersection of behavioral health, spirituality, and the human experience.
