(This is the first part of a two-part post. For part 2, click here.)
Call this a preliminary report, sketching out lines of research I want to pursue.
On the evening of November 1, I had the privilege and pleasure of meeting with a wonderful class of graduate students taught by my colleague, Professor Yaakov Ariel of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The course was on “Religion and Race,” specifically in America, and I was there to talk about UFOs.
More exactly, about my views on the role of the African slave experience in shaping the myth of alien abduction as we’ve come to know it in the late twentieth century, and on my belief about the existence of a specifically African-American UFO tradition, running parallel to the white American tradition but differing from it in important ways. I’ve blogged several times on these themes: click here and here for the first, here and here for the second. And in chapter 3 of Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO I developed the connection between African slavery and the seminal abduction event, that of Betty (white) and Barney Hill (Black) in the early 1960s.
I’d regarded this, actually, as the most controversial and speculative part of my entire book. Was it really plausible that memories of the ancestral trauma of being abducted, forced onto alien ships and carried away to a distant and unforgiving land, should resurface 200 years later in thin disguise–as I supposed? I was a little surprised when reviewers (like Steven Gimbel for the Washington Post) singled my conjecture out for sympathetic attention.
Yaakov and his students also seemed to find it plausible. One of them, Steven Kolins, called my attention to the work of a scholar whose research, of which I’d been unaware, seemed to dovetail with mine.
Her name is Dr. Joy DeGruy, and her book (published originally in 2005, issued in revised form in 2017) is Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing. On her website, she says this about the theory she advances in it:
“P.T.S.S. is a theory that explains the etiology of many of the adaptive survival behaviors in African American communities throughout the United States and the Diaspora. It is a condition that exists as a consequence of multigenerational oppression of Africans and their descendants resulting from centuries of chattel slavery. A form of slavery which was predicated on the belief that African Americans were inherently/genetically inferior to whites. This was then followed by institutionalized racism which continues to perpetuate injury.”
“We know that people do not have to directly experience an event to be traumatized by it,” DeGruy told an interviewer for Essence magazine, “and research has shown that severe trauma can affect multiple generations. For example, some children and grandchildren of World War II European holocaust survivors have also suffered trauma related to those events even though they were born years after the war ended.” (I also used a comparison with the inherited trauma of the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors to support my conjecture about Barney Hill.)
“We have been hurt,” DeGruy added, “not just by the obvious physical assaults, but in deep psychological ways that are connected to centuries of abuse.”
In a brief, powerful video on her home page, DeGruy tells how “I started to see that there were clear connections between that survival behavior [of slavery’s victims] and contemporary living in African-American experience.” She gives the example of how a Black mother, when she hears her child praised–particularly by a white person–will respond by putting the child down. This is behavior, once adaptive but now destructive, shaped generations ago when an overseer’s praise of a slave child might lead to that child’s being taken away from his mother and sold.
I can already hear the criticisms: “Anecdotal!” “Conjectural!” (According to the Wikipedia entry on DeGruy, her work has often been hailed as groundbreaking, but also assailed on various grounds from both right and left.) And I imagine that a reply might lean upon the cumulative effect of her examples of the phenomenon. A single one, like that of the mother’s disparagement, might be dismissed as her imagining a “clear connection” where there’s only a resemblance, possibly coincidental, generalized from DeGruy’s personal experience. But multiply the parallels of past and present, and it becomes harder and harder to deny a real causal link.
As an epigraph to her book From Ritual to Romance (which served as an inspiration for T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”), Jessie Weston quotes the classical scholar F. M. Cornford: “The true test of an hypothesis, if it cannot be shewn to conflict with known truths, is the number of facts that it correlates, and explains.” My hunch is that DeGruy’s “Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome” would rate high on the Cornford scale.
I’ve ordered DeGruy’s book; soon I’ll see for myself.
And I’ll find, perhaps, the answer to the question that’s of most direct concern to me: how far out on the limb would she be willing to go? Would she be prepared to say that actual memories of enslavement might be preserved, in some poorly understood communal unconscious–not the species-wide “collective unconscious” hypothesized by the Jungians, but something that’s special to a nation or ethnic group or religious community? To resurface 200 years later in space-age guise?
And in that mode to spread to and haunt the psyches of the enslavers? For nearly all UFO abductees, after Barney Hill, have been white.
Call it synchronicity, if you will. Just this past week the mail brings me the latest issue of the International Journal of Jungian Studies, with an article directly bearing on the issue I’ve just raised. In a vast historic crime like slavery, can there be interacting “communal unconsciousnesses” of perpetrators and victims, who are in a sense partners in the crime, both traumatized by it?
The article is titled “The Jewish Complex, Whose Complex Is It? A Relational Perspective.” Its author, Barbara Cerminara, is an Italian Jewish scholar whose grandfather died in Auschwitz. In part 2 of this post I’ll talk about Cerminara’s work, and try to bring it into dialogue with DeJoy’s. And with the UFO.
by David J. Halperin
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My book Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO–published by Stanford University Press, chosen as a finalist for the 2021 RNA Nonfiction Book Award for Religion Reporting Excellence, sponsored by the Religion News Association.
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I really look forward to what you will say next! I have long thought that there is a tantalising relationship between the abductee being “chosen” and divine election, the election of Israel etc. Yet the process of abduction is mechanical, absurd, and confusing, more in the spectrum of trauma as per the abductions of slavery as you say here. I am wondering if you will square this circle? My only thought so far is of the Christian rapture. For the chosen, it is in Greek, I believe, the harpage or abduction/rape. A possible synthesis. With alien abduction looking like a scientific counterpart or anti-type to Christian election. So the other trauma at work might be the disenchantment of the world, the collective loss of magic? Anyway, your thoughts this time run parallel enough to mine to allow me to risk saying and asking something! So thank you, and now – I shall keep quiet!
Thanks so much for posting, Tom! I don’t think I can square the circle, but only trace out a few points along its circumference.
Interesting you should mention “harpage.” Harpezein is the Greek verb Paul uses for his experience of being “caught up” into the third heaven, in 2 Corinthians 12. I discuss the passage in Intimate Alien, in conjunction with the abduction experience. Your suggestion that the experience might be seen as an “anti-type to Christian election” is intriguing.
The big problem with PTSS is explaining how it transmits from generation to generation unless it is just cultural transmission, but, in that case, the claims for it wouldn’t seem extraordinary. I suppose there might be some kind of epigenetic influence. How many of the adaptive behaviors would vanish in a society without the ongoing and present racism of our own? Perhaps the behaviors are not so much vestiges of the past but more a requirement of the present.
Thanks for your comment, Jim. From her website–I am awaiting the arrival of her book–it seems that DeGruy fully acknowledges the role played by contemporary racism in shaping the behaviors she describes, but balances this against her theory of the ancestral trauma as having initially shaped them. How successfully she achieves the balance, I’ll need to see when I read the book.
I think “cultural transmission” blurs the distinction between consciously transmitted historical tradition, and a transmission that is unconscious and more powerful. This has been explored in connection with the descendants of Holocaust survivors: Israeli therapist Dina Wardi has said that “the second generation absorbs the unvocalized deep memory from the parent. The real stuff is never transmitted through words … some of the survivors’ children’s nightmares are the result of absorbing the parents’ deep memory.” Will this be true of the ninth or tenth generation of the enslaved? Again–I’ll need to wait for the book.
David, your idea really resonates with me. Between 2004 and 2008 I was deeply involved with Bert Hellinger’s Family Constellation Therapy, which is all about channeling unseen and unacknowledged ancestors who are causing entanglements & difficulties with their survivors. I volunteered as a representative for the client or people in his/her immediate circle of relationships. The ritual was uncanny, as every time, within 30 seconds of the start, I would feel impelled to move in a certain way and in counterpoint to other reps in the same constellation, eventually leading in a kind of sacred ritualistic drama to a climax and a tableau of family resolution of the entanglements.
Bert himself was a former Catholic priest who went to Africa as a missionary for the Zulu and there he picked up the shamanism that he later formulated into his own therapy.
Now with the advances in Behavioral Genetics, we are beginning to see science itself recognize these phenomena, in parallel with the recognition of UFO/ET.
Exciting, Tom! Thank you so much for posting!