I first heard about historical trauma from my supervisor at my last nonprofit back in California.

Let’s call her Lara. She was a White Jewish woman from an affluent family. Her dad was a doctor and she grew up in Los Gatos, California. She had beautiful blue eyes, long curly hair and liked hip hop - she mentioned that a lot.

To Lara, the atrocities of the Holocaust affected both of her grandmothers who lived and survived concentration camps and subsequently generations in her family. Lara said she used to get anxious and triggered whenever World War II or Germany or Nazis were mentioned in her classes, in history books, or in the media. She would feel an overwhelming grief whenever the subject was mentioned because it made her think about her family members suffering through Nazi Germany. She called it historical trauma.

To be completely honest, I wasn’t sure I believed it. I wasn’t sure I believed her. How could trauma from someone’s else’s life, of which you have no direct experience, end up affecting your emotional makeup and psyche? How could you take ownership of that injustice yourself?

Lara majored in Nonprofit Management in her undergraduate studies and knew at an early age she wanted to help people; she arrested a lot of that urge to make an impact from the strength of her grandmothers. She wasn’t much older than me, only a few years or so but because it was a small nonprofit with a staff of four, she became my Program Manager. To be fair, she majored in the field and had experience through Americorps down near Compton and the south side of Los Angeles.

Friends for Youth was a children’s nonprofit that offered mentoring services, both 1-to-1 (which I ran for a year and a half) and school-based group mentoring. We worked with marginalized communities that were low-income and predominantly Latinx - many struggling with basic survival necessities and mental health issues.

Lara was a very particular manager. She wanted things a certain way and had a difficult time stepping back and refraining from micromanaging. She was anxious and wanted to have a hand in every part of the organization, even things that others were responsible for. Oftentimes, her leadership felt overbearing and from a framework of dominant culture. Her way or no way. Her successes alone, or our failures collectively.

I really struggled under her management.

Lara had an affinity for Latinx culture and according to her, it was because she studied abroad in Chile and has dated multiple Latino men. But from my perspective, she was so focused on Latinx culture, that global cultural understanding and diversity fell by the wayside. There were multiple times she has insinuated that Asians didn’t need help, because as a group they stood on equal ground with Whites. That Asian kids didn’t really need mentors and there was a reason that our board members and our mentor population was predominantly White and Asian. That I also wouldn’t understand our kids’ issues because she assumed my narrative was that of an upper middle class Asian American.

It was this same mentality that pushed kids away from her and caused a disconnect with other staff members and partners that worked with her. Her interest in our marginalized populations felt fetishist and our relationship became strained because I felt as if my work and my life’s challenges weren’t validated.

It was this same mentality that made me skeptical of her historical trauma from the Holocaust.

It was hard for me to believe that a White-passing, rich Jewish girl from an upper class neighborhood in California had ever experienced any pain, any obstacles in her life. Her parents were high school sweethearts. Her dad, a doctor. Her sisters, making well over average salaries. Her having to never have to worry about a future or food on the table. It was very hard for me to believe someone as basic as “Lara” could understand what it possibly meant to be a person of color and to go through this world with chains on your wrists and balls to your ankles before you can even walk. To be told that there are ceilings for us - places we cannot go and heights we will never reach simply because of the color of our skin.

How could Lara understand? How dare she say, she is also a victim of the Holocaust and “historical trauma”.

But that was a projection on my part. Lara made me feel as if my experiences and my challenges through life were invalid. That I was part of the problem. That I probably lived a life as if I were White. Maybe a life quite like hers.

I was hurt and I was angry. I didn’t want to understand her. I didn’t want to see that maybe her own challenges existed, that it wasn’t about comparison anyways. It wasn’t the Oppression Olympics.

But I was wrong.

Historical Trauma is very real. It’s been proven that trauma can actually change the way that genes are expressed. That anxiety and stress do in fact permeate through generations. Genes are literally changed in the way that they are expressed - chemical modifications in genetic make-up activates and silences parts of genes that then get passed through reproduction and replication.

Lara had really bad anxiety and extreme empathy for others despite not understanding their narratives through personal experience. These may very well have resulted from her grandmothers’ constant stress and fear living in concentration camps during WWII. That their pain and suffering manifested itself genetically and passed on in their DNA. That historical trauma has affected the Native Americans, the Jewish and the African Americans and continues to do so today. As a people, we can’t count on short term fixes for any kind of pain on the scale of genocide, war, slavery and the violations of human rights. We have to look at problems and solutions to them holistically and generationally.

I’m sorry, Lara.

We have to look at people with kindness, even when they’ve forsaken us. Even then they think their problems are the only problems in this world. Even when they tell us, we haven’t experienced hardship.

We must believe them anyway.

Humanity will never take a step forward if we don’t.