The claim is that the psychological, social, and physical damage inflicted by slavery did not end when slavery was abolished. It was transmitted across generations through multiple mechanisms: the destruction of African cultural identity and family structures; the deliberate suppression of education and political participation during the colonial period; the internalisation of racial hierarchy by both the enslaved and their enslavers; and the chronic stress and nutritional deprivation of slavery, which CARICOM argues produced heritable health vulnerabilities including the high rates of hypertension and type 2 diabetes seen in Caribbean populations today.
In its most developed form, the trauma argument draws on the concept of intergenerational or epigenetic trauma: the idea that severe trauma experienced by one generation can produce measurable biological and psychological effects in subsequent generations. Research on Holocaust survivors and their descendants, and on the descendants of enslaved people in the United States, has suggested that trauma leaves marks that extend beyond the individual who experienced it.
CARICOM’s ten-point plan specifically calls for a ‘psychological rehabilitation’ programme on the grounds that Caribbean communities suffer from a collective psychological injury whose root cause is slavery and colonialism. The argument is that this injury is real, measurable, and the responsibility of the states that created it.
