Generational trauma from repeated betrayals shapes black political imagination today.

Evidence

What we are living through, even with our cellphone cameras, is not unlike what Baldwin and so many others dealt with as the black freedom movement collapsed with the ascent of the Reagan revolution. This latest betrayal by the country joins with the underlying trauma caused by all the previous betrayals. That trauma carried over, and it shapes implicitly how we imagine and respond to our current days. This is the undertow of black politics: traumatic memories that cling to our choices like ghosts who can’t find peace as white America refuses to change again. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 207

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘undertow of black politics’ — traumatic memory as an invisible force shaping present choices — is a dense, analytically rich formulation that resists easy summary.
• DEFINE: This passage effectively defines ‘the after times’ as the state after successive betrayals whose accumulated trauma carries forward.
• XREF: connects to: Katrina levee-bombing belief persists among black Americans from remembered historical betrayal — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 127