As for descendants of slaves in the US, please check out these lectures by Dr. Joy DeGruy-Leary, and her theory on Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome. She did much research and readings into the history of American blacks and compared with other peoples. Her work focuses on how healing can occur after centuries of generational trauma.
1: https://youtu.be/g6H7gGUQIFs
Specifically, check out minutes 15:19 (bookmark “Systemic generational trauma” to 32:47 “Denigrating the Child”.)
2: https://youtu.be/BGjSday7f_8 This great talk on the history of slavery and Jim Crow in the US and explains how both black and white Americans have trauma leftover from the legacy of discrimination.
Finally, as a desi person I must add that our (especially older) communities are often quick to deride and hold racism against African Americans. There is much belief in exceptionalism in immigrants to the US contrasted against the “failed” minorities. Well, as the child of immigrants, I anecdotally see that much of the success comes from a continuity and sense of belonging from family, values, religion, etc which while colonized, still maintain memories former glories. In contrast, American slaves were ripped out from their historical context and shipped transatlantic.
So as the professor notes, talking about “culture” and saying “it’s their culture” is really a misnomer and attempt to distract from the very real trauma that continues to be inflicted.
Isn't this what most people would call culture?
In America, today, in streets you can potentially see folks who lived in a time before the civil rights movement. It's an alarming contrast which is being overlooked: the immigrant Africans from moneyed and successful families and the other group couldn't drink from the same fountain as his fellow man, and not be able to send their kids to the good schools
I think most Americans would fight you on even that second sentence. Because that implies culture matters. And that maybe it would help Appalachians get out of multi-generational poverty if they absorbed culture from Nigerian immigrants.
That aside, culture in America often doesn’t track with socioeconomic status. Many Chinese Americans, for example, came to California as laborers and the overtook white Californians. Vietnamese Americans came here as refugees and did the same. Asians have the highest poverty rate in NYC, but also dominate the selective admissions schools.