Post-Traumatic

by Chantal V. Johnson

Vivian flinched. “Do you buy this? You’re really less moral if you don’t want to support people who didn’t support you?” “But lack of support might not be the parents’ fault, right? Like, some parents been set up to fail. Generational poverty, generational trauma. Take migrant families escaping political persecution or gang violence, or like the Black families who came up here during the Great Migration. If you follow debt theory through, then Black and brown Gen-Xers and millennials might have a highly specific and extra moral obligation to the generation before us, because of the immense social and historical strain that generation survived, that we all benefit from.”