The Stoop · Hana Baba and Leila Day

I get it from my Mama?

May 15, 2025·32 min·2 clips

Baby mice who never experienced an electric shock showed fear of cherry blossom scent two generations after their grandfather was shocked.

1. The Stoop's co-host Leela Day examines whether her learned pattern of silence in white spaces was inherited from her ancestors through epigenetics and generational racial trauma. 2. Leela Day co-hosts with Hannah Bui; the episode features licensed clinical psychologist Dr. Steven D. Nifley Jr., founder of Nifley Racial Trauma Therapy, as the expert voice. 3. The episode asks whether behavioral patterns developed in response to racism can be transmitted biologically or socially across generations — specifically whether Leela's withdrawal in white spaces is her own learned response or an inherited one. 4. Leela opens by narrating, in third-person folklore style, her experience as the only Black cheerleader on a predominantly white high school squad in Las Vegas in the 1990s. 5. The coach made repeated body-shaming and racially coded comments, including questioning why Leela's skirt didn't fit like the other girls' and issuing her a gum demerit while white teammates hid their gum in plain sight. 6. Leela heard white teammates use the N-word at practice and describes becoming quiet, withdrawn, and erasing herself in that space throughout her first year of high school. 7. The hosts discuss TikTok wellness culture and its tendency to pathologize ordinary stress responses with clinical labels like perimenopause, ADHD, depression, and generational trauma. 8. Leela introduces epigenetics — the regulation of gene expression through environmental factors such as stress, nutrition, and toxins — as a possible mechanism for inherited behavioral patterns. 9. She describes the 2014 Emory University study by scientists Brian Diaz and Kerry Ressler, in which a male mouse conditioned to fear cherry blossom scent passed that fear response to two generations of offspring through epigenetic changes in brain and sperm. 10. The mechanism is DNA methylation: small chemical methyl groups attach to DNA and influence whether genes are turned on or off, without changing the underlying DNA sequence, and these changes can be inherited. 11. Dr. Nifley explains that enslaved African Americans coped with dehumanization through compartmentalization — boxing up trauma to deal with later — and that many never processed it, passing it to the next generation instead. 12. Dr. Arline Geronimus found that African American women had healthier pregnancies in their teens and mid-20s compared to white women's peak fertility window of 20-30, attributing the gap to the cumulative physical toll of chronic racism, which she termed weathering. 13. A large study of Black women found that those reporting higher rates of racial trauma and race-related stress were more likely to develop an aggressive form of breast cancer. 14. The John Henry folklore — a formerly enslaved man who competed against a steam drill and died from the exertion — is used to frame the concept of John Henryism, coined by psychologist Dr. Sherman James after interviewing a man named John Henry Martin in the rural South. 15. John Henry Martin, born to sharecroppers, worked 16-hour days to escape the debt cycle of Jim Crow sharecropping, developed debilitating osteoarthritis and high blood pressure — conditions Dr. James then linked to sustained cardiovascular stress in the medical literature. 16. Returning to the cheerleading story, Leela describes walking off the field mid-game during a football game, unable to hear the crowd, until the Black principal grabbed her arm and told her not to quit in front of everyone. 17. Though the principal's message — "do not let them see you give up" — echoed the same intergenerational instruction to endure quietly, Leela describes it as the moment she began unlearning the pattern, eventually quitting the squad and joining a Black female-led theater class. 18. The episode blends personal narrative with academic research in a conversational two-host format, moving between folklore-style storytelling, interview clips with Dr. Nifley, and reflective dialogue between Leela and Hannah. 19. People interested in Black mental health, intergenerational trauma, epigenetics, and the embodied effects of racism will find this episode substantive and grounded in both science and personal experience. 20. Listeners expecting a general wellness podcast or who are unfamiliar with the history of American racism and Jim Crow may find the episode's level of historical specificity and emotional weight demanding.

As heard by us

A cheerleading story opens into generational trauma and health risk.

The episode opens with a 90s Las Vegas cheerleading story about a Black girl on an all-white squad, then stays with the humiliation of a coach who polices her body and voice.

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Why you'd press play

A sharp listen when one Black girl's cheerleading story opens into trauma, memory, and health research.

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