racial memory

American  

noun

Psychology.

1. feelings, patterns of thought, and fragments of experience that have been transmitted from generation to generation in all humans and have deeply influenced the mind and behavior.

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Example Sentences

The unsynchronized sound track has the timbre of racial memory, echoing some eternal dream time.

From Time Magazine Archive

Wolves roam through our racial memory, howling beyond the firelight, scaring the hell out of us.

From Time Magazine Archive

I knew also that the external graces which I treated with scorn because I lacked them, held for her the charm of habit, of association, of racial memory.

From The Romance of a Plain Man by Glasgow, Ellen Anderson Gholson

This, my professor told me, was a racial memory.

From Before Adam by London, Jack

Not alone do I possess racial memory to an enormous extent, but I possess the memories of one particular and far-removed progenitor.

From Before Adam by London, Jack