Latest / Behaviour Speak with Ben Reiman / African-Centered Psychology with Dr. Jonathan Mathias Lassiter

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African-Centered Psychology with Dr. Jonathan Mathias Lassiter · Behaviour Speak with Ben Reiman

• 0:00
  All right, welcome to the podcast, Jonathan.
• 0:03
  Hello, thank you.
• 0:05
  Before we get started, I just want to acknowledge that I am producing this podcast on the territories of the Klah-Ah-Men Klahoose, Homalco, and K'omoks First Nations.
• 0:14
  I'm grateful to be here.
• 0:16
  So Jonathan, tell me a little bit about yourself.
• 0:21
  I love this question.
• 0:22
  Well, I always like to start by acknowledging
• 0:27
  my lineage, right?
• 0:29
  And so I would not be who I am without the people who came before me and immediately before me are my parents.
• 0:37
  And so that's Joyce Lassiter who, born in 1955 and dropped out of high school, but
• 0:46
  still very much intelligent, still very much a wise woman who raised me with a great sense of spirituality, hope and resilience and tenacity.
• 0:56
  And so I would not be who I am without her, as well as I am the son of John Mathias Lassiter, who was born in 1950 in Millen, Georgia, and his father,
• 1:13
  Jim Lassiter was a sharecropper.
• 1:16
  And so with my father's father being sharecropper, my father did get an associate's degree in air conditioning and refrigeration and then ended up going on to have his own business
• 1:27
  in pest control.
• 1:28
  He was one of the few black men in Augusta, Georgia to run and operate a pest control business.
• 1:36
  so.
• 1:37
  I didn't realize it at the time, but I now with my entrepreneurial spirit, I guess you can say with me branching out into my own businesses, I like to credit him for planting that
• 1:49
  seed, I don't even know if he knew that was intentional at the time.
• 1:53
  But I am because they are and they are because of their parents who, as I said, were sharecroppers on my father's side.
• 2:02
  I'm small landscape business owners on my mother's side.
• 2:06
  And so that's who I am at my core.
• 2:10
  I'm just a Southern boy.
• 2:11
  That's the proud son of these amazing people who may not have all the accolades and titles that our society values, but they have all of the things that keep me going.
• 2:25
  They had it in them and they instilled those things into me that keeps me going.
• 2:29
  It helps me.
• 2:30
  be able to do my best to impart and contribute to society.
• 2:34
  Because of them, I was able to be the first person in my nuclear family to graduate from college.
• 2:42
  I am the first person to get a PhD, I think, and definitely on my mom's side.
• 2:47
  I think second person on my dad's side, and definitely the only psychologist.
• 2:54
  a mental health professional.
• 2:55
  And so today I primarily operate in the world.
• 2:59
  I identify personally as a healer, but my professional titles are licensed clinical psychologist.
• 3:06
  And in that role, I operate both within the university as a professor, as a therapist with my own private practice, as well as an author.
• 3:17
  Just a term, what is a sharecropper?
• 3:20
  OK.
• 3:21
  I said it right.
• 3:21
  Assuming everyone knows what a sharecropper is.
• 3:24
  But you're right, there may be some people who don't know, especially younger folks, right?
• 3:28
  So a sharecropper, my understanding, right, is that it is a person who basically it was slavery by another name.
• 3:35
  And so my you know, I am the American descendant of slaves or enslaved Africans, if you will.
• 3:43
  And so they were people who were once enslaved.
• 3:46
  then after emancipation, they pretty much did the same jobs as slaves, except for now they had to be paid.
• 3:53
  And I put that in air quotes because what sharecropping did was that it made sure that people stayed in debt forever and never actually got financial freedom.
• 4:03
  And so they worked the land of their former
• 4:06
  enslavers, but their enslavers would charge them for housing, they would charge them for those tools, they would charge them for seeds, and any of the crop and profits that they
• 4:16
  made, they would then have to pay back those former enslavers.
• 4:21
  And therefore they just remained in debt because they always ended up owing more than what they made.
• 4:26
  just, so essentially just a different set of chains.
• 4:29
  Exactly.
• 4:31
  Wow.
• 4:31
  Okay.
• 4:32
  Yeah, I hadn't heard that term.
• 4:33
  I'm in Canada, not that that's an excuse to not be aware of the history, but yeah, I had not heard that term before.
• 4:41
  So, but I'm crazy.
• 4:43
  I was also reading about, just on your excellent website.
• 4:49
  My husband will be happy you said that, he designed it.
• 4:52
  He did a fantastic job.
• 4:54
  I was reading just about
• 4:56
  kind of your identities.
• 4:59
  So just kind of kind of read this out and no one mind unpacking it a little bit.
• 5:03
  As a black same gender loving cisgender man born with sickle cell anemia into a family of low socioeconomic status in Augusta, Georgia.
• 5:12
  And then of course, clinical psychologist, educator, author, choreographer.
• 5:17
  So lots of impact.
• 5:19
  I'm also curious, and maybe I'll ask again after, is how you even have time to maintain a private practice with everything else you're doing.
• 5:26
  I see a lot of folks that are out there doing this kind of work, and it's great that you're still practicing and keeping those skills going.
• 5:34
  So that's lovely.
• 5:35
  But we'll come back to that in a bit, maybe.
• 5:37
  The first question I have about is a term I've never heard.
• 5:40
  this identity described this way as same gender loving.
• 5:45
  I'm curious why you use that term.
• 5:46
  I haven't heard that before.
• 5:48
  Yeah, that is a very intentional specific term that I use.
• 5:55
  is same gender loving is coined by Dr.
• 5:59
  Cleo Manago, who is a activist and cultural analyst or critic, as you, if you will, out of Los Angeles.
• 6:09
  He did this amazing thing where he started this network of community-based support groups slash educational groups, if you will, particularly for black men who were same sex
• 6:25
  attracted or bi-sex attracted.
• 6:28
  And in the 1990s, he coined the term, same gender loving to really speak to the unique experience of what it
• 6:37
  was like to be a black man who was also same sex attracted or bisexual attracted because to speak to the intersectionality, have now, know, the term intersectionality is popular,
• 6:50
  but he was alluding to that even before that term became as popular as it is now.
• 6:56
  And I first learned about that term.
• 6:59
  when I moved to New York City.
• 7:01
  So I'm originally from Augusta, Georgia, born and raised there.
• 7:04
  I went to college in Milledgeville, Georgia, which is a small little country town.
• 7:10
  And then when I applied to graduate school, like a year after graduating from college and didn't get in and long story short, I ended up moving to New York to do AmeriCorps.
• 7:21
  And while in AmeriCorps, I was looking for community.
• 7:27
  And so I found this group called Black Men's Exchange and Black Men's Exchange is this educational support group that Cleo Manago had started.
• 7:35
  And it was the New York chapter.
• 7:37
  And so it was a bunch of Black men who are same sex attracted, bisexual attracted, meeting in this gentleman's apartment in Harlem.
• 7:47
  And we get together and we would talk about what it meant to be Black, same sex attracted, bisexual attracted.
• 7:53
  And I heard these people
• 7:55
  starting just using this term, know, as a loving man, as the same gender loving man.
• 8:00
  I'm like, what's same gender loving?
• 8:01
  And so that really blew my mind.
• 8:03
  And I really liked the specificity of that term.
• 8:07
  And so I adapted that for myself.
• 8:10
  I grew up reading about black heroes like James Baldwin and Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry and Bayard Rustin and all of these people, Audre Lorde, who were
• 8:24
  definitely both Black and same-sex attracted, but very much, I don't want to say led with, but I would definitely say prioritized in certain ways the plights of Black people.
• 8:40
  And so I always thought of myself of being in that lineage of people who, while not denying any part of myself was very much interested.
• 8:51
  particularly in the concerns of Black communities across intersections.
• 8:56
  And so I really love same-gender loving as a way to highlight the uniqueness of that Black experience alongside the same-sex attracted emotions.
• 9:10
  Gotcha, gotcha.
• 9:11
  And we're going to dig deep into sort of that side of your life soon enough as far as because that seems to be the center of a lot of your work.
• 9:19
  But
• 9:19
  Wanted look at some of the other identities as well.
• 9:22
  Cisgender, that's pretty straightforward now.
• 9:24
  I most folks have a pretty good idea where that rolls.
• 9:28
  Born with sickle cell anemia.
• 9:30
  So curious why you're sort of intentionally acknowledging that part of your life as well.
• 9:36
  Yes, and for a long time I didn't because I didn't want people to see me
• 9:44
  as defective or sickly.
• 9:47
  Now I own it because I realize how strong it has made me.
• 9:52
  I am an incredibly resilient and strong person for a lot of reasons.
• 9:58
  And one of those reasons is because I have literally been on death's door more times than I can count.
• 10:07
  due to sickle cell anemia.
• 10:09
  So for people that don't know, sickle cell anemia is a congenital genetic disease.
• 10:15
  It's actually the first discovered genetic disease.
• 10:18
  And so it's when our red blood cells, those are the things that are in our bone marrow that helps with oxygen, right?
• 10:25
  They, instead of being round and smooth, they are actually shaped like a crescent moon, if you will.
• 10:33
  So they stick together and in sticking together, they can cause obstructions or barriers in blood vessels, which then peruse oxygen, which then basically causes the tissue around
• 10:49
  that to die and which causes excruciating pain.
• 10:53
  And when it happens in at a rapid rate in a large part of parts of the body of organs,
• 11:01
  it can cause death, right?
• 11:04
  And so when I was born in 1983 and when I remember they had what's called the sickle cell camp, was for sickle cell, children with sickle cell.
• 11:16
  And I remember going when I was like nine years old.
• 11:18
  at the time, so that would have been like sometimes in the 90s, like 93.
• 11:25
  And so at the time,
• 11:28
  In 1993, I think the life expectancy was maybe like thirties or forties for people with stonemia.
• 11:35
  So right where you are.
• 11:36
  Yeah.
• 11:36
  Yeah.
• 11:37
  Right.
• 11:37
  I just turned 40.
• 11:38
  And so when I turned 40, it was, it was a big deal for me because I was like, my gosh, I'm still alive, which is not a guarantee, you know, and, for someone born with sickle cell.
• 11:49
  so, but I was in the hospital a lot and
• 11:55
  Because of that, I was very much in touch with understanding or mortality that I think most young people don't have.
• 12:05
  My husband always talks about the invisibility of youth and I was like, I've never experienced that in my life.
• 12:11
  I don't know what that's like.
• 12:13
  I've always been like, I could die at any time.
• 12:15
  And that's a very real thing, that's not hyperbole.
• 12:17
  And so because of that,
• 12:20
  I have been very intentional and very focused in my life.
• 12:25
  Like, gotta get this done, I gotta get this done.
• 12:27
  And that has served me to a great extent.
• 12:31
  In some ways, it's sort of kept me from being present, which I'm now sort of working on at this stage in my life.
• 12:36
  But as a young person, it really propelled me forward.
• 12:40
  Because I was like, I don't know when this thing might stop, so let me try to get it done.
• 12:46
  And so that's why I highlight sickle cell because it has fundamentally shaped me and has helped me be the person that I am.
• 12:54
  And I like the person that I am.
• 12:56
  And part of the person who I am is a very structured driven person.
• 13:01
  And that's partly due to sickle cell.
• 13:03
  And I'm also a very spiritual person.
• 13:06
  And that's partly due to sickle cell too, because again, it forced me to
• 13:13
  and be in touch with mortality and existential concerns from very early age.
• 13:18
  Right.
• 13:18
  Or in a very real sense, I saw the work of God or what I call God in my life, because according to science, I should be dead.
• 13:29
  Mm hmm.
• 13:32
  So my life is going against the sign, the scientific norm, the statistical norm.
• 13:38
  Right.
• 13:39
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 13:41
  And
• 13:41
  This is the most I've ever heard about sickle cell anemia.
• 13:44
  So I appreciate some of the education here.
• 13:46
  I've also heard some reference and please clarify that sickle cell anemia is either, you know, more common in black folks or, or it's only a black folks.
• 14:02
  What's sort of the connection to the black population?
• 14:04
  Yeah, I believe the statistics are that 90 % of people with sickle cell are of African descent.
• 14:11
  However, it's not exclusive to people who have African descent.
• 14:14
  It's the African and Mediterranean continent.
• 14:16
  And from my understanding, and I'm not a hematologist, so forgive me if I get things wrong.
• 14:21
  My understanding is that it was a genetic mutation that came about for people in those regions to malaria.
• 14:33
  So malaria was a big thing.
• 14:35
  And so then the cells ended up changing.
• 14:38
  And so in sickled cells, malaria can't really live, like the cell breaks apart or something like that.
• 14:44
  interesting.
• 14:45
  Yeah.
• 14:46
  And so it is genetic mutation, basically an attempt to adapt that environment where malaria was killing a lot of people.
• 14:54
  but then of course it causes its own issues and people don't have to deal with malaria anymore.
• 15:01
  So a protective factor with a lot of side effects.
• 15:04
  Interesting, interesting.
• 15:05
  Yeah, no, I definitely want to, I would like to find, like you said, a hematologist or someone that could come on and tell me more about it because it's, it's as I've been doing
• 15:15
  this podcast and I've been talking to a lot more black folks, certainly more than I've ever talked to in my entire life.
• 15:23
  I start reading more and more and sickle seems to pop up every now and then in those conversations.
• 15:28
  And I didn't really know why.
• 15:30
  Yeah.
• 15:31
  Yeah.
• 15:32
  Interesting.
• 15:32
  Okay.
• 15:33
  And then the clinical psychologist educator, I think that's pretty straightforward.
• 15:37
  Tell me a little bit about being an author.
• 15:42
  I see a couple of books behind you.
• 15:43
  I know I read a little bit about at least I think maybe the book on on your right, my left maybe is the only book of its kind.
• 15:51
  written.
• 15:51
  So tell me a little bit about some of the books you've written and that work.
• 15:57
  Yeah.
• 15:58
  So again, having grown up reading a lot about Black heroes and pioneers, if you will, I always thought to myself, these people could do these things in their time with so many
• 16:12
  obstacles, I can do something too to help my people.
• 16:16
  Right.
• 16:17
  I was having this sense of wanting to help black people.
• 16:20
  so part of that for me is I do that through writing and through speaking because I wanted to get it beyond, you know, just one person at a time.
• 16:30
  Sure.
• 16:30
  And so this project, the first book that I've so right.
• 16:36
  I've written I published one book.
• 16:39
  I'm in the process of writing my memoir, which would be my second book.
• 16:43
  and that will come out June of next year.
• 16:46
  It's the 10th of June of 2025.
• 16:48
  So, but the first book, Black LGBT Health, the Intersection of Race, Gender and Sexual Orientation is a book that I co-edited with my great friend, Dr.
• 16:59
  Lord Spalans, who is a licensed clinical social worker who has a doctorate in social work.
• 17:05
  She practices in Brooklyn, New York.
• 17:07
  But she and I met like back in 2011 at a training about doing research with racial ethnic groups that the American Psychological Association was hosting.
• 17:19
  And we kept in touch and I think around 2016, had sent out an email, 2015, she sent out an email, 15, 16.
• 17:28
  She sent out an email saying, hey, these editors, these publishers,
• 17:33
  asked me about doing a book, is anyone interested?
• 17:35
  And I knew I always wanted to do a book because again, I grew up reading all of these black people's books like Bell Hooks and James Baldwin and all these folks and Toni
• 17:43
  Morrison.
• 17:44
  was like, I wanna write a book.
• 17:45
  So at the point I was like, sure, like sign me up.
• 17:48
  I like Lord.
• 17:49
  So I was like, me up.
• 17:50
  And I was very junior.
• 17:52
  had like just graduated from grad school.
• 17:54
  And so was doing my postdoc in New York city and I guess no one else.
• 17:59
  want, very, it was interesting.
• 18:01
  And so she was like, all right, Jonathan, you said, yes, let's, let's, let's do this thing.
• 18:07
  And so long story short, we ended up, you know, putting in a call for chapters and we wanted people to write specifically about black LGBT, health, both mental health and
• 18:23
  physical health.
• 18:24
  And we wanted to make sure that they highlighted
• 18:26
  resilience and positive aspects because so much of what has been written about Black LGBTQ plus communities has been focused on all the things going wrong.
• 18:39
  So while we definitely need that research, if that's the only picture we get, we sort of get this picture that Black LGBTQ plus people are only suffering.
• 18:51
  Right.
• 18:52
  They only have things going wrong with them.
• 18:53
  So we want to highlight both sides of that coin.
• 18:56
  And we also were very intentional that we wanted people who were part of the community to contribute to the book because due to due to the ways in which white supremacy and
• 19:08
  capitalism operate, most of the research done on black LGBTQ plus communities is done by white folks who are not part of the communities because white people
• 19:20
  however, do make up the majority of the mental health field as well as the medical field.
• 19:28
  So we were like, if you're going to contribute to this chapter, you also have to be part of the community.
• 19:34
  And so we were like, we took a for us by us approach.
• 19:37
  And so the book ended up winning the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association's Achievement Award.
• 19:43
  And to this day, I still think it's one of the few books, if still not the only book.
• 19:47
  to look at both mental health and physical health beyond HIV, because that's the other thing.
• 19:53
  HIV is very lucrative thing to study, but a lot of research doesn't go beyond studying HIV in this community.
• 20:00
  Yeah, so true, so true.
• 20:03
  Wow, that's amazing.
• 20:04
  OK, cool.
• 20:06
  And so the second book I'm working on now is a memoir.
• 20:10
  Yeah.
• 20:12
  And I'm super excited about that.
• 20:14
  And that is coming out, like I said, next June.
• 20:18
  And so we're in talks, the title might change, but the title right now is based off of an essay in the book.
• 20:26
  It's a book of essays that basically share my journey of going from my father's son as a little boy and all the things I experienced there.
• 20:41
  As much as I love my father and we reconciled in his later years, he's passed away now, but we reconciled in his later years.
• 20:48
  He was very homophobic and did a lot of damage when I was growing up.
• 20:54
  he that really, you know, as I said, did a lot of harm and I had to unlearn a lot of that.
• 20:59
  So I share those stories in the book.
• 21:02
  And I, but now what I understand is that my father was a product of his environment and his environment told him that black men can't afford to be weak or soft because the world
• 21:14
  will eat them alive, right?
• 21:17
  He had saw his father disrespected in a white supremacist capitalist world that did not value him.
• 21:23
  And he didn't want that for his son, right?
• 21:25
  And so out of, again, I think a desire to protect me, he
• 21:30
  to make me tough, but in doing that, he engaged in what bell hooks call soul murder, which was basically trying to cut off all my emotions and punish me for showing anything besides
• 21:44
  anger.
• 21:44
  so I had to work through that.
• 21:45
  But in the book, I talk about that, but I also trace it to those white supremacy capitalist roots.
• 21:51
  Right.
• 21:52
  And also talk about my journey of becoming a
• 21:56
  psychologists because only 5 % of psychologists are black and less than 1 % are black men in the United States.
• 22:04
  And so I talk about that journey and the racism that I experienced in that process and how the field itself is very much based on the experiences of white people and whites.
• 22:20
  undergraduate white women for the most part because most of the research, you go and you look at the participants, a lot of professors are just having their students fill out
• 22:29
  surveys and then writing up things and publishing it as if it's universal.
• 22:33
  Wow.
• 22:37
  And you're only 40, so why did you decide to write this now and not maybe put something out when you're like 70s?
• 22:45
  Well, maybe I'll write a second one when I'm 70.
• 22:47
  No, you know what it was?
• 22:49
  It was, well, again, I always know I want to write a book.
• 22:52
  A lot of books.
• 22:54
  And so I did edit a volume.
• 22:56
  And so I knew I wanted to do a trade press book.
• 23:00
  And I had been reading a lot of people's memoirs.
• 23:02
  A lot people are putting out memoirs in their 30s 40s.
• 23:05
  Not unique in that sense.
• 23:06
  But again, I think the issue, so I'm using memoir to tell a bigger story.
• 23:12
  Right, the story, the issues that I want to draw attention to is the role of whiteness in society and in the mental health field in particular, but also how whiteness influences
• 23:24
  all of our mental health.
• 23:25
  Like because of the values of, of
• 23:29
  Eurocentricity, which values individualism, which values competition and materialism, all of us are suffering.
• 23:35
  And then we create a mental health system where its primary goal is to treat people as individuals and put the onus on the individual for getting better.
• 23:48
  While most of the time we're not acknowledging the systems, we're also not bringing in community and family in that healing process.
• 23:56
  and we are patching them up to go out and produce more in a capitalist system.
• 24:02
  That's how whiteness and capitalism influences the mental health field itself.
• 24:07
  So mental health practitioners then become tools of whiteness and capitalism.
• 24:12
  In their minds though, they probably don't think that because whiteness is often invisible, right?
• 24:19
  But I want to draw attention to those issues
• 24:24
  And so using stories from my personal life to do that.
• 24:28
  And so that's why I said, let's do it.
• 24:31
  Yeah, cool.
• 24:33
  And so true, like all of that is sort of bang on to sort of how everything kind of works in our system right now.
• 24:42
  I don't want you to read your memoir to me, but I'm curious about sort of why you decided to go into psychology and a little bit about what that what that journey was like for you.
• 24:52
  Yeah.
• 24:53
  And listen, I'm happy to talk about a memoir.
• 24:55
  Why did I start?
• 24:56
  Why did I decide to go into psychology?
• 24:57
  So I've been asked this before.
• 25:00
  What I always say is because I did not understand the people in my family.
• 25:05
  That's number one.
• 25:06
  It grew.
• 25:06
  from there, but as a little kid, remember like my parents telling us, if you do this, you will have this consequence.
• 25:15
  And I've always sort of been like a very like buy the book, like, you know, straightforward person.
• 25:21
  So I was like, cool, I'm not gonna do that.
• 25:23
  My siblings on the other hand were like, they would do it and then they would get the consequence and then they would be upset.
• 25:29
  And I would be confused.
• 25:31
  I was like, but you knew this was gonna happen.
• 25:34
  So I was like, what's wrong with these people?
• 25:37
  And then also, so that I think were the initial seeds, so like me just being curious about how the mind works.
• 25:44
  Of course I didn't have the language of psychology, I even knew it was a thing at that point, but I was just curious about how the mind works.
• 25:51
  Then as I became a teenager and my sexual orientation became something that was harder for me to suppress,
• 26:00
  I started to go have my own experiences with depression and suicidality.
• 26:05
  It was very much passive suicidality.
• 26:07
  I was never at the point where I could take my own life, but I used to pray to die.
• 26:13
  Because again, I grew up in a very Christian, Southern Christian household.
• 26:19
  And because again, having sickle cell, like God wasn't this abstract thing to me, God was real.
• 26:26
  And so I believed what I read and what I was told about God.
• 26:32
  And part of that was that God had destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah and, you know, anything besides heterosexuality was bad.
• 26:40
  Of course, going through college and graduate school, I have much more nuanced readings of those texts now.
• 26:47
  But at that point, I didn't.
• 26:49
  So I was very depressed as a teenager.
• 26:52
  And so
• 26:53
  that also got me interested in mental health as well.
• 26:58
  And so when I went to college, I decided to study psychology and I thought I would be a psychiatrist.
• 27:05
  But then I shadowed some psychiatrists and they were doing mostly medication management.
• 27:10
  I said, no, I actually want to like talk to people and figure out why they do what they do.
• 27:15
  And so then some of my professors was like, well, you need to get a PhD.
• 27:18
  And so I ended up getting a PhD.
• 27:21
  And while in grad school, I actually did a lot of my training in hospitals, working with people at the intersection of medical illness and mental illness.
• 27:30
  And that was, even though I had had my own journey with sickle cell, I didn't necessarily realize the role that psychologists can play in helping people cope with illness.
• 27:44
  until graduate school, because I don't remember ever seeing a psychologist or therapist bedside as a kid.
• 27:51
  I definitely needed it and definitely my mom needed it, right?
• 27:54
  But part of the thing that I learned in grad school was just how important it was to have mental health professionals be bedside when people are hospitalized for medical issues and
• 28:05
  how it helps not only the person with the medical condition, but also their loved ones because
• 28:12
  know, any sort of illness affects a whole family unit.
• 28:17
  So I got into that, it wasn't, so a lot of my work, you know, is still at the intersection of physical health and mental health.
• 28:27
  But then I learned about African centered psychology.
• 28:30
  And that wasn't until like maybe my last year of graduate school.
• 28:39
  And long story short, African-centered psychology is psychology that really looks at what it means to be human from an African understanding.
• 28:51
  And when I say African, not contemporary African societies, but pre-colonial African society, like Hemet and Yoruba and the Bantu Congo.
• 29:02
  and how they made sense of what it meant to be human and how they structured their societies.
• 29:07
  And then using that as a sort of guide map about how to interact with each other and to live and understand health.
• 29:19
  Not in that we try to recreate these societies, but that we prioritize those values that they had over the sort of contemporary values of materialism, capitalism, individualism.
• 29:31
  gotcha, gotcha.
• 29:32
  And then, so what was your experience like?
• 29:36
  So undergrad, like, first off, when you went to school, and you were taking sort of these intro psych classes, and then kind of getting into psychology, were you in a type of
• 29:48
  school where, were you attending predominantly white institutions for your training?
• 29:53
  Or were you in?
• 29:55
  Yeah, yeah.
• 29:56
  And so what was that like?
• 29:57
  Because I know you, you write a lot about sort of black psychology and things sort of specific to black psychology.
• 30:05
  And, and I had had the opportunity to have Dr.
• 30:08
  Evan August on the podcast a while back.
• 30:11
  And he, really enlightened me about the history of black psychology from its early days, you know, things like
• 30:20
  how most of the research for diagnoses were done on sort of black and brown folks.
• 30:25
  And most of the research on treatments were done on white folks, you know, because they're the ones that deserve the treatments.
• 30:30
  The black folks didn't deserve the treatments and the black folks were the ones with, you know, quote unquote more defects or whatever.
• 30:37
  And so they were, it made more sense to sort of in their minds to sort of, you know, use that approach.
• 30:43
  And of course, leading all the way up to the formation of AbSci after.
• 30:48
  Dr.
• 30:48
  King spoke at APA, was at 69, I think around 70 there.
• 30:53
  then sort of, you know, the whole, you know, evolution of absci and also some issues as well, which you write about as well, related to kind of some of your work.
• 31:04
  What was your experience like, sort of getting all your training in essentially white psychology?
• 31:10
  Yep, right.
• 31:11
  Yeah, and I love that you said that because that's what I tell my students I say I tell my undergrads and I tell my graduate students I say what you are learning is your center of
• 31:19
  psychology.
• 31:20
  No one is probably going to call it that except for me.
• 31:22
  Right.
• 31:22
  Or if you get another you happen to be lucky enough to be taught by another African center of psychology or someone who unders who's trying to decolonize psychology because I think
• 31:33
  the whole call to decolonize psychology is growing louder.
• 31:37
  but still relatively new.
• 31:39
  But it is a Eurocentric psychology.
• 31:40
  And so that's what I was taught.
• 31:43
  And I excelled in it.
• 31:44
  That's what I always tell my students.
• 31:46
  I say, listen, I know that this is not perfect and we got a lot of issues, but in order to get through this degree program, which is the most important thing, you need to excel in
• 31:54
  this.
• 31:54
  when I was there, I could tell you everything about Wilhelm Wundt's lab.
• 31:58
  I could tell you everything about Freud.
• 32:00
  I could tell you
• 32:01
  everything about G Stanley Hall, I knew the folks, right?
• 32:04
  I knew all those old white European men.
• 32:06
  And I loved it.
• 32:07
  Alport, Gorda Alport, right?
• 32:09
  And I loved it.
• 32:09
  Yes.
• 32:10
  Right.
• 32:11
  Because that's all I knew.
• 32:12
  That's what psychology was.
• 32:16
  And so, yes, I was trained in these predominantly white institutions and undergrad.
• 32:23
  There were no black professors, no black professors.
• 32:27
  mostly like white men in their 50s and 60s, who I loved.
• 32:32
  I'm not even gonna like try to act like I love Dr.
• 32:36
  Gillis, Dr.
• 32:37
  Walter Isaac.
• 32:38
  Like I love those, I love those guys.
• 32:40
  And I studied it and I excelled in it.
• 32:43
  I remember like Dr.
• 32:44
  Isaac had, he did cognitive psychology and he had a rat lab.
• 32:49
  And so I would go in and run rats and mazes and things like that.
• 32:52
  So I had no issues and I, you know, like I said, I excelled.
• 32:56
  So I loved psychology as an undergrad.
• 32:59
  however though, at the same time I was reading bell hooks.
• 33:03
  I was reading James Baldwin.
• 33:05
  I was reading Keith Boykin who is a black gay man who was talking about the intersections of that experience.
• 33:13
  I was reading
• 33:16
  Who, there was, I'm blanking on the name of, I think it's Dr.
• 33:20
  Beverly Guy Sheffield or whoever wrote Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together In The Cafeteria?
• 33:26
  Book changed my life.
• 33:27
  But I was reading all of these books by black authors talking about the experience of black people and oppression and how this influences emotions.
• 33:39
  They weren't necessarily talking about mental health, but the emotional effect.
• 33:43
  And so even as I was learning all of these white theories, then selling in it, even at that time, I knew that I want to take that and then go into black communities.
• 33:52
  And so I remember like my senior year, one of my professors, Dr.
• 33:56
  Lindsay, he was asking us, he was like, so what are you all planning on doing?
• 34:00
  And I was like, and I don't know why I said this, I think I was feeling myself that day, I don't know.
• 34:05
  But I said,
• 34:07
  I'm gonna go work with black people because white people have enough people helping them.
• 34:11
  And it was like me and my good friend Markita who we're still friends today, but we both like majors.
• 34:16
  We were only non-white people in the classroom, but even Dr.
• 34:20
  Lindsey was like, no, you're right.
• 34:22
  And we have a lot of help in.
• 34:29
  And so after that, I knew I wanted to go to grad school again.
• 34:32
  maybe I would do psychiatry.
• 34:35
  after I figured out I was going to go get a PhD, I really wanted to go to Howard because again, I wanted to focus on black people and be taught by black professors.
• 34:46
  had had none in undergrad.
• 34:49
  And so I only applied to Howard.
• 34:51
  I did the thing you're not supposed to do.
• 34:52
  I only applied to one grad, a graduate, and that was Howard.
• 34:56
  And I did not get in.
• 34:57
  I got an interview, but I did not get in.
• 34:59
  And I was devastated.
• 35:01
  Devastated, devastated.
• 35:02
  And long story short, I ended up reapplying the next year, but I cast a much broader net and I ended up getting into several schools.
• 35:11
  But again, a lot of them were predominantly white faculty and they did not seem to prioritize diversity.
• 35:19
  And so I ended up going to the California School of Professional Psychology and
• 35:24
  in San Francisco.
• 35:26
  And the way I actually even learned about that school was that I was looking at black psychologists who I had heard of, and I would look to see where they went to school.
• 35:36
  And this school had came up on a couple of their CVs.
• 35:40
  And so I was like, let me go there.
• 35:42
  So there I had psychologists of color teaching me.
• 35:47
  Still, I only had one black psychologist teach me.
• 35:50
  He was an adjunct and he taught my
• 35:53
  family studies, my family systems class, and his doctor, Kevin Washington, I came to find out that he was past president of the Association of Black Psychologists.
• 36:03
  Didn't even know that at the time.
• 36:05
  And so my experience was that, again, I continued to excel in Eurocentric psychology, but as a, and my professors were pretty good, but when I went to my,
• 36:18
  practical experience or my clinical experience where I start to train how to be a therapist, my supervisors were really racist and they were racist in both explicit and
• 36:27
  subtle ways.
• 36:28
  I remember again, I was in San Francisco doing my clinical work and Oscar Grant had been murdered at the Fruitville station.
• 36:45
  We were in group supervision.
• 36:48
  I'm the only black person there and it's mostly white women and a supervisor, white man.
• 36:55
  And this woman says something like, this is horrible, but we have to stop treating black men with kid gloves.
• 37:05
  And I was I was floored and shocked.
• 37:07
  I was like, this guy was just murder for doing basically nothing like like.
• 37:16
  We've all seen the videos of white people literally cursing out cops and nothing happens to them.
• 37:21
  Sure.
• 37:23
  But then you have people doing nothing, but at most maybe walking away or even running away, but running away.
• 37:31
  And they're being murdered.
• 37:32
  I don't think that's kid gloves.
• 37:34
  Furthermore, we definitely know with black children and some of the research with Latinx children as well, they're treated, they're seen as adults more so than their white
• 37:45
  counterparts.
• 37:46
  And so while I have white acquaintances,
• 37:50
  who were like drinking and drugging in high school and like vandalizing stuff.
• 37:54
  And I was like, yeah, I was some delinquents.
• 37:56
  And they were like, you youth.
• 37:57
  And I was just like, no, but no, like being in jail, right?
• 38:00
  Like, so it's those sorts of things.
• 38:02
  So when she said this, I was like, this woman is sick and delusional.
• 38:08
  Meanwhile though, like she's working in a predominantly black school as the therapist.
• 38:16
  And so I just started to come up with a lot of those experiences.
• 38:18
  And of course, my supervisor said nothing to correct it or anything like that.
• 38:23
  But and then as the only black person and as a student, I'm disempowered to say anything.
• 38:29
  Sure.
• 38:30
  So it was just me having to digest a whole bunch of anti-blackness in those spaces.
• 38:39
  But kept saying to myself, but once I get this degree, I'm going to use it.
• 38:45
  in a way and use my voice to talk back against all that stuff I had to digest in order to survive in that space.
• 38:55
  while I definitely had no problems excelling in the space, it was definitely isolating because I was often the only black person in those spaces.
• 39:07
  And it was definitely not an affirming space.
• 39:10
  And again, while no one necessarily said anything to me directly that was anti-black, there were a lot of anti-black statements about the communities that I cared about.
• 39:23
  got a lot of great writings.
• 39:25
  One article that I was particularly drawn to was this one that was published in the American psychologist in May of last year.
• 39:34
  Black sexual and gender diverse scholars contributions to psychology.
• 39:42
  First off, it's just, mean, for me, it's a list of people I'm gonna reach out to try to interview.
• 39:49
  Number one.
• 39:50
  It's a great resource.
• 39:51
  And...
• 39:54
  But a few things that kind of stood out for me early in the article, sort of in the lit review kind of section was.
• 40:05
  Two things, one that how little psychology students are taught and students in general are taught about the work of other black psychologists.
• 40:18
  And I know Abzai, again, just from talking to mostly from talking to Dr.
• 40:24
  August, from what I understand, Abzai was formed.
• 40:30
  and didn't take very long to sort of, in many ways, become a completely separate entity from the APA, you know, started the journal, Black Psychology and some other journals as
• 40:41
  well, and really became, you know, a place for, you know, Black folks to disseminate amongst one another, which is great.
• 40:51
  But we all know that psychology is still very Eurocentric.
• 40:55
  We know that
• 40:57
  I think, you know, depending on the discipline of psychology, saw it's sort of anywhere from sort of three to four and a half percent of psychologists are black.
• 41:06
  And so really this is that 4 % talking to each other is what AppSci essentially is.
• 41:12
  I've had the privilege of sitting in on some of the live zooms of AppSci, fact, the recent one that you were just in, I think last week.
• 41:19
  and, you know, and, they look like wonderful conversations and, and, and, and lots of good come that come out of that.
• 41:26
  But it's all, you know, compartmentalized in this 4 % group and sort of, and similarly, you know, we, we see similar sort of comparisons, the sort of contributions of women
• 41:38
  versus men and all these kinds of things, but black folks in general, in particular, and indigenous folks to even more of extent, because they're kind of more on that less than
• 41:46
  1%.
• 41:47
  yeah.
• 41:47
  Thanks to genocide.
• 41:49
  Yeah, I joined the Society for Indian Psychologists last year as sort of an ally membership.
• 41:55
  they have sort of 200 members or something like that.
• 41:59
  So, you know, it's wild.
• 42:04
  But there's so much good stuff coming out of black psychology and yet, can you just unpack a bit about sort of, maybe it's sort of obvious, about kind of why and why we don't know
• 42:17
  more about sort of black psychologists?
• 42:19
  Is it just racism and that's pretty much it?
• 42:22
  Yeah.
• 42:23
  I mean, it's simple answer.
• 42:25
  Yeah.
• 42:26
  Yeah.
• 42:26
  Why supremacy?
• 42:27
  There you go.
• 42:28
  Yeah.
• 42:28
  Yeah.
• 42:29
  So
• 42:30
  No, mean, imagine if you had people learning about, on mass, people on mass, learning about being taught how to actualize a different way of being that did not support the
• 42:46
  siphoning of power from the masses to the few.
• 42:50
  Imagine if you had them learning about how to define themselves outside of material goods.
• 42:57
  Right.
• 42:58
  That's a real threat to capitalism.
• 43:00
  Right.
• 43:01
  Right.
• 43:01
  That's a real threat to keeping people chasing after a carrot for their self-worth.
• 43:10
  So white supremacy, capitalism does not want people to know these things.
• 43:15
  They don't want they want to keep it as fringe.
• 43:18
  They want to keep that.
• 43:19
  you know, those this is unscientific.
• 43:21
  Those people don't really know what they're talking about.
• 43:23
  Meanwhile, those people
• 43:25
  were the ones
• 43:28
  thinking about studying, sharing, dispersing this knowledge from millennia before the rise of Europe.
• 43:35
  Millennia before the rise of Europe.
• 43:40
  Right?
• 43:41
  So I have to teach my students that, yes, we have 1968 being when the Association of Black Psychologists was founded in the United States, but African-centered psychology or SAKU,
• 43:55
  as Dr.
• 43:56
  Wade Nobles talks about it, was happening.
• 44:02
  millennia.
• 44:02
  It was happening way before colonization, way before anyone wrote it down.
• 44:09
  Right?
• 44:10
  We have the oral tradition, the Egyptian mystery systems, right?
• 44:14
  We're talking about what it means to be human and what it means to live a life of or morality and order, balance, harmony, etc.
• 44:22
  These principles of Maat, right?
• 44:23
  That's like
• 44:26
  So that was happening millennia before.
• 44:28
  you get Aristotle and his desire to dominate and to have knowledge funneled through Europe, and then it trickles down from there, right?
• 44:40
  So it's about power to keep a particular group whiteness on top, capitalism on top.
• 44:49
  That's why we don't hear about it.
• 44:51
  It's a very simple answer.
• 44:53
  I believe it.
• 44:56
  think it's, and in fact, this is just sort of, you know, it's a conversation I've had a few times around how white supremacy is so built into our world that we often don't
• 45:08
  realize it's white supremacy.
• 45:10
  because you don't sort of, I don't think one sort of thinks of psychologists as capitalists.
• 45:17
  You know, I mean, they are because they're in the society.
• 45:21
  think maybe that's the problem is that there's sort of this vision of capitalists as all being, you know, these greedy billionaires.
• 45:29
  They're the capitalists and everyone else is, you know, just a victim of their, you know, I think they sort of thought that the 99 % is not capitalists and the 1 % is kind of
• 45:39
  thing.
• 45:40
  have you had conversations with or with white psychologists sort of about this and kind of why they're not bringing this up more in college programs and that sort of thing?
• 45:52
  So I'm curious what their thoughts are.
• 45:54
  Maybe I just need to go ask them.
• 45:56
  Yeah, I definitely encourage you to ask them.
• 45:58
  But what I will say is that that's sort what the book is about.
• 46:01
  So all of my psychologists go out and get it, all the people interested, and go out and get it it comes out.
• 46:09
  But outside of the book, I have decided to not place my energy to talking to white psychologists in that way, right?
• 46:16
  Again, the book is doing that and I'm happy to tour the book and have those conversations when the book comes out.
• 46:23
  However, outside of that space, I spend my energy talking to black students.
• 46:29
  I spend my energy talking to other black mental health providers.
• 46:33
  I spend my energy talking to black mental health communities, families.
• 46:38
  That's where I spend my energy.
• 46:39
  So we talk about, you know, a lot of times, none Eurocentric psychology, the psychology of indigenous folks, Latinx folks, Asian American folks, Black folks, white supremacy
• 46:52
  characterizes it as niche, right?
• 46:55
  Or some sort of specialized understanding of it.
• 47:00
  And they do silo it, right?
• 47:02
  And my thing is continue to call it niche all you want.
• 47:06
  I actually don't care what your central psychology labels it anymore.
• 47:10
  Right.
• 47:11
  I am not interested in talking to or trying to get them to do anything different because I'm a student of history and history has shown me that it's not going to happen.
• 47:19
  Right.
• 47:20
  So 2020 came.
• 47:21
  Everyone was reading all the books by brilliant black scholars.
• 47:25
  Some of them had been out at least four years prior and no one had read them.
• 47:29
  Then 2020 comes, this person is murdered by the police.
• 47:34
  And now all these books, you shoot up on New York Times bestsellers list, right?
• 47:40
  And people were like, I want to do better.
• 47:43
  And then we get all these DEI officers.
• 47:46
  get these commitment.
• 47:47
  And 2024, 2023, 2024.
• 47:51
  Now everything's right.
• 47:53
  It's going in the opposite direction.
• 47:54
  Some folks don't call it the white lash, right?
• 47:58
  All right, this backlash against anything that is trying to decenter whiteness.
• 48:05
  so, again, even more proof, if we're waiting on the white masses, not to say that there aren't in some individual white folks, allies, et cetera, et cetera, because there are,
• 48:17
  right?
• 48:18
  But if we're waiting on the white masses to do something, we're gonna die waiting.
• 48:23
  And so again, there's,
• 48:26
  sort of projects I do that are public facing like the book that's here.
• 48:30
  Everyone can read this.
• 48:31
  if you, 95 % of my energy is going to speaking to the communities themselves who are affected by whiteness negatively and how to resist and to operate from a place of self-
• 48:50
  empowerment and self-determination.
• 48:52
  Yeah.
• 48:53
  And healing in community.
• 48:57
  Yeah.
• 48:57
  No, I love that.
• 48:58
  That makes sense.
• 49:01
  Kind of related, I also kind of read in this article in sort of the preamble to talking about some of these great ethics, think you talked about 34 different amazing
• 49:13
  psychologists and their work.
• 49:15
  talked, there's a bit about sort of how
• 49:18
  because you're sort of in the realm of black sexual and gender diverse psychology.
• 49:24
  It was wild to read about how that group also haven't felt welcome in the black centered groups.
• 49:30
  like Ab-Sai and the society of culture, ethnicity and race, I think that might help.
• 49:39
  The psychology of sexual orientation and gender diversity.
• 49:41
  didn't welcome the sexual and gender diverse black psychologist.
• 49:45
  What's happening there?
• 49:47
  that just, again, just like the last question, was it just racism?
• 49:51
  Is this just homophobia straight up?
• 49:53
  Yeah.
• 49:53
  Again, a simple answer.
• 49:55
  Yeah.
• 49:55
  To unpack it a little bit more.
• 49:57
  Yeah.
• 49:58
  So again, this is why love it.
• 50:00
  This is why I personally identify with the term SGL.
• 50:02
  because it really highlights the uniqueness of being black and same-sex attracted or bisexual attracted, right?
• 50:08
  Because it really is a unique experience.
• 50:10
  So they're really, when you are in a black SGO person, you're not really accepted by whites and non-black because we know that there are anti-black Asian folks and Latinx
• 50:27
  folks as well, right?
• 50:28
  You're not really accepted in the LGBTQ plus or queer community.
• 50:33
  If we want to use that as an umbrella term due to anti-blackness and you're not really accepted in black communities because of heterosexism and homophobia, biphobia,
• 50:43
  transphobia, et cetera.
• 50:44
  Now, of course, I don't want to make blanket statements.
• 50:48
  That's not everyone's story, but it's definitely too many people's story.
• 50:55
  Put it that way.
• 50:58
  And so when you are a Black, same gender, love person, then you find yourself in this sort of interstitial place, right?
• 51:05
  This place in between.
• 51:06
  And for some folks that can be incredibly isolating, however, going back to African center perspective, and this is what I do with my clients and my students who are part of these
• 51:16
  communities, that can also be a place of power.
• 51:21
  Because when you understand what it's like to live in this in-between space, one, you understand both communities, whereas those communities usually only understand one or the
• 51:31
  other, right?
• 51:32
  They only understand their own experience.
• 51:33
  You can understand both and, but both and perspective is also African-centered, always thinking about both and, not either or.
• 51:42
  But one, you understand both and.
• 51:43
  Two, you also have the freedom to create yourself
• 51:51
  in the image that aligns most with your potential because if you're trying to fit into either one of those communities, you don't anyway.
• 52:03
  So then you don't have to conform to those norms.
• 52:06
  You can figure it out and create yourself a new.
• 52:10
  So there's power there.
• 52:12
  And then we in going back to pre-colonial Africa, we know there's a tribe in West Africa called the Degara tribe who looked at
• 52:20
  those folks who we would call SGL today, they didn't have that language then, but they called them gatekeepers.
• 52:26
  And those gatekeepers were spiritual beings, spiritual folks who had the keys to both the physical and the spiritual world.
• 52:36
  And people came to them as the healers, the people to help, hey, listen, I'm having this issue with my child's having this issue.
• 52:45
  Can you intervene in the spirit world for me?
• 52:48
  And so that could be a place of power in that in-between space.
• 52:54
  And so it can also be isolating and hurtful.
• 53:00
  So I don't want to minimize that.
• 53:03
  I want to say yes, and we can use that to move from a place of strength and power as well.
• 53:10
  Yeah.
• 53:11
  Cool.
• 53:12
  I to touch on just a couple of concepts in your work.
• 53:16
  I'll share some of these articles with folks so they can kind of dive deeper into them.
• 53:20
  of course, your book will be a great resource for folks.
• 53:25
  And so we don't need to unpack too much of that here.
• 53:27
  But there are a couple of things in there that in the research that kind of stood out to me that I wanted to ask a little bit about.
• 53:35
  I know you do a lot around a lot of work around
• 53:40
  spirituality and mental health for, know, for particularly, think for the, the, the kind of BSM, BSMM kind of population.
• 53:50
  I just, some of this is a little fresh in my head because I just interviewed a black psychologist named Janice Parker.
• 53:58
  And she does a lot of work around spirituality and mental health.
• 54:03
  And really taught me a lot about sort of the history of the Black church and why it's so different from the White church in so many ways.
• 54:14
  For all you folks out there that are sort of anti-church, anti-Christian or whatever, for probably some really good reasons.
• 54:23
  go learn about the Black Church because it's a completely different world and has completely different meaning and you know I think if there was an intention for the way
• 54:34
  you know
• 54:38
  Christianity and church was intended to be.
• 54:41
  It was through that black lens that really how the church kind of combined, the black church kind of combines a lot of what you're talking about, pre-colonial Africa and
• 54:51
  spirituality with aspects of the Christian church together to make this sort of this beautiful thing that has really changed my opinion of Christianity because I had some
• 55:04
  trauma.
• 55:05
  as a child in the church.
• 55:06
  And I read about that in your research and her research about how that can affect folks and really made me really essentially angry at the church and God and Christianity.
• 55:18
  And I don't ever really have a desire to go back there.
• 55:21
  But I would happily sit in a black church any day and join in song because it's just, I think it's what
• 55:30
  And also think a lot the conversations that I've had with Indigenous folks and around, you know, their connection with spirit and the Creator, really just changed my whole outlook
• 55:42
  on this stuff.
• 55:43
  A couple of things you've talked, a couple of terms that I've kind of seen written about that I'd like to unpack a little bit.
• 55:50
  You've written about something called culturally specific spirituality, and I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that.
• 55:56
  Yeah.
• 55:57
  So I wanna, I'm gonna definitely talk about cultural specific spirituality.
• 56:02
  I also wanna touch on something that you mentioned before about the black church and things like that.
• 56:08
  So as I said, I was definitely raised in a Southern black Christian church and that was very important for me for a very long time.
• 56:15
  But now I don't really identify as Christian at all.
• 56:18
  I don't identify as religious.
• 56:19
  however, I am, as I said, very much a spiritual person and a spirit field person.
• 56:24
  I see the world through a spiritual lens.
• 56:27
  But when I say that, what I mean is that I recognize both the seen and the unseen.
• 56:32
  I also, part of my belief system is that we have an energy that's beyond our five senses that connects us all and that energy is a source of power.
• 56:44
  And I also see my ancestors, those who have gone on before me.
• 56:48
  as part of my spiritual community who are also empowering.
• 56:53
  So that very much again aligns with this African center understanding of spirituality where the spirit world is a densely populated and active space that has real implications
• 57:08
  for the lives we live in our physical form and our physical bodies.
• 57:13
  When I first started doing my research, I was very much interested in how people reconcile their Christianity and their sexual orientation.
• 57:21
  But through doing that research, people start to make that distinction between spirituality, which is more individual personalized understanding of spirit and religion,
• 57:32
  which is the more formal piece of it where there's clergy and then and also in some ways removed because you're also on.
• 57:41
  approaching spirituality through the lens of someone else's interpretation instead of your own.
• 57:48
  And so I moved from that religion to spirituality in my personal life, but also in my research.
• 57:54
  And so what I would start to understand though, as I was looking at definitions of spirituality in the larger psychology, sociological literature, that again,
• 58:07
  white supremacy, most research was about either from the viewpoint of white people, or it was the viewpoint of black women in particular.
• 58:18
  So Dr.
• 58:18
  Jacqueline Mattis did a lot of work trying to define spirituality, but her samples were black women.
• 58:25
  And that work is incredibly valuable.
• 58:28
  However, for the populations that I work for, which tend to be black,
• 58:33
  same-general loving folks, particularly black same-general loving men in the research area, those definitions were not specific to them.
• 58:41
  And so I always wanna make sure that I'm using the best tools that I can when I'm working with people.
• 58:47
  And for me, the best tools are always gonna be the tools specific to the people.
• 58:51
  I know to paraphrase Audre Lorde, I think it's very important that people define themselves for themselves.
• 58:59
  And so I wanted to understand how Black, St.
• 59:02
  John and loving men define spirituality for themselves and then use that as a jumping off point to understand how to use spirituality to help them have better mental and physical
• 59:16
  health.
• 59:17
  And so this culturally specific spirituality, what I learned through interviewing several Black, St.
• 59:22
  John and loving men is that there were these universal components in the sense that I had
• 59:27
  read similar qualities across samples of people in that God is something greater than themselves, that spirituality is about connecting to something inside of them,
• 59:42
  spirituality guides them.
• 59:45
  But then there were also these culturally specific pieces where there are
• 59:51
  experiences of oppression influenced how they understood their relationship with God.
• 59:56
  They also talked about how for them spirituality was about unifying both the masculine and feminine energy within them.
• 1:00:06
  They also talked about how for them spirituality was something that was not only a experience that happened in their
• 1:00:18
  in their in one lifetime or in in this form, but something that continued throughout multiple lifetimes.
• 1:00:26
  And so and when they imagine God, a lot of them saw God as this energetic or this androgynous figure instead of this masculine feminine figure or even a feminine figure.
• 1:00:39
  Gotcha, gotcha.
• 1:00:41
  Interesting.
• 1:00:42
  Yeah, and I appreciate you kind of
• 1:00:46
  kind of making that sort of division sort of between spirituality and religion because I think there's, and again, Dr.
• 1:00:55
  Barker went ahead her on, she talked a lot about sort of that piece.
• 1:00:58
  I think...
• 1:01:01
  Yeah, I mean, I think it's it is it.
• 1:01:04
  And this has also been a real struggle for me with sort of just religion in general.
• 1:01:08
  And, even the concepts of Bible and Quran and all these other things, you know, is that these are all, you know, as much as the book likes to claim these are the words of the
• 1:01:20
  divine, you know, it was man holding the pen.
• 1:01:23
  Exactly.
• 1:01:24
  And
• 1:01:25
  let's be specific, holding the pen, men holding the pen, you know, for that purpose.
• 1:01:31
  also just specific to the Bible, the Bible itself is, you know, translated across sort of three different languages before it gets to English.
• 1:01:42
  so lost in translation is definitely, you know, part of
• 1:01:47
  what's made so many problems in our world.
• 1:01:49
  And so I really liked the idea of thinking about spirituality and I know lots of folks in those churches would call that, know, sort of sacrilegious or whatever, you know, a white
• 1:01:59
  supremacy, like you said.
• 1:02:00
  So I love that sort of concept of spirituality.
• 1:02:02
  That's something I've been sort of trying to kind of connect with more and more in kind of recent years is, and it's hard to sort of, I think it's hard.
• 1:02:11
  when you've kind of had religion influence you in so many ways throughout your whole life, it's hard to sort of just go to spirituality and not feel like you're still, you know,
• 1:02:25
  caught in that religious sort of grasp in a way.
• 1:02:29
  And that's something I struggle with.
• 1:02:31
  I can't stand the religions, but I'm also not...
• 1:02:35
  so egocentric to think that, you know, we as humans are the end all and be all of the universe.
• 1:02:41
  You know, there's gotta be more and I, and there is more because I feel it.
• 1:02:46
  I see it happening all the time and didn't in different groups and in these conversations that I'm having.
• 1:02:52
  So yeah, it's, it's, I do love that.
• 1:02:55
  Well, I think I just wanted to ask about kind of another sort of jargony term.
• 1:02:59
  Yeah.
• 1:02:59
  because I do have a lot of folks listening that are in kind of the psychology and kind of research sort of realm and academia.
• 1:03:07
  And you've referenced a lot sort of to pre-colonial Africa and how that's embedded in your work.
• 1:03:13
  And I've seen a couple of times you refer to doing your work within an Afrocentric theoretical framework.
• 1:03:22
  and something called optimal conceptual theory.
• 1:03:26
  I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about what that is and what that's about.
• 1:03:30
  Yeah, my students will love this.
• 1:03:32
  I actually just put all of my graduate students through an oral exam where they had to explain to me African-centered psychology and optimal conceptual theory.
• 1:03:42
  wow.
• 1:03:42
  I said, if you don't know anything else when you leave this lab, you will be able to explain this.
• 1:03:47
  So now I'm being put on the spot.
• 1:03:49
  So listed up students, this is why I gave it to Oral Zem.
• 1:03:53
  So when you're on a podcast in the future, you can explain it.
• 1:03:57
  All right.
• 1:03:57
  So I'm trying to do this quickly.
• 1:03:59
  African-centered psychology again is a distinct discipline of psychology that is separate from Euro-centered psychology.
• 1:04:08
  So we know Euro-centered psychology,
• 1:04:10
  is not only a psychology that is based on the ideas of white older men, particularly, but also women, but predominantly men.
• 1:04:19
  It's also based on the psychology that is very much pathology-laden.
• 1:04:23
  Like Freud was about sex and aggression.
• 1:04:25
  It was like, why are we basing whole human lot, know, motivations on sex aggression and unconscious conflict, you know, all these things like that, right?
• 1:04:34
  So African-centered psychologists are saying these things don't work.
• 1:04:38
  for us.
• 1:04:39
  mean, Watson's talking about behavior.
• 1:04:41
  could control behavior.
• 1:04:42
  So again, power control, all of these things embedded in Eurocentric psychology.
• 1:04:46
  so African-centric psychologists are saying, we can't find healing in the oppressive forces in Eurocentric psychology.
• 1:04:56
  So we need to go back to pre-colonial African societies.
• 1:05:01
  And again, I want to make sure we're not talking about those societies as monoliths.
• 1:05:06
  Of course there's diversity and
• 1:05:07
  and they're heterogeneous, right?
• 1:05:09
  But what we're talking about are the themes that we see across a multitude of societies.
• 1:05:17
  like everyone in the South isn't the same.
• 1:05:20
  Every family in the South is the same, but there are themes across families in the South, right?
• 1:05:24
  So the same thing with those pre-colonial African values, we're talking about themes.
• 1:05:29
  And some of the themes we see are,
• 1:05:32
  an emphasis on spiritual and material unity, meaning that the spiritual world has a integral part in our physical lives.
• 1:05:40
  We see a theme of interdependence and collectivity, meaning that people operating the group and what happens to me influences you and so on and so forth, right?
• 1:05:50
  The South Africans call that Ubuntu, I am, because we are a person as a person through other person, right?
• 1:05:57
  We also see a theme of self-knowledge, right?
• 1:06:00
  That what it means to understand ourselves, it's not just based on this individual since like, I'm funny, I'm cute, I'm this or that, but it's also connected to our ancestors and
• 1:06:12
  the community around us.
• 1:06:14
  Like our worth is not just how much money we make, but it's who we are in our relationships.
• 1:06:22
  So there's a priority on relationships and not material.
• 1:06:25
  acquisitions, not getting the best grades, not just being able to recite a whole bunch of knowledge from a book, but what are you doing with that knowledge?
• 1:06:36
  How are others to heal with that knowledge?
• 1:06:40
  So those pioneering black psychologists like Dr.
• 1:06:43
  Wade Nobles, like Dr.
• 1:06:44
  Naim Akbar, like Dr.
• 1:06:46
  Lynn James Myers were saying, how can we mine the vast
• 1:06:52
  in-depth understanding of these Africans who lived millennia before to help our people.
• 1:07:00
  Yeah.
• 1:07:00
  So that's what African-centered psychology is.
• 1:07:04
  from, is the illumination of the human spirit.
• 1:07:08
  And from an African-centered perspective, what it means to be human is to be spirit incarnate.
• 1:07:13
  And therefore what wellbeing is, is not just the absence of disease,
• 1:07:19
  But well-being is how aligned we are with our true nature, which is spiritual.
• 1:07:26
  So that's the goal of psychology and therapy and healing from an African-centered perspective.
• 1:07:33
  not how do we decrease anxiety symptoms so people can go back to work.
• 1:07:38
  It's how do we help people be more themselves, be more whole, be more alive, their higher selves.
• 1:07:43
  Yeah.
• 1:07:44
  And so optimal conceptual theory is one particular
• 1:07:48
  theory up under that large discipline of African-centered psychology.
• 1:07:53
  And I wanna say that again, African-centered psychology is a discipline of study.
• 1:07:57
  Meaning there are many different theories, theories, many different therapeutic approaches under the umbrella of African-centered psychology.
• 1:08:07
  The same way that we have behaviorism and humanism and psychoanalysis and CBT.
• 1:08:12
  up under the umbrella of Eurocentric psychology.
• 1:08:15
  We have into therapy, have belief systems analysis, we have culturalization all up under the umbrella of African centered psychology.
• 1:08:25
  And so OCT, optimal conceptual theory is one theory under the umbrella of African centered psychology, which was developed and divined through Dr.
• 1:08:37
  Lyndon James Myers, who was also a past president of
• 1:08:41
  the Association of Black Psychologists and basically she says that the way people behave and act, respond to understand and make meaning of their world is based on their belief
• 1:08:50
  systems.
• 1:08:51
  And she says she proposes two particular belief systems on a spectrum.
• 1:08:56
  There's the optimal worldview and the suboptimal worldview.
• 1:08:59
  Suboptimal worldview is aligned with what we would call Eurocentric values, individualism, capitalism.
• 1:09:07
  The deficit discourse.
• 1:09:09
  deficit discourse and optimal worldview, which is much more aligned with those pre-colonial African values, like the highest value being in relationships, spiritual
• 1:09:18
  material unity, that this knowledge, this approach to understanding the world from a both and perspective rather than either or, approach to the world as collaborative and not
• 1:09:31
  competitive.
• 1:09:32
  So Dr.
• 1:09:32
  Meyer says that all of us
• 1:09:34
  because of white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, et cetera, and the suboptimal worldview, affects us all.
• 1:09:43
  And so we all are going to move up and down that continuum.
• 1:09:48
  But the goal of African-centered psychology, and she created this particular therapeutic approach called belief system analysis, based on optimal conceptual theory, is to move
• 1:09:57
  people so that we operate more towards that optimal worldview, rather than the suboptimal worldview.
• 1:10:05
  well done.
• 1:10:06
  Six minutes.
• 1:10:07
  Yeah.
• 1:10:08
  How did your students do?
• 1:10:10
  They're working on it, but they're students.
• 1:10:12
  That's amazing.
• 1:10:13
  We've only got about a minute left.
• 1:10:15
  I just want to thank you for all the good work you're doing.
• 1:10:18
  I wanted to touch on the last piece of your identity, but I know we're out of time here in that you're also a choreographer.
• 1:10:25
  I'm a dancer and an actor and folks can certainly learn about all that on your website, which we'll link them to and maybe something we can dig into another time.
• 1:10:33
  was really, really cool having you on the podcast and really cool to finally get you here and learn about all the great stuff you're doing.
• 1:10:39
  And I really appreciate you coming on.
• 1:10:40
  Thank you so much for having me.
• 1:10:42
  This has been great.
• 1:10:43
  Awesome.