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(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Hi, welcome back to Black Healing Remix, the space where we remix discussions on wellness,

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healing, liberation, decolonization, and much, much more. Today, I am joined by Dr. Evan Auguste.

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He is a brilliant mind, also a great colleague, who's doing work at the intersection of forensic

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psychology, decolonization, liberation psychology, and much more for years.

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In our conversation today, we dive into ancestral memory. We dive into the work that he's doing in

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Haiti. We dive into what does it mean to do black work as a forensic psychologist? How do we actually

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cultivate liberation? It's a very layered discussion that goes into masculinity and much

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more. Can't wait for you to check it out and let us know what you think. Welcome, everybody. I have

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to say that I am super excited, thrilled, and honored to be in conversation with a colleague

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who I have just the utmost respect for, who's someone I feel like is really carrying the

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lineage of sacred healing work for our people across the diaspora. He is someone who we've had

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many conversations like that of where I've been given me much life, given me much joy.

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I'm just really excited to welcome Dr. Evan Auguste for a conversation today on healing,

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racism, black communities, African communities, Haitian communities, all these nuances. We're

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about to get into it because he's a brilliant and beautiful light. Welcome, Evan. How are you

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doing today? How are you doing? Now, I'm feeling good. Now, I'm feeling great because sometimes

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you do this work so often, having somebody say that to you, that feels good. That's who I've

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wanted to be. To see you saying that, that feels good. How I'm doing is a bigger question.

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I think I'm feeling the weight of this political moment. I think I'm watching it really tear at

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a lot of the people that I love. I'm watching them try to adjust, shift, relearn safety.

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That's tough. I'm sitting with that because it's inherent to the work that we both do,

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how to show up with that day by day. There's the anchoring in the fact that people have

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not been in this particular moment, but people have been in similar moments before,

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carried each other through, held each other through. I'm trying to find my pockets of warmth

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amidst everything else going on. That's where I'm at right now.

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I appreciate you sharing that. That resonates with me as well. I feel also this heavy grief.

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It feels global. It feels diasporic, but also goes beyond the Black and African diaspora.

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It feels like this grief at, this is where we're at. With all the wisdom and insight that we know,

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how could this be allowed to happen? I'm carrying that grief for the veneer, because it has been

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a veneer that is no longer there. Some of us who were not aware of that veneer are now much more

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clear about where we are at and what context we live in. I'm also holding and feeling this

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polarization, not polarization, maybe it is. It's like a push-pull of this ancestral power,

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recognition, lineage. All that really feels like it's coming in through me in a different way,

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even as I'm holding this grief for what this moment means for our folks and what it means for

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the future. It's very nuanced, because I don't want to be in that place where I'm psychologically

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gaslighting people. The SS is going to be like, girl, hold on now. It's too much.

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Also, I want to hold that we do have power, and also hold that these systems have power too.

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We're in that context. I feel like I'm holding both of those things while

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trying to do healing work, like you're doing healing work, and seeing beauty in it, and also

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seeing a lot of sadness. I think you named it perfectly. I was talking with somebody,

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I can't remember the specific person. I think it was my colleague, Nkemka Anyewu.

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There's a degree to which we're existing in a moment where people, for the longest time,

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have ignored ancestors intentionally, what that means, the wisdom of that.

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At times, you get the opposite, the romanticization of that. We have ancestors,

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that means everything is going to be okay. Well, no, listen, we got ancestors that lost.

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We got ancestors that failed. All of that is also true. I think that's what invites

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nonetheless precarity into it. Because no, yeah, we still have to fight for this particular moment,

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and there is no guarantee that we will win, but we have no other option than to try,

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is what it is. Absolutely. When we get to that realism, I'm always in community spaces,

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somebody's like, call all the ancestors down, but hold on, exactly who?

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I don't know if I want Uncle Mookie to come. I don't really know what he got to offer right now.

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I think this blanket that everyone who transitions into that realm is inherently

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gaining some great wisdom. For me, and I think many of my colleagues and friends who

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do ancestral work, we know that ain't true. We know that sometimes they come and be like,

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I'm not going to do that, Grandma, but I appreciate that offering.

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But that may not be the direction. Understanding that there are benevolent ancestors, people who

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have wisdom and things to give us, but I think that sometimes there's an assumption that a

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transition means that that wisdom is somehow elevated on a different level, as opposed to it

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still being some of the embodied wisdom that they carry throughout this lifetime. They're still

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valuable and helpful and insightful, but it doesn't mean that all the ancestors got a word,

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because as somebody doing a lot of work around my lineage, there's a lot of amazing indigenous

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folks in my lineage, but also there's some white folks in my lineage. There's some people who are

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a little bit more hostile towards other parts of my lineage. How do we talk about that,

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particularly as African Americans who have that complex ancestral history? It's not just like,

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I've had those experiences where I go get Akashic Records readings or I have spiritual experiences,

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and I'm like, oh, I'm expecting this ancestral moment in my meditation to come up. It's going

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to be a big, tall African man. It's like, so that's clearly an indigenous person who's very

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short. You got to challenge some of your essentialist blackness stuff here, buddy,

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because you've got a much more complex heritage, but that hasn't been held very well in our spaces.

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That's exactly it. There's two things I'm thinking. One is there's this deep understanding

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and I think yearning for ancestral power and guidance, but this idea that it somehow renders

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what we have to do somehow less complex. These relationships that we, again, we talk about this

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all the time psychologically, interpersonally. Again, you do a lot of healing work, so people

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know how deeply complex working through pain and harm and contradiction and hope and love are with

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people that you can see eye to eye. Why do you think that would be any way less complex

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when we start talking about spirit work, when we start talking about ancestral work? What makes

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you think that would be any more unidirectional? Yes, come on now, say it.

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It makes no type of sense, which is, to address to the other point, is why I love the Amos Wilson

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quote. I don't have it all off the top of my head, but he talks about the real African-centered

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scholar takes what he knows from tradition and creatively applies it to this moment

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to liberate people. That's what it means to be in African-centered tradition. It's not about

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blindly moving through and supporting anything that you don't deeply understand. It's about

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consistent critical analysis and relationship to that. All these pieces mean, no, this doesn't

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render anything more simple or more shallow. It invites a whole range of opportunity,

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but again, that's also the opportunity for hurt, for pain, for betrayal. It just means that we

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have a full range of things that are applied as soon as we begin to invite all those other

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possibilities in. Absolutely. I think the invitation of that nuance and that applied

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framework, to me, is the distinguishing factor between how someone's doing their ancestral work

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and their engagement with their work. All those questions and those nuances coming into

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the space, or is it just this blanket, all the ancestors and blah, blah, blah, and the spiritual

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world is always like, well, this is a much more complicated mechanism that we're engaging in my

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experience. I think what's also really complicated as someone who has...

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I mean, it's not unusual. All of us have a very complicated lineages, but I think that when I

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started really accepting that, how do I ancestrally contend with that? In a way that isn't

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the ways in which we know Black people in the South be like, I got Indian in my blood. Okay,

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girl, well, that's not... Using it sometimes as a way to deflect away from Blackness and

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from Africanity, or using their history of, I had a White person in my family to do the same

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thing to establish subtly or not so subtly that I'm not like the rest of y'all niggas. That's

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what the comment is, right? That's really what it basically is. So how do we own these complex

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lineages without doing that, without serving anti-Blackness? How do we own the deep enmeshment

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that Indigenous American communities and African American communities have with each other,

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from maroon communities to the moment we were forcibly brought here? How do we name all that

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legacy and how that's in our spirits, in our genetic memory, without using it as a tool to

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deflect away from Africanity or Blackness? That's the piece that I'm grappling with in some spaces

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where I see people say those things. I'm having a hard time with how your juxtaposition of your

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ancestry and how it's being used. That's exactly it. The simplest way I think about this is with

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intention, right? Because you're right, these things are irreducibly complex. And so what that

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means is, no, like ancestor work isn't something that you get. And now this thing makes sense.

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Come on now, come on.

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This is, we're talking about a lifetime of practice. I want to be super clear. So everybody

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watching this, I think, again, I want to be real clear. YOLO, YOLO my superhero. So that's why I'm

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here. YOLO my superhero. So YOLO, the journey that YOLO is going on, I'm still, I would say,

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a few steps. I'm trying to get to where you were at and we try to both go farther, right? There's

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a lot of work that I've even been doing recently where I lost my grandmother on my maternal side,

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we called her moms, two years ago. And even recently, consulting with a few people, building

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an altar, honoring like them, their histories, learning more stories so I could have those as

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central as I'm honoring what she gifted me. And I had a moment where I was sitting there one day,

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I was thinking like, the woman that I knew wouldn't want anything to do with this right here.

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She wouldn't want anything to do with this altar that I placed. That goes for my other

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grandmother too. Both of them wanted nothing to do with that. So what does it mean to nonetheless

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be intentional about honoring who I knew them to be while they were here, while at the same time

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really taking seriously that, yeah, they experienced specific particular forms of,

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I don't even want to call it, we call it miseducation around their ancestral conditions

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so they had such a negative relationship. My father tells a story about my,

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in Haiti, my grandfather didn't practice voodoo, but he was a fan. He understood it to be an

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essential part of Haitian culture. And so he would have all of these, what he would call like

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artifacts to honor all around the house. My father says one day my grandmother went in the room,

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the office, looked all of it, took it while he wasn't there and threw it all out. We don't want

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anything to do with this. Right. Because of her education, she grew up, she went to those

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Catholic schools. That was how she understood to be good in the world. And so when we talk about

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intention, consistent grappling with what does that mean to honor somebody the way that I believe

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that we can honor somebody, the way that we've honored somebody for millennia and the person I

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want to honor for damn sure wanted nothing to do with any of this. Consistent contradiction.

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Oh yeah, no, you're right. It's interesting because as we were talking, I want to share

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this like, yes, it is the contradiction. And it's also the nuance of what I want to say is

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as someone who also comes from communities where altar building in that framework is foreign and

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not seen as something to be celebrated and uplifted. But I also come from the same community

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that builds altars when people pass in public spaces that has altars in their homes that like,

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that they won't call an altar. You know what I mean? Like, they don't use that language.

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But when I go, I'm like, oh, this is a whole bunch of pictures of my grandma with all her artifacts.

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Okay, this is an altar, but you don't see this as an altar. Or whenever we're in any community,

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Black community across the world, when someone transitions and you see a public space where that

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person may have transitioned and not been harmed, there's an altar out there. Now, would all people

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use that language? No. And it's really interesting when you, I mean, the same thing with my

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grandmother's church. Like, my grandmother's Southern Baptist. I remember going to that church

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and I'd be like, this is the most African shit I've ever seen in my life. But they would not,

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she would not make those connections. And actually I have some internalized ideas that

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were really deeply anti-Black around it, right? That I'd be like, oh, no way. And so sometimes

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the practices of what's happening, what's in our bodies, what's in our practice is different from

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the ideological kind of defensiveness that we built around them, you know what I mean? Which is a

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really precarious and awkward place. Because I hear you like, you know, how do you honor their

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legacy and know that they wouldn't want anything to do with these kinds of traditions, hypothetically,

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in this framework, but maybe in a different framework, they might recognize it, you know?

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I agree. Exactly. I love the point that you made. This is one of Nyle Ackbar's thesis,

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where he says like, white people have you thinking that you can't do ancestor worship,

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that you can't do ancestor veneration. He said, look at Mount Rushmore, that's ancestor worship.

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You look at what they name all these schools and all these streets, that's ancestor worship.

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And telling you that you can't do the same. Come on, come on, come on.

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In an intentional, ancestral way. So I think, no, that's a brilliant point that you're making.

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Yeah, because the one piece I want to say, this is what I try to do in my work also, is when we're

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more intentional about that ancestor worship, when we dig into who these people were and the energy

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they tried to deliver, that's when we discover so many more political strategies. I was talking with

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a student of mine a few months ago. I was talking to him about African-centered psychology, and he

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said, I'm interested in this to the degree that it can help me politically in this moment.

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And I thought that was fascinating because it's true, there's a lot of people who engage in

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spirit work at times to bring them further away, to mystify what they're experiencing.

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To bring them somehow away from face-to-face with their political condition. I think

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Fanon even talks about that at times. Religion helps people erase their

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tangible material political position. But when you dig into the legacies that we're talking about,

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it's the exact opposite. For a lot of people, it's the exact opposite.

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And so in the healing work that I've been engaged in, looking at the legacies of Thomas Hilliard,

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of Louis Mars, of people like this who are so intentional about how do we liberate people,

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how do we heal people, how we shape systems around this. Again, that's a level of ancestral

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worship that directly connects to how we give free and how we hold each other in these moments.

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So when we're intentional about the ancestral worship, that's a piece.

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It gives us new strategies and new possibilities for meeting this moment.

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It speaks to what the, I'm going to say the white girls, it's not correct, but the people

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call the spiritual bypassing. That's the language they've used. When you use the

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spirituality to obey the reality of what's happening in your current political moment.

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And then when I think about the practices that I've inherited, the practices I'm still growing

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and learning in, they're all about engagement with the political moment and strategies.

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And so yeah, 100,000% with you on that piece. Something else you said that really resonated

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with me about the ancestral piece that I wanted to drop in. Oh, so like one thing that kind of

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connects to me with that story about your grandmother, my grandmother gave me a Bible

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that I own. I'm not a Christian and I think Jesus is amazing, but that's not my path.

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And I remember during the fire challenges that we're having here in the city, I was

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potentially going to have to evacuate. And I started looking at your home about what am I

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going to take? And I have my whole altar, right? But the thing that I keep on that altar that

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connects to my grandmother is that Bible, which is the ways in which I link to her.

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And even though it's still on my altar, which she may not be, she might've been like, what is

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going on on this, right? You know what I mean? But it's one way that I respect and honor what

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she held as a framework, even as I hold it within the context of my own.

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I loved it. I was talking with him yesterday, who another person you would love, his name is

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Naya Toussaint. He's down in Florida getting his PhD, who did a lot of really great programming

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when he was over at the union seminary church or the union theological seminary, rather.

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And they did a lot of work of connecting what they called their series. It was

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decolonizing Christianity, I believe. And they spoke to the ways that when we look at,

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again, specific ancestors, that this plurality is also a part of that legacy.

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That people were able to hold so many different modes of practice and spirit and understanding

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and knowing together, right? That brought them closer, that helped them, again, plan, scheme,

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dream, shape space, right? And the moment, again, people started to get,

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I don't know what to ask.

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Lenny James Meyers talked about a lack of dienodal thinking, right? Became too black and

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white in how they saw things. It immediately reduced the amount of complexity in ways that

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people understood that they could be. Again, think about the Haitian revolution. I think

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that's a great example. You have a revolution that starts with a voodoo ceremony by Bukhman Dutty,

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who people talk about the book. Some people say he's talking about the Quran. So already we're

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talking about distinct modes of practice involved in one of the biggest revolutions that everybody

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loves to name and honor. We're doing a project on intergenerational trauma. And one of the pieces

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that people name is the incomplete consciousness, that people weren't fully able to lean all the

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way into the precepts of the revolution, that multiplicity and plurality that shaped their

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desire for freedom and immediately tried to reproduce the French Republic and IET.

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So you had these visions of the lacu, right? Not just as an idea, but a political superstructure

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for how we exist together, the way we practice, the way we see each other, and how that immediately

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comes into conflict with these ideas of we want to be like France, but we want to make it black.

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It leads to a lot of those same colonial reproductions and relationships that end

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up being harmful. So again, it extends back when you remove the possibility of understanding the

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fullness of what our ancestors have been and honor the complexity, the I'm calling contradictions,

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you're saying both then, I love both of these things, right? It reduced the way that we can

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exist in the world, right? You know, I think about that in relationship to so much things,

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just like the ways in which the, it's the, it's an under complication of even self, right? The

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understanding of ourselves, as well as like, you know, how we're able to engage the world. I'm

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thinking about gender. I'm thinking about like, you know, I'm thinking about sexuality. I'm

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thinking about all these things that like these binary concepts we have, which really limit and

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restrict us, right? One of the ways I think about this, what you've raised up is that sometimes when

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I'm holding space with black men, I often hear men say, as a man, I can't. For me, I've always

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curious about that framing because I see how this gendered concept, because what I really,

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what I'm hearing when someone says that is saying, my gender concept will not allow me to,

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right? Like, you know what I mean? And it's like, it becomes a defense mechanism, right?

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And it's often followed by, as a man, I can't cry. So it's like my gender concept tells me,

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holds me, help keeps me from leaning into crime, right? Like, you know what I mean? And like,

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when I have the free frame like that, it's always interesting how men are like, well, that means

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that it's me in some levels. I was like, well, it's like less, it's layered, right? But I think

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about like how these concepts can keep, can hold hostage our imagination and not help us see the

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full range of who we are and what's possible for our lives. And I think that like, that's the real

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danger to me in the binaries of the world. It's like, they're so polarized and it's like, well,

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there's a whole spectrum of existence and spirit and presence and power that's here. How do we

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lean into that and accept the multiplicities of who we are? You know, I'm sorry, the Black man

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piece is really on top of my head because it's cool. So we just did a Black Masculine Reimagined

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Summit in LA. We had about 55 folks, Black men, straight men, gay men, trans men, whole spectrum

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of people there, right? And there were so many things that came up in conversations and that

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have come up with conversations in general with Black men that I'm always like, we have really

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internalized deeply racist ideas about who we are. Like, so for example, this thing, this wasn't

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at a BMR, but it's a story I've been really sitting with for a while. There was a brother,

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and I have his permission to tell the story, but be identified. I was talking to him and working

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with him through some stuff around his partner, his own wife, or the wife at the time, excuse me.

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And he was talking about how he was really kind of struggling because he couldn't sexually show

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up with her. And so I was like, okay, so we're just kind of asking more questions. And then I

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get to this point where I'm like, you're really angry at her. You don't like her. You seem to be

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upset with her. Usually there's a lot of distrust. He's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, but I don't got no

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reason why I still shouldn't be able to get it up and, you know, fuck. I'm like, wait, hold on.

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And so I started to realize, I was like, wait, there's this thing that many Black men have

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internalized that despite the fact that you are, your body and your spirit are saying no.

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Exactly.

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His trust was broken with this woman. And yet you still feel that like, as a Black man, I'm still

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supposed to, regardless of whatever I'm feeling, whatever I know to be true, be able to be this kind

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of sexual being for her. And when I engaged him more, I was like, why do you think that as a

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human being, when all your spirit and your energy is saying no, why would your body say yes? He was

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like, I guess I just thought that I should always be hard. And I was like, well, where'd you get

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that idea from? Where'd that come from? You know what I mean? And this is a brother who's like,

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who's like tall, big, like, you know, and you see all the stuff that's been put on his spirit.

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And so I say that to think about all the ways in which for Black men, for Black women, for all of

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us, these ideas internalize, erase us from our humanity, right? You know what I mean? Like limit

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our understanding of like, hold up, you're a human being here. Like you're having an emotional

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experience. This is what, you're not supposed to still perform our work, even, you know, like,

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of course there's going to be consequences. And so I think about that a lot with those concepts

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you shared. It's just something that enrages me. And I can hold it in the context of patriarchy,

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but I feel really sometimes an immense amount of grief for how I see so many Black men and

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masculine folks suffering because of the paradigm that's holding so much of their spirit and their

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joy hostage.

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Hello, I'm Donnie Frazier, BEAM's digital content and community engagement consultant.

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I'm thrilled to tell you about our program, Black Masculinity Reimagined.

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This community and skills building initiative supports Black men and masculine folks in

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addressing mental health and community violence. We offer events both virtually and in person

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across the country where participants can learn new strategies for connection,

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coping, and self-care while working to dismantle patriarchy and support collective Black mental

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health. Learn more at beam.community.

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You named it so beautifully, right? And I see it in both ways because I understand that there

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are so many people who, especially if we're talking about Black men in the context of the

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United States, right? We're talking about historic experiences of domination, erasure,

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even under a lens of hypervigilance or seeking purpose and trying to find purpose through

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provision, through protection, because these are the stories that they've heard that they

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want to honor. And because it's not wrong. People need protection, right? People need

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sexual gratification, right? People want safety. And so to form your identity around that,

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in a way, it makes sense. But when you allow other people to dictate what those virtues mean,

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now you're removing the humanity of yourself from the conversation. And that's the other

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piece. When we start talking about all the different types of possibility,

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masculinity, and a lot of people know this. Masculinity can look and has looked historically

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so distinct and different depending on the groups of people that we're talking about. We have had

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a millennia. Sometimes people think there's a natural form of masculinity that just exists.

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It has manifested in so many different and distinct ways in direct needs of the community.

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And so now we're in this space where people feel like they no longer have agency to even shape

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how they show up and relate to their bodies. They relate to their partners. And I'll say,

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a lot of it is also not their fault. A lot of that comes from specific structural experiences of,

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again, erasure, of violence. And I think sometimes we miss that. And I know you know that.

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People will talk about, I don't understand why this person won't cry. Sometimes I think men

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fail to think about that in their own self-narrative. It's like, well, tell me about

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a time that you tried and what happened. Tell me about a time where you tried to

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talk about what was going on for you. Tell me about a time you tried to be sad or angry

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and what happened. And it can be violent. It can be a violent reaction. It can be an intense

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experience of rejection. It can look like hospitalization. It can look like incarceration.

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Absolutely. And they don't, sometimes people don't get told that

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structured narrative. And so just blame themselves and internalize that.

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Yes. It goes back to what I often do when I hear people say, a lot of times brothers be like,

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I can't be vulnerable with my wife. So what I'll say is like, I want to replace the,

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I want you to, I want to invite you to do a little Sinistim activity with me. I'm a,

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I'm a big Sinistim. I have all over social media, little prompts. I love a Sinistim

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because it's always interesting. I was like, I want, I want to invite you in that Sinistim,

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and replace I can't with I'm choosing to, because. And then replace it with I'm choosing

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not to be vulnerable with my wife, because. And then because took a minute. I was like,

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what's the because? Because when