(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,
healing, liberation, decolonization, and much, much more. Today, I am joined by Dr. Evan Auguste.
He is a brilliant mind, also a great colleague, who's doing work at the intersection of forensic
psychology, decolonization, liberation psychology, and much more for years.
In our conversation today, we dive into ancestral memory. We dive into the work that he's doing in
Haiti. We dive into what does it mean to do black work as a forensic psychologist? How do we actually
cultivate liberation? It's a very layered discussion that goes into masculinity and much
more. Can't wait for you to check it out and let us know what you think. Welcome, everybody. I have
to say that I am super excited, thrilled, and honored to be in conversation with a colleague
who I have just the utmost respect for, who's someone I feel like is really carrying the
lineage of sacred healing work for our people across the diaspora. He is someone who we've had
many conversations like that of where I've been given me much life, given me much joy.
I'm just really excited to welcome Dr. Evan Auguste for a conversation today on healing,
racism, black communities, African communities, Haitian communities, all these nuances. We're
about to get into it because he's a brilliant and beautiful light. Welcome, Evan. How are you
doing today? How are you doing? Now, I'm feeling good. Now, I'm feeling great because sometimes
you do this work so often, having somebody say that to you, that feels good. That's who I've
wanted to be. To see you saying that, that feels good. How I'm doing is a bigger question.
I think I'm feeling the weight of this political moment. I think I'm watching it really tear at
a lot of the people that I love. I'm watching them try to adjust, shift, relearn safety.
That's tough. I'm sitting with that because it's inherent to the work that we both do,
how to show up with that day by day. There's the anchoring in the fact that people have
not been in this particular moment, but people have been in similar moments before,
carried each other through, held each other through. I'm trying to find my pockets of warmth
amidst everything else going on. That's where I'm at right now.
I appreciate you sharing that. That resonates with me as well. I feel also this heavy grief.
It feels global. It feels diasporic, but also goes beyond the Black and African diaspora.
It feels like this grief at, this is where we're at. With all the wisdom and insight that we know,
how could this be allowed to happen? I'm carrying that grief for the veneer, because it has been
a veneer that is no longer there. Some of us who were not aware of that veneer are now much more
clear about where we are at and what context we live in. I'm also holding and feeling this
polarization, not polarization, maybe it is. It's like a push-pull of this ancestral power,
recognition, lineage. All that really feels like it's coming in through me in a different way,
even as I'm holding this grief for what this moment means for our folks and what it means for
the future. It's very nuanced, because I don't want to be in that place where I'm psychologically
gaslighting people. The SS is going to be like, girl, hold on now. It's too much.
Also, I want to hold that we do have power, and also hold that these systems have power too.
We're in that context. I feel like I'm holding both of those things while
trying to do healing work, like you're doing healing work, and seeing beauty in it, and also
seeing a lot of sadness. I think you named it perfectly. I was talking with somebody,
I can't remember the specific person. I think it was my colleague, Nkemka Anyewu.
There's a degree to which we're existing in a moment where people, for the longest time,
have ignored ancestors intentionally, what that means, the wisdom of that.
At times, you get the opposite, the romanticization of that. We have ancestors,
that means everything is going to be okay. Well, no, listen, we got ancestors that lost.
We got ancestors that failed. All of that is also true. I think that's what invites
nonetheless precarity into it. Because no, yeah, we still have to fight for this particular moment,
and there is no guarantee that we will win, but we have no other option than to try,
is what it is. Absolutely. When we get to that realism, I'm always in community spaces,
somebody's like, call all the ancestors down, but hold on, exactly who?
I don't know if I want Uncle Mookie to come. I don't really know what he got to offer right now.
I think this blanket that everyone who transitions into that realm is inherently
gaining some great wisdom. For me, and I think many of my colleagues and friends who
do ancestral work, we know that ain't true. We know that sometimes they come and be like,
I'm not going to do that, Grandma, but I appreciate that offering.
But that may not be the direction. Understanding that there are benevolent ancestors, people who
have wisdom and things to give us, but I think that sometimes there's an assumption that a
transition means that that wisdom is somehow elevated on a different level, as opposed to it
still being some of the embodied wisdom that they carry throughout this lifetime. They're still
valuable and helpful and insightful, but it doesn't mean that all the ancestors got a word,
because as somebody doing a lot of work around my lineage, there's a lot of amazing indigenous
folks in my lineage, but also there's some white folks in my lineage. There's some people who are
a little bit more hostile towards other parts of my lineage. How do we talk about that,
particularly as African Americans who have that complex ancestral history? It's not just like,
I've had those experiences where I go get Akashic Records readings or I have spiritual experiences,
and I'm like, oh, I'm expecting this ancestral moment in my meditation to come up. It's going
to be a big, tall African man. It's like, so that's clearly an indigenous person who's very
short. You got to challenge some of your essentialist blackness stuff here, buddy,
because you've got a much more complex heritage, but that hasn't been held very well in our spaces.
That's exactly it. There's two things I'm thinking. One is there's this deep understanding
and I think yearning for ancestral power and guidance, but this idea that it somehow renders
what we have to do somehow less complex. These relationships that we, again, we talk about this
all the time psychologically, interpersonally. Again, you do a lot of healing work, so people
know how deeply complex working through pain and harm and contradiction and hope and love are with
people that you can see eye to eye. Why do you think that would be any way less complex
when we start talking about spirit work, when we start talking about ancestral work? What makes
you think that would be any more unidirectional? Yes, come on now, say it.
It makes no type of sense, which is, to address to the other point, is why I love the Amos Wilson
quote. I don't have it all off the top of my head, but he talks about the real African-centered
scholar takes what he knows from tradition and creatively applies it to this moment
to liberate people. That's what it means to be in African-centered tradition. It's not about
blindly moving through and supporting anything that you don't deeply understand. It's about
consistent critical analysis and relationship to that. All these pieces mean, no, this doesn't
render anything more simple or more shallow. It invites a whole range of opportunity,
but again, that's also the opportunity for hurt, for pain, for betrayal. It just means that we
have a full range of things that are applied as soon as we begin to invite all those other
possibilities in. Absolutely. I think the invitation of that nuance and that applied
framework, to me, is the distinguishing factor between how someone's doing their ancestral work
and their engagement with their work. All those questions and those nuances coming into
the space, or is it just this blanket, all the ancestors and blah, blah, blah, and the spiritual
world is always like, well, this is a much more complicated mechanism that we're engaging in my
experience. I think what's also really complicated as someone who has...
I mean, it's not unusual. All of us have a very complicated lineages, but I think that when I
started really accepting that, how do I ancestrally contend with that? In a way that isn't
the ways in which we know Black people in the South be like, I got Indian in my blood. Okay,
girl, well, that's not... Using it sometimes as a way to deflect away from Blackness and
from Africanity, or using their history of, I had a White person in my family to do the same
thing to establish subtly or not so subtly that I'm not like the rest of y'all niggas. That's
what the comment is, right? That's really what it basically is. So how do we own these complex
lineages without doing that, without serving anti-Blackness? How do we own the deep enmeshment
that Indigenous American communities and African American communities have with each other,
from maroon communities to the moment we were forcibly brought here? How do we name all that
legacy and how that's in our spirits, in our genetic memory, without using it as a tool to
deflect away from Africanity or Blackness? That's the piece that I'm grappling with in some spaces
where I see people say those things. I'm having a hard time with how your juxtaposition of your
ancestry and how it's being used. That's exactly it. The simplest way I think about this is with
intention, right? Because you're right, these things are irreducibly complex. And so what that
means is, no, like ancestor work isn't something that you get. And now this thing makes sense.
Come on now, come on.
This is, we're talking about a lifetime of practice. I want to be super clear. So everybody
watching this, I think, again, I want to be real clear. YOLO, YOLO my superhero. So that's why I'm
here. YOLO my superhero. So YOLO, the journey that YOLO is going on, I'm still, I would say,
a few steps. I'm trying to get to where you were at and we try to both go farther, right? There's
a lot of work that I've even been doing recently where I lost my grandmother on my maternal side,
we called her moms, two years ago. And even recently, consulting with a few people, building
an altar, honoring like them, their histories, learning more stories so I could have those as
central as I'm honoring what she gifted me. And I had a moment where I was sitting there one day,
I was thinking like, the woman that I knew wouldn't want anything to do with this right here.
She wouldn't want anything to do with this altar that I placed. That goes for my other
grandmother too. Both of them wanted nothing to do with that. So what does it mean to nonetheless
be intentional about honoring who I knew them to be while they were here, while at the same time
really taking seriously that, yeah, they experienced specific particular forms of,
I don't even want to call it, we call it miseducation around their ancestral conditions
so they had such a negative relationship. My father tells a story about my,
in Haiti, my grandfather didn't practice voodoo, but he was a fan. He understood it to be an
essential part of Haitian culture. And so he would have all of these, what he would call like
artifacts to honor all around the house. My father says one day my grandmother went in the room,
the office, looked all of it, took it while he wasn't there and threw it all out. We don't want
anything to do with this. Right. Because of her education, she grew up, she went to those
Catholic schools. That was how she understood to be good in the world. And so when we talk about
intention, consistent grappling with what does that mean to honor somebody the way that I believe
that we can honor somebody, the way that we've honored somebody for millennia and the person I
want to honor for damn sure wanted nothing to do with any of this. Consistent contradiction.
Oh yeah, no, you're right. It's interesting because as we were talking, I want to share
this like, yes, it is the contradiction. And it's also the nuance of what I want to say is
as someone who also comes from communities where altar building in that framework is foreign and
not seen as something to be celebrated and uplifted. But I also come from the same community
that builds altars when people pass in public spaces that has altars in their homes that like,
that they won't call an altar. You know what I mean? Like, they don't use that language.
But when I go, I'm like, oh, this is a whole bunch of pictures of my grandma with all her artifacts.
Okay, this is an altar, but you don't see this as an altar. Or whenever we're in any community,
Black community across the world, when someone transitions and you see a public space where that
person may have transitioned and not been harmed, there's an altar out there. Now, would all people
use that language? No. And it's really interesting when you, I mean, the same thing with my
grandmother's church. Like, my grandmother's Southern Baptist. I remember going to that church
and I'd be like, this is the most African shit I've ever seen in my life. But they would not,
she would not make those connections. And actually I have some internalized ideas that
were really deeply anti-Black around it, right? That I'd be like, oh, no way. And so sometimes
the practices of what's happening, what's in our bodies, what's in our practice is different from
the ideological kind of defensiveness that we built around them, you know what I mean? Which is a
really precarious and awkward place. Because I hear you like, you know, how do you honor their
legacy and know that they wouldn't want anything to do with these kinds of traditions, hypothetically,
in this framework, but maybe in a different framework, they might recognize it, you know?
I agree. Exactly. I love the point that you made. This is one of Nyle Ackbar's thesis,
where he says like, white people have you thinking that you can't do ancestor worship,
that you can't do ancestor veneration. He said, look at Mount Rushmore, that's ancestor worship.
You look at what they name all these schools and all these streets, that's ancestor worship.
And telling you that you can't do the same. Come on, come on, come on.
In an intentional, ancestral way. So I think, no, that's a brilliant point that you're making.
Yeah, because the one piece I want to say, this is what I try to do in my work also, is when we're
more intentional about that ancestor worship, when we dig into who these people were and the energy
they tried to deliver, that's when we discover so many more political strategies. I was talking with
a student of mine a few months ago. I was talking to him about African-centered psychology, and he
said, I'm interested in this to the degree that it can help me politically in this moment.
And I thought that was fascinating because it's true, there's a lot of people who engage in
spirit work at times to bring them further away, to mystify what they're experiencing.
To bring them somehow away from face-to-face with their political condition. I think
Fanon even talks about that at times. Religion helps people erase their
tangible material political position. But when you dig into the legacies that we're talking about,
it's the exact opposite. For a lot of people, it's the exact opposite.
And so in the healing work that I've been engaged in, looking at the legacies of Thomas Hilliard,
of Louis Mars, of people like this who are so intentional about how do we liberate people,
how do we heal people, how we shape systems around this. Again, that's a level of ancestral
worship that directly connects to how we give free and how we hold each other in these moments.
So when we're intentional about the ancestral worship, that's a piece.
It gives us new strategies and new possibilities for meeting this moment.
It speaks to what the, I'm going to say the white girls, it's not correct, but the people
call the spiritual bypassing. That's the language they've used. When you use the
spirituality to obey the reality of what's happening in your current political moment.
And then when I think about the practices that I've inherited, the practices I'm still growing
and learning in, they're all about engagement with the political moment and strategies.
And so yeah, 100,000% with you on that piece. Something else you said that really resonated
with me about the ancestral piece that I wanted to drop in. Oh, so like one thing that kind of
connects to me with that story about your grandmother, my grandmother gave me a Bible
that I own. I'm not a Christian and I think Jesus is amazing, but that's not my path.
And I remember during the fire challenges that we're having here in the city, I was
potentially going to have to evacuate. And I started looking at your home about what am I
going to take? And I have my whole altar, right? But the thing that I keep on that altar that
connects to my grandmother is that Bible, which is the ways in which I link to her.
And even though it's still on my altar, which she may not be, she might've been like, what is
going on on this, right? You know what I mean? But it's one way that I respect and honor what
she held as a framework, even as I hold it within the context of my own.
I loved it. I was talking with him yesterday, who another person you would love, his name is
Naya Toussaint. He's down in Florida getting his PhD, who did a lot of really great programming
when he was over at the union seminary church or the union theological seminary, rather.
And they did a lot of work of connecting what they called their series. It was
decolonizing Christianity, I believe. And they spoke to the ways that when we look at,
again, specific ancestors, that this plurality is also a part of that legacy.
That people were able to hold so many different modes of practice and spirit and understanding
and knowing together, right? That brought them closer, that helped them, again, plan, scheme,
dream, shape space, right? And the moment, again, people started to get,
I don't know what to ask.
Lenny James Meyers talked about a lack of dienodal thinking, right? Became too black and
white in how they saw things. It immediately reduced the amount of complexity in ways that
people understood that they could be. Again, think about the Haitian revolution. I think
that's a great example. You have a revolution that starts with a voodoo ceremony by Bukhman Dutty,
who people talk about the book. Some people say he's talking about the Quran. So already we're
talking about distinct modes of practice involved in one of the biggest revolutions that everybody
loves to name and honor. We're doing a project on intergenerational trauma. And one of the pieces
that people name is the incomplete consciousness, that people weren't fully able to lean all the
way into the precepts of the revolution, that multiplicity and plurality that shaped their
desire for freedom and immediately tried to reproduce the French Republic and IET.
So you had these visions of the lacu, right? Not just as an idea, but a political superstructure
for how we exist together, the way we practice, the way we see each other, and how that immediately
comes into conflict with these ideas of we want to be like France, but we want to make it black.
It leads to a lot of those same colonial reproductions and relationships that end
up being harmful. So again, it extends back when you remove the possibility of understanding the
fullness of what our ancestors have been and honor the complexity, the I'm calling contradictions,
you're saying both then, I love both of these things, right? It reduced the way that we can
exist in the world, right? You know, I think about that in relationship to so much things,
just like the ways in which the, it's the, it's an under complication of even self, right? The
understanding of ourselves, as well as like, you know, how we're able to engage the world. I'm
thinking about gender. I'm thinking about like, you know, I'm thinking about sexuality. I'm
thinking about all these things that like these binary concepts we have, which really limit and
restrict us, right? One of the ways I think about this, what you've raised up is that sometimes when
I'm holding space with black men, I often hear men say, as a man, I can't. For me, I've always
curious about that framing because I see how this gendered concept, because what I really,
what I'm hearing when someone says that is saying, my gender concept will not allow me to,
right? Like, you know what I mean? And it's like, it becomes a defense mechanism, right?
And it's often followed by, as a man, I can't cry. So it's like my gender concept tells me,
holds me, help keeps me from leaning into crime, right? Like, you know what I mean? And like,
when I have the free frame like that, it's always interesting how men are like, well, that means
that it's me in some levels. I was like, well, it's like less, it's layered, right? But I think
about like how these concepts can keep, can hold hostage our imagination and not help us see the
full range of who we are and what's possible for our lives. And I think that like, that's the real
danger to me in the binaries of the world. It's like, they're so polarized and it's like, well,
there's a whole spectrum of existence and spirit and presence and power that's here. How do we
lean into that and accept the multiplicities of who we are? You know, I'm sorry, the Black man
piece is really on top of my head because it's cool. So we just did a Black Masculine Reimagined
Summit in LA. We had about 55 folks, Black men, straight men, gay men, trans men, whole spectrum
of people there, right? And there were so many things that came up in conversations and that
have come up with conversations in general with Black men that I'm always like, we have really
internalized deeply racist ideas about who we are. Like, so for example, this thing, this wasn't
at a BMR, but it's a story I've been really sitting with for a while. There was a brother,
and I have his permission to tell the story, but be identified. I was talking to him and working
with him through some stuff around his partner, his own wife, or the wife at the time, excuse me.
And he was talking about how he was really kind of struggling because he couldn't sexually show
up with her. And so I was like, okay, so we're just kind of asking more questions. And then I
get to this point where I'm like, you're really angry at her. You don't like her. You seem to be
upset with her. Usually there's a lot of distrust. He's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, but I don't got no
reason why I still shouldn't be able to get it up and, you know, fuck. I'm like, wait, hold on.
And so I started to realize, I was like, wait, there's this thing that many Black men have
internalized that despite the fact that you are, your body and your spirit are saying no.
Exactly.
His trust was broken with this woman. And yet you still feel that like, as a Black man, I'm still
supposed to, regardless of whatever I'm feeling, whatever I know to be true, be able to be this kind
of sexual being for her. And when I engaged him more, I was like, why do you think that as a
human being, when all your spirit and your energy is saying no, why would your body say yes? He was
like, I guess I just thought that I should always be hard. And I was like, well, where'd you get
that idea from? Where'd that come from? You know what I mean? And this is a brother who's like,
who's like tall, big, like, you know, and you see all the stuff that's been put on his spirit.
And so I say that to think about all the ways in which for Black men, for Black women, for all of
us, these ideas internalize, erase us from our humanity, right? You know what I mean? Like limit
our understanding of like, hold up, you're a human being here. Like you're having an emotional
experience. This is what, you're not supposed to still perform our work, even, you know, like,
of course there's going to be consequences. And so I think about that a lot with those concepts
you shared. It's just something that enrages me. And I can hold it in the context of patriarchy,
but I feel really sometimes an immense amount of grief for how I see so many Black men and
masculine folks suffering because of the paradigm that's holding so much of their spirit and their
joy hostage.
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You named it so beautifully, right? And I see it in both ways because I understand that there
are so many people who, especially if we're talking about Black men in the context of the
United States, right? We're talking about historic experiences of domination, erasure,
even under a lens of hypervigilance or seeking purpose and trying to find purpose through
provision, through protection, because these are the stories that they've heard that they
want to honor. And because it's not wrong. People need protection, right? People need
sexual gratification, right? People want safety. And so to form your identity around that,
in a way, it makes sense. But when you allow other people to dictate what those virtues mean,
now you're removing the humanity of yourself from the conversation. And that's the other
piece. When we start talking about all the different types of possibility,
masculinity, and a lot of people know this. Masculinity can look and has looked historically
so distinct and different depending on the groups of people that we're talking about. We have had
a millennia. Sometimes people think there's a natural form of masculinity that just exists.
It has manifested in so many different and distinct ways in direct needs of the community.
And so now we're in this space where people feel like they no longer have agency to even shape
how they show up and relate to their bodies. They relate to their partners. And I'll say,
a lot of it is also not their fault. A lot of that comes from specific structural experiences of,
again, erasure, of violence. And I think sometimes we miss that. And I know you know that.
People will talk about, I don't understand why this person won't cry. Sometimes I think men
fail to think about that in their own self-narrative. It's like, well, tell me about
a time that you tried and what happened. Tell me about a time where you tried to
talk about what was going on for you. Tell me about a time you tried to be sad or angry
and what happened. And it can be violent. It can be a violent reaction. It can be an intense
experience of rejection. It can look like hospitalization. It can look like incarceration.
Absolutely. And they don't, sometimes people don't get told that
structured narrative. And so just blame themselves and internalize that.
Yes. It goes back to what I often do when I hear people say, a lot of times brothers be like,
I can't be vulnerable with my wife. So what I'll say is like, I want to replace the,
I want you to, I want to invite you to do a little Sinistim activity with me. I'm a,
I'm a big Sinistim. I have all over social media, little prompts. I love a Sinistim
because it's always interesting. I was like, I want, I want to invite you in that Sinistim,
and replace I can't with I'm choosing to, because. And then replace it with I'm choosing
not to be vulnerable with my wife, because. And then because took a minute. I was like,
what's the because? Because when