Video: Black Religion and Mental Health Symposium Plenary I
Plenary I:
Plenary Chair: Dr. Tracey E. Hucks, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Africana Religious Studies, Harvard Divinity School
Panelists: Rev. Dr. Monica A. Coleman, John and Patricia Cochran Scholar for Inclusive Excellence and Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Delaware, Dr. Martin Summers, Professor of History and African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College, Dr. Stephanie Y. Evans, Professor of Black Women's Studies (WGSS & AAS) at Georgia State University
Professor Ahmad Greene-Hayes (Harvard Divinity School) and Professor George Aumoithe (FAS, History and African and African American Studies) proposed this two-day interdisciplinary symposium, integrating mind, brain, and behavior insights into the exploration of Black religious practices and their impact on mental health. They questioned how Black religious spaces can enhance mental health outcomes, considering their dual role as sanctuaries and potential impediments to open discourse. The symposium brought together experts from history, public health, psychiatry, African American studies, religious studies, and civic society, focusing on understanding the neurobiological and socio-behavioral dynamics contributing to mental health stigmatization within Black communities. The symposium aimed to illuminate how societal stressors, such as racism, influence brain function and behavior, thereby affecting mental health, while also exploring resilience mechanisms among Black religious communities. This project aligns with the Harvard Mind Brain Behavior Interfaculty Initiative’s mission of facilitating interdisciplinary collaboration to address complex issues, contributing to a broader understanding of the interplay between mind, brain, and behavior in the context of Black mental health.
This event took place on March 1, 2024.
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SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: Black Religion and Mental Health Symposium, Plenary 1. March 1, 2024.
AHMAD GREENE-HAYES: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to day two of our Black Religion and Mental Health Symposium. We're very grateful that you all are here on a Friday morning. I'd also like to, again, thank our opening keynote speaker, Dr. Judith Weisenfeld, for a thrilling and very enlightening lecture, which set the groundwork for today's conversation.
So we've explored the intergenerational, historical, archival roots of this conversation. Today, we'll be delving into the practical thinking with practitioners, leading theorists, and scholars on the question of mental health and of Black religion. I'm very honored to present the first plenary discussion, which will be chaired and moderated by Dr. Tracey Hucks, who will, after I introduce her, introduce our speakers.
Dr. Tracey Hucks is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Africana Religious Studies here at Harvard Divinity School, and the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is a nationally known and esteemed scholar of Africana Studies and American religious history.
She has served most recently as Provost and Dean of the faculty at Colgate University, where she has been James A. Storing Professor of Religion and Africana and Latin American Studies. Hucks previously taught at Davidson College where she was the James D. Vail III Professor and Chair of the Africana Studies Department and also at Haverford College.
In 1995, she was a resident graduate scholar at Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria. I hope I pronounced that correctly. A graduate of Colgate, she earned her Am and PhD from Harvard University in 1998. Hucks is the author of Yoruba Traditions and African-American Religious Nationalism, which was published in 2012 and was a finalist for the American Academy of Religion First Book Award and the Journal of Africana Religions Albert J. Raboteau Book Prize.
Hucks' most recent publication is Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad, Volume One, Africans in the White Colonial Imagination, which was published in October, 2022, by Duke University Press. Working with Dr. Dianne Stewart, who authored Volume II, the two-volume study theorizes the prominent role of Africana religious cultures in the shaping of diasporic identities. And so we are very pleased to have Dr. Hucks here to moderate this important conversation among leading scholars at the intersections of Black religion and mental health. Thank you.
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TRACEY HUCKS: Good morning, everyone. Let me welcome you, again, to the Harvard Divinity School and also welcome you to the first plenary session for this morning for our Black Religion and Mental Health Conference. I will be introducing our panelists, but before I do that, I just wanted to say briefly to just really thank our conveners, [? Georgia ?] and Mark Green Hayes.
I also wanted to say, as someone who was a seven-year coordinator of the [? Mellon ?] Elijah Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, that it is an amazing program. I want to thank the late Lydia English and Rudolph Bird and others who have put so much into that and have given us these bright scholars to date.
It has graduated over 500 PhDs of color, and I just wanted to have a moment because we get to see the work of that in the university. This is what Lydia English was imagining. I know as an ancestor, she is looking so proudly on so many of these [? Mellons, ?] and those who may be actually coordinators, and [? Mellons ?] who are with us today.
I will be introducing each of our panelists in terms of the order of program. They each will be speaking five to seven minutes, and then we'll open it up for questions. I will have a few questions that I'll pose to each one of the panelists, and then we'll open it up for audience questions. Our first panelist, and I will have them come up at the end of their-- I read their bio, is Martin Summers, is Professor of History and African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College.
He has particular research and teaching interests in race, gender, sexuality, and medicine. He is the author of Manliness and Its Discontents, The Black Middle Class and The Transformation of Masculinity, 1900 to 1930, and the co-editor of Precarious Prescriptions, Contested Histories of Race and Health in North America, which was published in 2014.
Summers' research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the National Humanities Center. His most recent book Madness in The City of Magnificent Intentions, A History of Race and Mental Illness in the Nation's Capital, published 2019, received the Sharon Society's Prize for outstanding monograph in the history of behavioral and social sciences.
Summers is currently at work on a book entitled Inner City Blues, African-American Mental Health and The Urban crisis in 20th Century Chicago, which examines how social scientists, psychiatrists, and psychiatric social workers, government officials, and community activists understood the relationship between urbanization and mental health, and consequently sought to address the mental health care needs of African-Americans in so-called ghettos. Join me in welcoming our esteemed guest, Dr. Summers, who can come to the dais.
[APPLAUSE]
Our next speaker will be Stephanie Y. Evans is Professor of Black Women's Studies at Georgia State University. She served as department chair for 12 consecutive years at Georgia State University, Clark Atlanta, and University of Florida. Bless your soul. Bless your soul. But also maintained her passion for research, bless your soul, in the area of Black Women's Historical Wellness. Bless your soul again.
Her areas of focus are Black women's intellectual history, memoirs, and mental health. She is author and editor of nine books. Her single-authored works include Black Feminist Writing, A Practical Guide to Publishing Academic Books, Black Women's Yoga History, Memoirs of Inner Peace, and Black Women in the Ivory Tower, 1850 to 1954, An Intellectual History.
She is lead co-editor of five books, including Dear Department Chair, Letters from Black Women to The Next Generation of Leaders. Also, Black Women and Public Health Strategies to Name, Locate, and Change Systems of Power, and Black Women's Mental Health, Balancing Strength and Vulnerability. At GSU, Professor Evans is also affiliate faculty in the Center for the Study of stress, trauma, and resilience. Evans highlights life writing and Black women's traditions of collective self care as sustainable models for human rights and social justice. Please welcome Dr. Evans.
[APPLAUSE]
And our final panelist will be Monica A. Coleman is John and Patricia Cochran Scholar for inclusive excellence and Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Delaware. She spent over 10 years in Graduate Theological Education at Claremont School of Theology, the Center for Process Studies and Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago.
Coleman has earned degrees from Harvard University, Vanderbilt University, and Claremont Graduate University. Answering her call to the Ministry at age 19, Coleman is an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and an initiate in traditional Yoruba religion. Coleman brings her experiences in evangelical Christianity, Black church traditions, global ecumenical work, and Indigenous spirituality to a discussions of theology and religion.
Coleman is the author and/or editor of six books and several articles that focus on the role of faith and addressing critical social and philosophical issues. Her memoir, Bipolar Faith, shares her lifelong dance with trauma and depression and how she discovers a new and liberating vision of God. Her book, Making A Way Out Of No Way is required reading at leading theological schools around the country.
Coleman is co-host of the webinar series Octavia Tried to Tell Us, Parable for Today's Pandemic, addressing today's pressing issues with insights from afrofuturist literature, process theology, and community values. Coleman's strength comes from the depth of her knowledge base and from her experience as a community organizer, survivor of sexual violence, and as an individual who lives with mental health challenges. Coleman speaks widely on mental health wellness, navigating change, religious diversity, and religious responses to intimate partner violence. Please welcome Dr. Coleman.
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In terms of format, I repeat again, each panelist will speak five to seven minutes, and then we'll open it up for questions. And so I'll invite Dr. Coleman.
STEPHANIE EVANS: I think we're going in this order.
TRACEY HUCKS: Oh, sorry, Dr. Summers. Yes.
MARTIN SUMMERS: Hi, good morning, everyone. Is this on? I also want to thank George and Ahmad for organizing this conference and inviting me to participate. I really don't consider myself to be a scholar who works at the intersection of mental health and religion. So I'm very grateful to be invited to engage in this discussion with people who are more firmly situated in this field.
And in fact, I think in my book Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions, I think I actually didn't pay enough attention to religion, and that's really confirmed by Dr. Weisenfeld's fantastic talk last night. And I'm really looking forward to reading her work when it comes out.
So we were asked to respond to a couple of prompts, and I organized my comments around the question of, what historical patterns do you see in the treatment and perception of mental health within Black communities, and how have these patterns influenced current mental health outcomes? And I want to start by reading a very short quote from a book that was published in 1974, entitled Mental Health Issues and The Urban Poor.
And it was published by clinical psychologist Dorothy Evans and William Claiborne, and this quote reads, quote, "we are now faced with a fourth revolution in mental health, specifically, the new federalism. This political philosophy is threatening to radically affect modes of training, service, and research in the mental health fields.
A probable outcome of the new federalism, at least over the short term, is less money for mental health programs. If tradition is followed, this probably means that the poor will be the first to lose and will lose the most. This likelihood sharpens the need of mental health workers to carefully consider their commitments to the poor".
And so the while the authors were very sanguine about the affects of community mental health care in the 1960s, they were also lamenting the fact that with the Nixon and Ford administrations, there was a fundamental rethinking of the federal government's role in social welfare spending that would ultimately undermine community mental health care efforts.
But nowhere in this article did they identify with the first three revolutions were, and I don't know-- I'd be curious if anyone in the field has a sense of what these first three revolutions they were thinking about when they invoked this fourth revolution in the 1970s. I think it's fair to say that the third revolution was community mental health care itself.
And I'm going to take the liberty of imagining what they might have thought the first and the second revolutions were. The first revolution being the emergence of moral treatment that coincided with the asylum movement in the mid 19th century, and the second revolution being the mental hygiene movement in the early 20th century.
And now while all three of these movements were revolutionary in some regard, they each were characterized by the unequal treatment of mentally ill Blacks. And so I want to just briefly go through and talk about each of these revolutions, the revolutionary aspects, as well as the ways in which they continued to marginalize Black folks who were considered or diagnosed with mental illness.
So the first revolution of moral treatment, again, coincided with the asylum movement. And it certainly was an improvement over the previous modes of care for the people who were identified as being insane. People who were typically just held in jails, in people's homes, in basements and attics often chained.
And so with the emergence of the asylum movement, this was part of this larger mid 19th century reform movement. And again, that coincided with the development of moral treatment in which psychiatrists thought that the best way to treat the mentally ill were to remove them from the sources of what was causing them stress and put them in these very tranquil environments, make sure that they had plenty of rest, a nutritious diet, engaged in some work, as idle hands and idle minds weren't good for kind of recovering one's sanity.
But there was also an underlying therapeutic rationale that reinforced ideas about racial segregation and notions of African-Americans proper role, which Professor Weisenfeld talked a little bit about yesterday. So I won't go too much further into that, but there was this notion that actually the proximity to Black people might impede the recovery of mentally ill whites.
And so in the case of Saint Elizabeth's, where you had the center building, which housed all of the white patients, you actually had these separate lodges for the Colored insane, which were actually equidistant between the center building, the main building, and the hospital's kind of stables and barns.
And so one of the things that I think they were doing was really reproducing the racial topography of the plantation. And in addition to that, and this was talked a little bit about last night, the labor that patients were inspected to engage in. Again, there was this therapeutic rationale that Black people would perform the kinds of labor that they would perform outside of the asylum.
So you typically have Black women patients working exclusively in the laundry. As was mentioned yesterday, Black patients at Crownsville actually building the hospital itself, building the infrastructure. I just saw a video that was made by Vanessa Jackson about Cherry State Hospital was originally the Eastern hospital in North Carolina for the Colored insane where patients picked cotton.
So that in itself, the very therapeutic rationale of moral treatment really reinforce racial hierarchies. So then we moved to the second revolution, which is mental hygiene, and that was based on this idea that you need to preserve mental health rather than care for or treat mentally ill people after they had become institutionalized.
And so while there were some mental hygiene efforts within the Black community, and here I'm thinking specifically of the Lafargue Clinic in Harlem in the 1940s. Actually more research needs to be done on African-American experiences within the mental hygiene movement. In other cities, again, I know in the case of Washington DC, the few mental hygiene clinics that did exist, they catered to white Washingtonians.
So you don't see any Black clients in the mental hygiene clinics in early 20th-century Washington DC, but there's another aspect of the mental hygiene movement, which I think is really interesting, and that was in some ways, the mental hygiene movement was responding to the primary mode of treating of mentally ill people by just institutionalizing them. And so a lot of these asylums were constantly overcrowded.
So mental hygiene advocates argued that we really need to move to-- we really need to move a lot of these patients who might not be fully recovered out of the institution, get them into more I guess we might say hospitable environments. And so one of the practices of the mental hygiene movement was called boarding out, which was to take patients in the asylum, who again, might not be considered fully recovered but would still think-- psychiatrists still think, OK, we can move them out, put them into a home environment.
And this will assist them in fully recovering, and I didn't do as much on this as I would have liked. But I just want to give you one example of how this looked at Saint Elizabeth's. So there's one example of a Black woman patient who was boarded out to a former employee at Saint Elizabeth's. And we see the former employee actually writing back to the doctors basically saying, look, this woman has not worked out.
We were expecting her to come into this house and basically be a domestic servant, but she's not following the rules. She just leaves the house and just kind of wanders around Washington DC, and the employee even said, former employee even said, she's too dangerous of a Negro to be at large.
So I think that that's something, especially if you look at some of the larger history that Sarah Haley has done in Georgia looking at the convict lease system and the chain gang and one of the things that she talks about is Black women prisoners being paroled into the homes of prison employees to basically do domestic labor.
And I think that if we really looked at asylums in the late 19th or at least the early 20th century, we might see the same dynamic happening. But again, there's just so much more work that needs to be done. I will briefly talk about the third revolution-- the third and the fourth revolution, and I'll wrap up. So the third revolution of community mental health care is, again, based on this principle of delivering care closer to where people live.
And it really required buy in from the community. That is the community needed to have a role in determining what this care looked like, and it was called quote, unquote, "citizen participation". So as a result, there was much more collaboration between mental health experts, government-funded agencies, and grassroots activists, as well as other community-based organizations.
So, for instance, you had public housing tenants groups partnering with psychiatrists at Saint Elizabeth's to create a community mental health care center in Southeast DC. In Chicago, you have really radical grassroots organizations, like the Woodlawn Organization collaborating with psychiatrists who are based at the University of Chicago basically to provide preventive mental health care for members of the community.
But tensions always existed, especially when Black residents believed that mental health experts were studying them more than providing therapeutic care. And in addition to that, community mental health care also suffered from chronic underfunding, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, which kind of transitions us into the fourth revolution.
And again, I'll use Chicago as an example to just talk about some of this chronic underfunding and the resource disparity and its impacts on Chicago's Black community. So in 1971, there was a report by the Illinois mental health planning board, which found that 2/3 of community services, community psychiatric services in the city, were located on the North side, primarily white neighborhoods.
Whereas one third of community psychiatric services were located on the South side. So this, again, really illustrates the resource disparity that had begun to develop during the third revolution. And then fast forward 16 years in the late 1980s, the Chicago reporter published an article-- it's really kind of stunning-- which found that the neighborhood with the lowest poverty level in Chicago received $185 per person for community mental health services.
And this was on the North side, whereas the neighborhood with the highest poverty level on the South side received only $30 per person in community mental-- or for community mental health services. And so this lack of acute care beds and outpatient services led to disproportionate reinstitutionalization of mentally ill African-Americans and Illinois' remaining state hospitals.
And then with further closures of state hospitals, you have low-income African-Americans who are in need of psychiatric services tending to receive them in carceral institutions like the Cook County Jail. So there's kind of an irony here that you have this history of distrust of the psychiatric profession, part of the larger medical profession.
And then in the 1960s when you finally have African-Americans beginning to say, OK, yes, we can collaborate with mental health experts, really kind of deal with issues that are wracking our community, then what ends up happening? Funding gets cut, and Black people are kind of cut adrift yet again. So I guess I'll end there and look forward to having more conversations.
[APPLAUSE]
TRACEY HUCKS: Thank you, Dr. Summers. Dr. Evans.
STEPHANIE EVANS: Yes, I have a picture [INAUDIBLE]. How many of you knew that Rosa Parks did yoga? Raise your hand. So this is the story of how I came to write a book about Black women's yoga history because Rosa Parks, a Deaconess in the AME Church, was not only taking yoga but teaching yoga.
And so I was asked to respond to the question, considering your focus on Black women's intellectual history and mental wellness, how do memoirs and personal narratives contribute to our understanding of mental health resilience and coping strategies among Black women? And so it's a pleasure to be here to talk about this work because in these trying times and the trying times of being a department chair for 12 consecutive years, this has saved my life.
Barbara Smith says, "the purpose of Black Women's Studies is to save Black women's lives", and this work is saving my life. I understand how we are all under duress here at Harvard University. I'm sure everyone clearly understands how Black women are under duress and how the institutions are under duress, how putting together this panel creates stress.
So thank you to Professors [? Anuwat ?] and GH for all the work that you do, but how in these trying times, can we be well? Toni Cade Bambara says, "are you sure, sweetheart, you want to be well". And what memoirs do and what memoirs have done for me is show me how to be well. Maya Angelou said that she's writing letters to her daughters. She says I only have one son, but I have many daughters.
So I have curated a career in Black Women's Studies showing me how to be an academic and how to be well, despite all the ridiculousness and foolishness that comes along with being an academic. I started writing-- my first book was Black Women in The Ivory Tower, 1850 to 1954. And it was my query into, if I am a bookish person, and I love books, and I want to be an academic, how do I understand what it means to be an academic, as a first-generation scholar, as someone who is an adult re-entry student, didn't start college until I was 25.
I was kind of just floating around college until I read Anna Julia Cooper's on The Higher Education of Women. And that was the first time I felt at home. I said, wait a minute, I'm an intellectual. This is what I'm supposed to do on The Higher Education of Women. So my dissertation was on Anna Julia Cooper, Mary McLeod Bethune, Septima Clark, and Fanny Jackson Coppin as a guide of how to be a Black academic woman.
And so I worked my way up through tenure at the University of Florida of all places, and after tenure, everything is supposed to be great, right? You get tenure. This is the goal, but I still found myself very stressed in these conditions. In 2013, I had a personal health crisis that sent me back into some of the childhood trauma, which is why I love being on this panel with you.
Coleman's work is just so important to how I understand the impact of life writing, but I was vexed because even though I had made it as an academic, I was still stressed. So I asked the question, how have Black women elders managed stress?
This allowed me to shift my focus from looking at Anna Julia Cooper as a foremother of what we now call intersectionality, as someone who had impacted Black women's studies and Black women's thought to asking the question, how did Anna Julia Cooper live to be 105 and a half and raise five kids and earn her PhD from the Sorbonne in Paris and write her dissertation in French and defend in French?
And so I took a look at her writing and her inspirational stories, and it allowed me to go back to this database of Black women's life writing and look for wellness patterns for what I call historical wellness. And so the term historical wellness is in the word of in the words of Deirdre Cooper Owens, fraught. She talks about medical bondage and the concept of Black women's super bodies, and that term is fraught.
I see historical wellness as fraught. It is problematic. You cannot have historical wellness without understanding the duress that these crazy making conditions. Dr. Weisenfeld's presentation last night, it makes you mad getting in these archives, and how do you manage a life of the mind when part of our work is recovering such trauma?
And so when I started looking at Anna Julia Cooper and some of the elders for clues about stress management, it really kind of recalibrated how I thought about wellness in this historical context. It's not to say, well, if you just shore up your personal practice with yoga, if you just meditate, it will all be OK.
But it's really to understand a Black feminist approach, which is collective self care and that you see these practices that Mrs. Parks was not only taking yoga. She was teaching yoga. So this idea of self care in the Black feminist and African feminist context is not about self and survival only. It is what Rosalyn Terborg-Penn calls African feminist values of survival and self care and networks.
So I started off asking the question about wellness in the historical context and looked at the American Psychological Association study of stress in the nation in 2017. 2017 was a pivotal year because it was after the 2016 election when everybody was stressed. I mean, they do the report every year, but I looked at the main stress management strategies.
I'm thinking back to 2017, and well, that was before the pandemic. That was before the election, and we thought we were stressed out then. But I looked at the stress management strategies. Meditation, music, prayer, yoga, and exercise. And those were the most prominent stress management strategies.
So I took that lens and looked at what were some of the historical practices. Meditation-- and I was specifically looking at centenarians, nonagenarians and centenarians. Those long living Black women. Then I was allowed to see Anna Julia Cooper as someone who meditated every morning. I spoke with two of her great nephews, and they said Sis Annie would go in her sunroom, and she would sit and write every morning. And that was part of her practice.
She also gardened. There were pictures of her-- there weren't pictures of her card parties but pray tell. There was creating community. So you get to see that practice of meditation. Music, I looked at Marian Anderson's narrative of how being an opera singer and how singing the gospel and Jessye Norman talks about this as well, how the vibrational practices of singing really helped shape her mind, her body, and her spirit.
Dovey Roundtree, who was a lawyer in the desegregation case for-- we talk about Brown v. Board of Education desegregating schools. She was a head lawyer on the desegregation of transportation, and she was a very active practicing lawyer. And then she found herself in the hospital with fibroids, and she said that she had a calling.
And even though she was this high powered civil rights lawyer, she understood that this work was negatively impacting her health. And she had ignored the calling long enough. So she went to seminary, and so here we have her narrative talking about how she lived to be 100 and-- you know, she ended up living to be 106, just passed a few years ago.
But her partner doing this very difficult work, traumatizing work, passed early, I think in his 40s. And then I started looking at yoga, and the Delaney sisters, which I'm sure many of you are aware of, they started doing yoga in their 60s. And it was because they had their mother living with them, and they said, well, mama started to get hunched over.
And so we saw this little exercise thing on TV. So we started doing our morning exercises. They didn't know it was yoga. They were doing their exercises in the morning. We're going to get up. We're going to stretch, and Bessie saw that Sadie was doing a little bit better, and she was like, wait a minute. I'm going to get up and do yoga too.
They ended up living to be 109 and 104, and Ida Keeling who just passed a few years, I believe also at 106, started running out of grief. Both of her sons were-- and some of you may have seen her doing push ups on The View, and she had her practices. But her exercise practice came out of grief. Both of her sons were murdered about three years apart in drug-related incidents.
And no one was held accountable, and so her youngest daughter said, we saw the light coming out of mama's eyes. So I knocked on her door one day and said I'm going to do this 5 kilometer. Here's some shoes. We're just going to walk, and so she said walking was the first time that her mind was free, that she started to feel a release from the grief that she had from her hard life.
And then she said, so I just started walking in her 60s. So that walk turned into running, and she just set records for her age group. And so there were in each of these areas an example of historical practices that Black women's life writing allow us to see. And it was a textual reference from our Auntie Rosa, which was written by 11 of her nieces and nephews that said, our Auntie Rosa used to come with us to yoga class.
And I was like, that's a lie. I've never heard of that. Our Auntie Rosa used to answer the door in yoga pants. I was like now, wait, stop. So I went to the Library of Congress, and at the time, there was a block on the pictures because, rightly so, the Rosa and Raymond Parks estate is very protective of Rosa Parks and her image and how it's used.
And so I had to get permission from the estate, the Library of Congress, and publish the pictures, and then it was all over the internet. And so it's so inspiring, and we said we weren't going to have slides, but it's one thing to say Rosa Parks did yoga. It's another thing to see her in a Thunderbolt pose, which is on the knee, but then in the Bow Pose with her feet behind her head.
Now mind you, she had just turned 60 in this picture, and Rosa Parks lived in her 90s. And when you go back to the list of long living women, we then get to better understand the strategic practices that enabled Harriet Tubman to live into her 90s. And the strategic practices that are there when we think about yoga as an Indian practice but also an African practice.
It's said that the Queen of Sheba and her people bent down to greet the rising and setting sun. That's a Sun Salutation, and this is an opening-- memoirs are an opening for us to be able to understand the historical wellness practices that allowed women to write their stories, to survive themselves, and to create communities and networks of healing.
TRACEY HUCKS: Thank you so much. Dr. Coleman.
MONICA COLEMAN: In her opening remarks to the symposium yesterday, Dean Marla Frederick mentioned that religion can be both a barrier and a balm. And I'm not getting her exact language correctly, but that religion can be both a detriment and a salve to the most pressing issues of our day. And I found this to be true in my work and experience at the intersection of mental health and faith, and that's what I want to speak about today.
I come to this topic from a couple of directions. I'm a philosophical theologian, a scholar of Black religions, a religious leader, and a person who lives with depressive condition. As a philosophical theologian, I care about what we believe. And I'm particularly interested in how the ways we understand the world frames and shapes our beliefs with the hope that these beliefs are liberative and lead to ethical action that creatively transforms the world.
As a scholar of Black religions, I also understand the belief does not always precede practice, but that belief can also emerge from practice. And there is, at best, a dynamic and symbiotic relationship between belief and practice. My personal faith practices that inform this talk traverse historical denominational Black church. I'm ordained elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and traditional African religion, in particular, [INAUDIBLE] lineage in traditional Yoruba religion, in which I'm an Orisa.
I am also a person who lives out loud with a depressive condition, and so I know the engagement of both religious community and the Western mental health system as a person who has been and is in need of its ability to support and strengthen folk who live with mental health challenges. I also begin with the premise that Black mental wellness should be nurtured, not just triaged.
My work in this field as an academic, writer, and religious leader comes largely from my encounter with the ways Black religious communities failed me as a person who lives with a depressive condition. There are some long-held beliefs that serve as barriers to mental health discourse. On my non-exhaustive list are some of the following.
Suffering is a result of God's punishment. Suffering makes us stronger. Suffering teaches us something we need to learn. Suicide is an unforgivable sin. God will heal you. Your happiness is a reflection of your faith, but this often sounds like too blessed to be stressed. Your faith will save you, or mental illness is a result or work of a demonic or negative force.
These beliefs are sometimes said aloud, but more often they are the natural conclusion to other propositions made about God, suffering, sin, evil, and agency that are embedded in both classical Christian theologies and a variety of other non-Christian belief systems. I find these beliefs to be particularly dangerous in Black communities because we are people whose historical and contemporary experiences create the conditions for a deficit of mental wellness.
So the mere suggestion that we have earned, need, or can pray our way out of these conditions is a kind of spiritual terrorism. To be more personal, when I tell my own story and that of my families in my book Bipolar Faith, one point I'm trying to make is that people who have experienced enslavement, sharecropping, sexual violence, war, poverty, ongoing state violence, reproductive injustice, and migration that appears voluntary but is largely spurred by a fear of lynching and land robbery are understandably not OK.
Now we can give that a clinical diagnosis, but we can also recognize the trauma and astounding resilience that exists in African-American experience. Thus, one, to cultivate Black mental wellness is a dimension of the goal for Black liberation writ large. And two, any implication that God wills, abides, uses, or ignores these experiences is a faith we can and should throw in the trash.
Now there are things that Black religious communities do, especially well that are supportive, even nurturing, to the experience of living with a mental health challenge. I'll name a couple. Again, a non-exhaustive list. We know how to mourn. We know how to collectively acknowledge loss and tarry in it when we need to. We have the entire genre of spirituals that do exactly this.
They can hold pain collectively while still expressing the longing for relief and freedom. We know how to testify. We know how to tell a story of hardship in front of community and how we have survived it. What I'd like to see is a greater acceptance of telling that story before it has a happy ending. Testifying before and even without deliverance, that I'm still in the middle of my story, but I trust community to hold it and hold me while I'm here.
Embodied community spirituality. The separation and hierarchy of soul, spirit, and mind, vis a vis body and Earth, is a problem that Black religiosity can and sometimes does issue. In our spiritual toolkit, we have embodied practices, such as ecstatic worship, dance, spirit possession for lack of a better term, Earth grounding, and these things we often do in community with peers, elders, ritualists, and musicians who know how to both cultivate and release these forms of spirit embodiment.
Trauma therapist Tim O'Brien often talks about the ways that an embrace of these arts, music, singing, dance, done in community is not just important, but for many communities, a necessary form of healing. Some traditions have prayers and rituals that are particularly meaningful for mental wellness. In Black new thought traditions, affirmative prayers function as both a goalpost and a core spiritual practice for transforming one's thoughts and life in a positive direction.
Practices embraced in many 20th century therapeutic strategies. Meditation and contemplative practices are also core to many forms of Black religiosity. Healing practices that neurologists have more lately discovered through brain scans. In traditional Yoruba religion, rituals such as [? iboris ?] that focus upon both the vulnerability and strength of one's Ori, one's head, one's mind, one's guide, can explicitly serve as a health practice for maintaining mental wellness and for healing mental distress.
These are the parts of our traditions that both give me hope and keep me faithful. Black religious communities have a tradition of doing two things that I think are particularly relevant for the discourse on mental wellness, doing two things well. Black religious communities have long served as holistic places of healing and support.
Political, social, economic, and social service needs have been met by Black religious communities. We long understand that it's not just a spiritual place. In that vein, Black religious communities can serve as supports for those who are actively pursuing mental wellness. When one is in a difficult place with one's mental health, there are tangible supports one needs that religious communities can provide without having to be experts in mental health but because they are experts in care.
Food, child care, checking in, and ministry of presence, just sitting with people. We know how to do this. Lastly, Black religious communities have long functioned as a place of affirmation and respect amidst a wider society that denies that to Black embodiment. Now we know Black religious communities have the capacity to vilify and ostracize any who deviate from a kind of moral, social, or spiritual norm.
Yes, but we also know that when somebody may have been a custodian or a janitor in the outside world, they were a deacon or a minister right within religious communities. And at our best, we offer affirmation and respect for people who don't experience this outside of these communities. And we can do this for those living with mental health challenges.
And I will say that my experiences both saved my life and my faith, and it is my hope for all religious communities that we can curate and cultivate a space wherein people can roll up and lose their whole minds and still walk out with their dignity. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
TRACEY HUCKS: Please join me, once again, for thanking this entire panel this morning. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
We have ample time for questions, and I wanted to open up with a question for each one of you and then a general question. Monica, I'll start with your question, and I'll go down the line. My question for you was, when I'm looking at your name here, Reverend Doctor Monica A. Coleman, really it's Reverend Doctor Priestess Monica A. Coleman.
And so my question for you is about, what does it mean for you to be a practitioner both of a religion that predicates itself on a theology of suffering and the very figure that is centered in it is about suffering that we see so much of that suffering, and also a practitioner of a tradition where suffering is not the kind of theological basis? You don't need the deity or the [? reisha ?] to suffer in order to have some kind of redemptive moment. And so how do you reconcile those two? That was my question to you. You can just think about that.
My question for you, Dr. Evans, is we had a scholar here-- our students [? Harambee ?] Group had a forum last year on health and wellness also. And I remember one of the things that one of our keynote speakers said was that health disparity across class and education did not impact Black women. And so even if they had PhDs, their health outcomes could still be as poor as women who didn't have as much education, and women who did not have as much access and means in terms of economic class and for you to speak a little bit about that.
And my question to you, Dr. Summers, was I was thinking about vagrancy, this notion that comes out after slavery and a sense of vagrancy laws. And we know that prison was one of the institutions where these so-called Black vagrants get shuttled to, and I'm wondering if these asylums was another response to vagrancy. Another one of these institutions where so-called the Black vagrants go. So you have Blackness being criminalized and medicalized after slavery, and that's my question to you. So, Monica, we'll start with you and come down.
MONICA COLEMAN: It's a great question. Part of it is that-- I don't know that I've ever been the kind of Christian for whom suffering was central, for whom the crucified Jesus was core to my Christianity. I grew up in a very social justice oriented Black church that was not heavily doctrinal, much to some people's dismay, but it just wasn't.
And even though I have exposure to these ideas, my own faith was shaped much more by the life and ministry of Jesus. That I kind of Williams, Delores Williams womanist way, where I was like, I mean, I get the cross. But to me, the message of the cross isn't about redemptive suffering. It's about the end is not the end.
And that's very much reaffirmed for me in Ifa as well is that, of course, the end is not the end, that death is not the end of the story is quite core to Ifa as well because of the rich belief in ancestors and even in what you might call the pre-existence of souls or the choosing of your own Ori. So I don't know that I've had a faith where suffering is key to how the faith works, even in the Christian instantiations of my faith.
I talk about suffering because that's usually the part of mental health challenges that bother people. Most people are not bothered by manias, for example, not when they're in them. Maybe the effects, but there are plenty of parts of mental health that feel fine. It's the suffering that usually bring you to, I have a problem now.
And I do think that the experience of suffering is part of the human condition, that the experience of loss is part of the human condition. I do believe that Western society does not do a good job of teaching us how to lose, of helping us to lose well, of lingering in grief moments of helping us to manage and navigate change. Those are not things that Western society does very well, generally speaking, religiously or non religiously.
And I do think that in my own experience of Ifa it does it better. There's not the same desire to hold onto, or I guess the same kind of craving for stasis, I'll say. There's very much an understanding that what happens in the world, what happens with humanity, what happens with Orisa changes. It fluctuates. It's connected very much to Earth with changes.
And so in that sense, the suffering, there isn't a discrepancy for me between the way I understood Christianity and practice Christianity. And Ifa, although I know there are for many people. So for me it's that kind of classical conception of Christianity, which includes redemptive suffering that has all kinds of problems that are not helpful for, I think, any kind of liberation, including mental wellness.
STEPHANIE EVANS: Thank you for that question, and thank you for saying bless your soul as you read my bio because that's part of my answer is just understanding that the individual behavioral does not address the systemic, that we have to engage the Black feminist womanist both and, that we have to have practices of inner peace that we cannot be well if we don't take seriously our daily practice.
But no matter how much you practice, you have to address the systemic challenges. And so in 1987, Angela Davis gave a talk at Bennett College called Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired, a reference to Fannie Lou Hamer. And she said the fight for mind, body, and spiritual health is always tied to social, economic, and political liberation struggles so that both and is how you have to understand how Serena Williams is having to save her own life.
She's Serena Williams. She's a star. She's well resourced, and yet she's not believed. And so no matter what your economic status, your celebrity status, the higher education-- women in higher education have the same health outcomes. Gee, I wonder why. Because it's systemic. And so seeing the individual practice as valuable does not erase the need to address the systemic underpinnings and causes, root causes.
But the way that Black women do self care, it is collective. I'm thinking of Billy Avery. Billy Avery and her work, and Byllye Avery is still-- the CUNY Program is just putting together a named professorship in reproductive justice and Byllye Avery's name. And so her consciousness raising groups in the '80s and the Spelman College Collective was a demonstration-- that conference was a demonstration of consciousness raising. How telling your story in community helps us solve these problems.
MARTIN SUMMERS: Thank you for the question. There's no doubt that the asylum functioned as a tool for social control in the South in the late 19th century. I definitely think there are some parallels, for instance, between the asylum in the American South and the asylums in, say, colonial Africa. So the asylum itself is there to discipline people who are out of place.
And there's been some excellent work in this regard by people like [? Lynette ?] Jackson, and I'm blanking on some of the other folks who've done this kind of work. I think the challenge for the historian is actually documenting that because you're going to see references to either diagnoses or what the supposed cause is kind of religious excitement, not, OK, this person doesn't have a job.
So you're rarely going to see that, if at all, those kinds of direct references to vagrancy in the hospital records or in the clinical files. But I also think we have to complicate that as well because in the South too, there was also a resistance to building asylums for Black people, at least in the immediate post-emancipation period because they didn't want public dollars going to fund any institutions that might serve the Black community.
And on the other hand, and this is something that I deal with in the book on Saint Elizabeth's, you also had instances in which African-American families are actually turning to asylums. And we need some help dealing with this member of our family, but once they're admitted into the hospital, they just don't forget about them. They're kind of writing to the superintendent and to the physicians and making sure that-- they're attempting to monitor the therapeutic experience of their loved ones in the institution. So I think it's really a both end answer.
TRACEY HUCKS: That's very helpful. Time for our audience. We'd like to hear from you, and there are microphones that will come to you.
AUDIENCE: Thank you so much for this great panel. My question is for Dr. Evans. I'm thinking about recent work that is historicizing wellness and the concept and locating it in particular social, religious histories, and I wonder if there are other conceptions of wellness in historical contexts that you're looking at. Are there markers of wellness in the past that may not be markers of wellness now? Are there ways that mobilizing wellness as a frame might make us miss other conceptions in the past as well?
STEPHANIE EVANS: Absolutely, thank you so much for that question. When you approach an archive or a data set, and you have questions in mind of what you're looking for, that's what you find. And there are other ways that emerge if you have an open-ended question. Like what does it look like? What does-- not just wellness, but what is practice?
And that became clear when I asked Jane along, who is the head of Black Women's Yoga Teachers Association, to write the foreword for the book. And she was talking about where she learned what we now called yoga that is not recognizable as yoga. And she begins with the story of her mother and her grandmother at the kitchen table in this practice of reading the newspaper.
And she says, at the coffee table, this was their morning practice. This is where I learned yoga. They wouldn't call it yoga. We wouldn't call it yoga, but her yogic practice was watching the ceremonial sunrise with her mother and grandmother shifting the newspaper, drinking coffee. You're not going to find that if that's not what you're looking for.
So it was less for me about wellness than it was about practice. And so I was looking for specific practices of yoga, but that then became just being open to what were the practices. And then you find specific references, like Harriet Jacobs mentioned meditation in her practice. Meditation practice, she mentioned it in her memoir three times. Meditation, the actual word.
But she also mentioned that when she was in the attic, she escaped living in the attic for seven years. In the early mornings, her grandmother would let her out of the attic because her muscles were atrophying, and she would have stiffness. So she was stretching her body to alleviate-- so you find those types of things if you're looking for a general practice.
So now I'm transitioning to look at tea as a wellness practice, and there's all sorts of amazing ways that if you look for tea, you'll find tea. But if you look for herbs and medicines, then you'll find that Harriet Jacobs, her grandmother used tea and herbs to heal her, the ant bites that she was getting while she was in the attic. And you see all different sorts of medicinal practices, fertility control, all sorts of stuff.
And so there's how wellness is defined today, and then there are ways that are-- some that are influenced by other religious-- specific yoga, which arrived in 1893, but then some that are passed down through African traditions and that predate or that are parallel to Indian yoga. So there's a wider practice there if you're open to looking for that.
AUDIENCE: Thank you so much for this wonderful panel discussion. I have a question for Dr. Coleman. Actually, I was really struck by-- you said we know how to testify, and then you went on to say that we should tell the story before deliverance. And you moved on from there. I wonder if we can tarry there for a little while. What does that look like?
I mean, I'm thinking here with Morrison who describes shouting as a communal experience. It's individual, but it's communal in that the community surrounds the person as they are essentially losing their mind, letting go. And then once that moment passes, they come back to you. I'm curious if that's what you're envisioning, or are there other ways that we might testify before deliverance, even when deliverance may never come for Black people?
MONICA COLEMAN: Thank you, because I cut some of the section. I was trying to be mindful of time. So I definitely had more to say about it, and I want to, I guess, talk about two kinds in the-- I grew up with testimony services. These are kind of core to watchnight practices, which is just a Black thing to be doing. Because we were watching for freedom, watching for liberation, watching for the Emancipation Proclamation.
And anyone who kind of had some exposure to Protestant Black churches, giving honor to God who was the head of my life. I mean, we know how the sentence goes. There's a template. There's a format in which you testify. But there are also problems with some of that right because you have to have a happy ending.
You have to have, and then God delivered me. And then the surgeons went in. There was no cancer. I mean, you have to have these kind of miraculously deliverances, which are great if you have them. But I want us to be able to testify in the middle of our stories to say this is what's happened, and I got nothing more than that. I'm still in it. This is still kicking my ass every day, but I'm here, period.
That can be the testimony. Thema Bryant was talking about this on a podcast she did where she said we have this habit of glossing over what the thing is that we're getting over anyway, and then the devil was at work and not even telling the story. So I think we have to do a different kind of testimony. One where we actually tell the story.
Because when you do, it's very much like you talk about life writing. It eradicates the loneliness that people feel in their experience because you think you're the only one who has x, y, z. And then you're like, no, everybody around me has had this challenge or that challenge or maybe not everybody but at least more than four people or more than-- like, things you just never talk about.
And you find out the person sitting next to you, the person you're sitting next to in choir, the person you've walked in the door with, has experienced the same challenge as you. And that itself is healing. That itself just makes you better. And so I think-- one, I do want to talk about the kind of verbal testifying that we can do and not feeling that it has to have a happy ending because that's just not how life is.
Sometimes you get a fairy book ending, but most of the time you don't get a fairy book ending. You just get, and we're still doing this. We're still here. I'm still learning. That's all I got. Check with me tomorrow. And that's the story, and we need to be able to relish and celebrate those stories because we do know how to tell our stories in terms of community.
We just need to I think be better at it. In terms of what you're referencing, which kind of went to the embodiment, we have ways of telling our stories that are not verbal, whether you're looking at the way people have moaned and groaned and mm'd. The way your feelings to the way people express these in much more embodied forms of dance or of shouting or those kinds of things.
I think two things are happening. One is there is you're telling without having to use words because sometimes there are no words. There is no expression. There is not a way to put into linguistics what this experience is, and yet we still know it. The people around like, yes, we know what this is about. And the other part is it's grounding.
And when you mentioned Toni Morrison, I went right to the clearing. But I know even for myself putting your bare feet in the Earth is grounding, whether you're just dancing or standing. It's part of a ritual. It, in some ways, gets you out of your head in the worst ways. And it helps you get past this sense that there is a mental and there's a physical, that there is a linguistic and there's an embodied.
There are false dichotomies. Your mind is in your body. Like, what is this, right? I mean, your brain is in your body. It's like, we say these for ease, but they're not really differences. There's not spirit and embodiment. There's not mental and physical. It's the whole thing, and those are practices that kind of help remind us of that and help create that kind of unity and get us out of this very Western hierarchy that the mind, the spirit, the soul is more important, more elevated than the rest of who we are.
MARTIN SUMMERS: Can I just follow up on that because you were talking about these false dichotomies, and I'm thinking to whether or not another false dichotomy we should have is-- or we should do away with is the sacred and the secular because in my current work on Chicago, one of the things that I'm looking at is the ways that migrants to Chicago and actually old settlers were responding to the Chicago Race Riot of 1919.
You were talking about voluntary migration. People leaving the South, being forced out of the South. And some historians have begun talking about migrants experiencing a form of PTSD. But that's not alleviated when they get to places like Chicago or New York, and so then how are they kind of dealing with this racism? And Chicago, the Commission on Race Relations in Chicago, which was written by or headed up by Charles Johnson, he actually circulates a survey amongst Black Chicagoans in the wake of the race riot.
And he has a question, how are you-- or are you experiencing any quote, unquote, "mental complexes" because of the kind of daily racism that you're experiencing? And I was reading that, and one of the things that struck me is that nobody says, I'm turning to the church. Some of them say, I am engaging in self hypnotism or auto hypnotism, or they're looking in the mirror.
And they're just essentially saying that this isn't about me. This is more about white people, and so I'm thinking that this is actually a form of new thought. But there's something kind of spiritual about what they're doing. It's a form of self care that they're not engaging in traditional church.
MONICA COLEMAN: And going to that, which goes to the question that Dr. Hucks asked me earlier, even Isese is tradition. It doesn't mean religion. And when my daughter was younger, and I would say, this is our religion. She says, no, it's not our religion. This is our culture.
I mean, she just rejected-- I was like, what kind of religious scholar mama am I where my kid is like, we don't do religion. But she got it because this was just a culture of our lives. And so for like, no, this is-- no, mom, this is our culture. And I was like, OK, like I wasn't going to argue with her because she was right.
STEPHANIE EVANS: And this also speaks to the impact that Rosa Parks picture has that you see someone in the AME church who is devoting herself to studying Buddhist practices, Buddhism, taking it seriously, and also people like Jan Willis whose book is titled Black, Baptist, and Buddhist. So we're not only not going to separate the mind and the body in our religious practices.
We're going to incorporate those things, and I'm thinking of when you talk about embodiment, Tina Turner, who turned to Buddhist and turned to Buddhist chanting. Tina Turner released four chanting albums. We know all about her hits, but when you listen to her chanting albums, she differentiates between chanting and singing.
And she says that even though she's known for this other type of sound, the chanting is part of what-- but you don't have to give up your Christian faith. So this kind of bifurcation, the Aristotelian on the one hand. This on the other hand. No, the hands are the same body, and all of these kind of separations you find-- I'm thinking Kathryn Dunham as well. The practice of the body, the practice of dance, and blending that faith. So it's really a bringing together. I love that your daughter got that.
MONICA COLEMAN: And I mean, this is what my current research is on, how Black people in communities transgress these religious boundaries. It's just, no, we just go and ignore them. Whether you talk about how you ignore them is another story, but that's almost part of Black religiosity is to transgress some of these religious boundaries. Because when we understand the beliefs and practices aren't separated really, you can see that.
MARTIN SUMMERS: I'm thinking too about the blues. I mean, the blues is a performance but also as the blues-- the ways of blues kind of creates community that is very much similar to the church.
AUDIENCE: We have another audience question.
STEPHANIE EVANS: I was like, we're going to talk. Y'all just--
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: First of all, thank you all for being here and for coming to share your knowledge. My name is Margaret Daramola. I am a first-year student here studying religious syncretism and its manifestations in the African diaspora. My question is specifically for you, Dr. Coleman, but you're welcome to add and answer is, you mentioned being ordained in the Christian tradition and also adhering to traditional Yoruba religion.
I'm wondering how do you reconcile the amalgamation between both traditions, given that Ifa is a polytheist religion, and Christianity is monotheist. And also how do you respond to the common notion that practicing Ifa as a Christian can be seen as idolatry.
MONICA COLEMAN: Let me take them backwards. The second question is the extent to which Ifa is heretical for a Christian to practice depends on the extent to which one is an exclusive Christian. So if you believe that the only way-- the only valid way to be religious is by holding certain theological propositions about who Jesus is, then you've got a problem.
But you got a problem with everybody. It doesn't hold those propositions like other Christians, Muslims, Jewish people, everybody. If you are a more pluralist Christian, who doesn't think that Jesus is the only way or certain beliefs about Jesus are the only way to connect with the divine, then it doesn't really matter to you what other people are doing. It's just a different path.
So I think, one, it depends on what kind of Christian one is, in terms of how you relate to other beliefs generally speaking. I want to challenge the ideas of monotheism and polytheism in the question because they're Western terms that don't really work for Indigenous traditions. I mean because Christianity isn't really even that monotheistic. I mean, what's the Trinity?
It's just a whole complicated problem. I mean, this desire for oneness. Many feminist theologians have written about it. Laurel Schneider has a wonderful book about going beyond monotheism. So that's part of it. It's not that there's polytheism, and there's monotheism. And I'm blanking on his name, but there is this wonderful Nigerian scholar who talks about [? communotheism, ?] and that's even, in some ways, a more accurate way of talking about what you see in traditions like Ifa.
I find all the terms problematic. I think they just don't apply. It applies when you're looking at certain kinds of Western religions, and they're still slippery there. But that there's a sense of this has one God. This has many gods, also hinges on the fact of where you think God is. So if you have a tradition that has a deep sense of panentheism, that God is in everything, it's harder to separate, well, God is over here, and we're over here. There's one God over here, and there's humanity over here.
There's five gods over here. There's humanity over here. To even translate Orisa as gods, it doesn't work. They're not gods. They're not ancestors. Its own thing, and it's better to live in that world than to try to make sense in a Western language that was never designed to account for that entire worldview. So for me, I mean, even sometimes when I'm talking about trying to translate what Orisa are, I'll say cultural hero. Because everybody's got cultural heroes.
Every community, every society, every culture has a cultural hero. So Rosa Parks could be an Orisa in that sense. She's our cultural hero. I have no lineage to her. I'm not a descendant of her, but she's part of our culture. I mean, so in some ways, I think that would be a better translation than God or angel or some of the other things we've seen through that society. So for me, it's not-- personally and I think even ideologically, it doesn't have to be a contradiction.
I think that the terms that Western philosophical language and Western theological language likes to coin are more problematic, even for its own traditions, even for Western Christianity isn't that monotheistic [? than ?] the conflict. I mean, the other difference, of course, is that Ifa, it's not a proselytizing tradition. We don't really care if you are or not. We're not going to go-- we're not on the street corner with tracks and saying like this is what you have to be.
And there's a long tradition for centuries of people who visibly practice Christianity, Islam, and still go see an [? Awo, ?] still go see a [? Baba ?] for readings. And come on, there's no sense that, oh, you're not supposed to come. It's like, well, of course, we've got wisdom for you. That's not necessarily going to-- that from our perspective, from Ifa perspective, is going to be a problem. Now you might have problems with your other world, but we don't think that there's this contradiction there. So I hope that answers your question.
TRACEY HUCKS: Other questions? I'm going to make sure my elder [? Olupona ?] in the back is our esteemed Professor have a question. Yes.
MONICA COLEMAN: Yes, our godfather.
AUDIENCE: Sorry, nice to be here. I'm sorry I missed Judith's lecture yesterday. I had to be with the students in one of the halls. I was going to comment a little bit on the question from the poet laureate from Virginia, who is usually not well known here. But it's kind of a pentecostalist question that comes out of the inability-- probably practitioners of Christianity-- to understand that generally Yorubas are defined by the Indigenous worldview, no matter where they are.
As a professor, if I have my dream, and I wake up, I know where to go. I know the people to call. Even when I claim to be a Christian, and of course, for Western part of Nigeria, the Yoruba there, the religion sort of cross criss. And I mean, [? Hefa ?] for himself says that a [INAUDIBLE], we met Ifa in the world.
[INAUDIBLE], we met Islam in the world. [INAUDIBLE] the Christianity came in the afternoon like a thief to disrupt the social order, that sense. So this is quite an issue. I, first of all, want to commend the organizers of this meeting for the kinds of structure that you have put in place. It's a conversation.
It's not-- people don't come here to-- it's not that we're really reading, and I find it very helpful. I was just busy listening, and honestly, the other thing that happened are known to you and particularly Monica was that I woke up this morning trying to see if I can get in touch with Professor [? Shoyinka, ?] the [? big ?] guy in, to write a foreword to a monograph that is the life of a medicine man in Nigeria, who is 100 plus now and whose conversations are so unique.
[? I ?] was a psychiatrist, traditional psychiatrist. But the only thing they remember about him in his own town is that he was a medicine-- they probably saw a bad medicine man. They never knew he had a psychiatric hospital and that they were bringing cases to him from the [? Arrow ?] Mental Hospital, the best known mental hospital in West Africa, which Professor [? Lambo ?] established based on the principles that were just hearing community, psychiatry, and health practices.
And the problem has to do with what we have just been discussing here. So my question is, how do we go back to these traditional Indigenous ways of responding to the crisis of our times? If Africans [? in ?] Nigeria-- so during COVID-- didn't revert back to traditional thing, a lot of people would have died. The West predicted they were going to die. They are going to be bodies all over the place.
They will have no access to all the things the West had, and yet they quickly responded to Indigenous medicine, traditional healing, in particularly in psychiatry thing, to mental health to respond to their crisis. It seems to me that we have reached the stage where we have to do more of this comparative work, particularly between the African-American and African diaspora communities.
We are not doing enough of it. Our students in the Divinity School and all over the place should be made to go to these countries. Tanzania, South Africa, to observe what is going on there. Our students are also challenged here in the classrooms, where they cannot-- the kinds of conversations we are having here, they are not allowed to even say. And when they say, they may even be afraid of saying it because it's not seen as it's even scholarly, so to say. And this is what we have to deal with. Anyway, thank you very much. Let me stop here.
STEPHANIE EVANS: Please, I just feel like, yes, we want to clap for this. Yes, exactly, if I can say I was very mindful when studying yoga to seek out kemetic yoga. There are African traditions, and so I was not erasing Indian yoga. I cited and conversed with Indian and South Asian women yoga scholars so that I can better understand that yogic tradition.
But I also sought out Yirser Ra Hotep, who went back to Egypt and looked at Egypt and said, OK, this is what we call the Plow Position, or the Lotus Position can also be found in ancient Egypt. And then I pointed out, OK, but this is the East African tradition because Africa is a continent, not a country. So let's look at the Ethiopian traditions and the Zulu traditions in the South Africa and the [? Rero ?] traditions and really see Africa as a continent of multiple cultural practices that we would call yoga.
And there's this book called The Blue Zones, and it looks at communities of centenarians all over, and they have it in Greece and Italy and Japan. And there's not a blue zone listed in Africa. Really? Really? There's not a whole blue zone where there's a community of long living people that are listed, and that's on purpose. And so I think when we do encounter crises like COVID, and things like that, we can go back and look at historical practices.
And I have to say, I started school at Saint John's in Santa Fe with the great books curriculum, where we read Homer and [INAUDIBLE] and did Euclidean math and Thucydides, the history, and the Peloponnesian War, and all of that. And I was like, there's Africans in here. And they said, no, that's pre-history. What the hell is pre-history? What's before history but more history?
And so it's really centering concepts like [? Sankofa ?] and understanding that when Anna Julia Cooper is talking about a concept of regeneration that we don't see time in a linear like the past, the present, and the future. Part of kemetic yoga that differentiates it from Indian yoga is a listening for ancestors, a listening to ancestors, a connection with ancestors. And so that regenerative understanding that we must reach back to Africa, no matter if the academy will recognize Africa as a epistemological source or not.
MONICA COLEMAN: And I was thinking about your talk, in particular, as an answer to Dr. [? Olupona's ?] question in the sense that the more we share, even including in life writing, our experiences, the more that becomes new data for even Western thought to say, wait, but look, there are a whole bunch of people who are doing a whole different thing than we've been talking about. Because look, this person wrote about this, and this person wrote about that, and this person wrote about that.
And I'll even say, I'm surprised how many classes of social work teach my book because this is now data. And when I read it, I see a whole lot of African religion in it. I don't know if anyone else does, as well as Black church and a number of different things. And so I think also the more we share how we got over, whether it's through our testimonies, through TikToks, through memoir, those begin to shape, I'd like to think, or can contribute to shaping and changing even how people are looking at the resources that are drawn from.
Because we'll see that they are more communal. They are more religious. They are more dot, dot, dot, than this one-on-one therapeutic session. I've got nothing against it. I love my therapist, but that alone wouldn't keep me well. That has to be a part of a larger whole, and there is that very Western tendency to be like, well, this one person talks to this one person. And we don't thrive like that. I don't know if anyone does, but I know we don't. That's not going to create wellness. That has to be about peace.
TRACEY HUCKS: I'd like to pose the last question if possible, and it's one we can reflect on. And it really came from Dr. Summers, from something you said, that in some of these asylums, there was this understanding that white patients could not be in proximity to Black patients because it would somehow impede their health and their wellness. And my question is, however, might there be data to support that the proximity factor of Black people to the structures of white supremacy can be shown to be detrimental to Black health comprehensively?
MARTIN SUMMERS: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the things I was thinking about in this whole discussion of historical wellness and self care as kind of countering. It made me think of Ruth Wilson Gilmore's definition of racism and of processes and structures that set the preconditions for premature death and that the historical wellness and self care is a response to that.
But, yeah, no, I certainly think that we have to think about white supremacy as producing not only in a physical-- well, again, I don't want to draw a false distinction between mental wellness and physical wellness. I think they're all bound up, but certainly, I think that we have to think about white supremacy as an etiological factor in mental illness.
MONICA COLEMAN: So I mean, as you were saying that, I was like, well, it's the Black-- white people think that they need to be separate from Black people to get well, but the Black people need to be separate from the white people to get well. In some ways, this structure could have also been to that benefit.
STEPHANIE EVANS: Working at an HBCU for eight years, I would say this is where we also need to do the internal work because just having a Black space doesn't mean it's a healthy space.
MONICA COLEMAN: That too. It's the internalized racism that we need to, and that's the whole-- at your point that just because we're gathered, doesn't mean we're gathered well.
TRACEY HUCKS: And I'm going to give the last word to our esteemed brother George.
AUDIENCE: All right, well, I will take the last word by closing the session. Please join me in warmly welcoming-- warmly thanking rather, our chair, our panelists for such a generative conversation.
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So wonderfully weaved.
SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2024 The President and Fellows of Harvard College.
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