# Video: Black Religion and Mental Health Symposium Plenary II June 04, 2024 ![Speaker at Black Mental Health Symposium.](/sites/g/files/omnuum5526/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/hds2/files/untitled_600_x_400_px_4.png?itok=N3SWuRKb) Plenary II: Plenary Chair: Dr. Melissa Wood Bartholomew, Associate Dean for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, Lecturer on Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, Harvard Divinity School Panelists: Sevonna Brown, National Director of Black Women’s Blueprint, Safer Childbirth Cities Initiative, Merck for Mothers, Dr. Henry Love, inaugural Obama Foundation U.S. Leaders Fellow, Vice President of Public Policy and Strategy at Women in Need, Dr. Joshua Louis Gills, Rutgers Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at the Aging and Brain Health Alliance, Yolo Akili Robinson (he/him/his) is a non-binary award-winning writer, healing justice worker, yogi and the founder and Executive Director of BEAM (Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective) 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. \[MUSIC PLAYING\] SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School. SPEAKER 2: Black Religion and Mental Health Symposium Plenary 11. March 1, 2024. AHMAD GREENE-HAYES: Thank you so much for remaining with us for this second portion of the day. We had a very full conversation this morning, and so we're very grateful to Dr. Hucks for moderating and to our esteemed panelists for offering insights for reflection and contemplation. And so we're very grateful to all of you. I'm pleased to introduce my colleague, Dr. Melissa Wood Bartholomew, who will be the plenary chair for our second session of the afternoon. She is an alum of Harvard Divinity School, and she's currently the associate dean for Diversity Inclusion and Belonging. She's also a lecturer here at Harvard Divinity School. She is a Christ centred minister and a racial justice and healing practitioner committed to a multi-faith, multidisciplinary, Afro-centric approach to healing, justice rooted in the African philosophy of ubuntu, restorative justice and love. Melissa's passion for racial and social justice was cultivated at Howard University where she received her undergraduate and law degrees. She is an attorney with nearly a decade's experience in public interest law. Through her experiences in Seattle practicing law as an assistant attorney general, as a legal aid attorney with the Northwest Justice Project, and working as a mediator in King County Superior Court, it became clear to Melissa that the law could not facilitate the heart changes required to eradicate racism and oppression from individuals and systems. Her call to ministry led her to pursue her MDiv at HDS Melissa. Is earnestly committed to eradicating racism and oppression and advancing healing and societal transformation through spiritually engaged, heart centered, multi-faith and multi-disciplinary strategies rooted in love. She is a restorative justice practitioner and has studied restorative justice in Rwanda, transformational leadership in Ghana and has published various articles exploring racial justice and healing. Melissa received her MSW from Boston College where she received her PhD in social work. Her research interests include the impact of racism, incarceration, and other systems of oppression on the mental health of Black people and the role of religion and spirituality in their resistance. I could not think of a better individual suited to lead this panel, guiding practitioners in the field on the question of Black religion and mental health. And so if you would please welcome my colleague Dr. Melissa Wood Bartholomew to the stage. \[APPLAUSE\] MELISSA WOOD-BARTHOLOMEW: Thank you so much for that introduction, and thank you to the esteemed conveners of this powerful conversation. This is such an urgent conversation, and I'm so grateful that we're here, that we're having this conversation. I'm grateful to be a part of this conversation. I give thanks for the panel that came before us. It was medicine for our soul, our spirit, our mind, our body, and I'm so grateful to each and every one of you and to our Dr. Hucks who led the panel. Thank you all so much for laying the groundwork. It's a privilege to be here. And I'm excited to and honored to be able to introduce our panelists for this next panel. And following in the fashion of Dr. Hucks, once I read your bio, you can come take your seat. So our first panelist, Sevonna Brown. Sevonna Brown is the national director of Black Women's Blueprint, Mother's Maternal Portfolio. She is a doula and has been featured in the documentary, The Business of Birth Control as well as Aftershock. She is also a recipient of the Mellon Mays Fellowship for research on Black maternal health. She has experienced leading girls initiatives focused on violence intervention and reproductive health and has expertise in clinical experience, in postpartum support, home visiting, prenatal care, and childbirth education for pregnant women. She has worked in integrative health medicine offices, nutrition programs, and leads initiatives like mobile health vans. Her expertise spans across continuity of care, home birth, birth centers, and maternal fetal medicine. She sits on the respectful Maternal Care Council organized by White Ribbon Alliance. And she has-- she has trained midwives and doulas at colleges and universities and schools of nursing and within birthing centers. She has written numerous op eds and published articles in Ebony, Time Magazine, For Harriet and Rewire News on issues of reproductive and maternal health. And she is certified in the intercultural development inventory, the premier cross-cultural assessment of intercultural competence that is used by thousands of individuals and organizations to build intercultural competence to achieve intergenerational, I'm sorry, international and domestic diversity and inclusion goals and outcomes. In this way, she has the expertise and drive to serve as multiple principal investigator for the proposed community and academic partnership entitled NY Champ and looks forward to working together along with the NIHs maternal health research centers of excellence in providing the best obstetrical care possible in New York State. Please join me in welcoming Sevonna Brown. \[APPLAUSE\] Next, we have Henry Love. Henry Love is a developmental psychologist, inaugural Obama Foundation US Leaders Fellow and vice president of public policy and strategy at Women in Need Incorporated, the nation's largest shelter provider to families experiencing homelessness. Love holds a master of philosophy, and PhD in psychology from the City University of New York Graduate Center. He has over 10 years of experience in policy work in the public and social sectors. His technical expertise and research interests span various anti-poverty programs and policies, including addressing implicit racial bias, affordable housing, child and youth homelessness prevention, guaranteed income, and childhood adversity. Love has worked closely with the New York City Council to draft and pass NYC Local Law 35 which requires behavioral health resources in all New York City family homeless shelters. In addition, he has advised members of the New York City Council, New York State legislature, Congress, and the Biden Administration on policy solutions to ending child and family homelessness. Love has worked with the Mayors for Guaranteed Income, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Trinity Church Wall Street to design, implement, and evaluate innovative, guaranteed income-based interventions. His experiences as a survivor of intimate partner violence and growing up as an African-American youth in Detroit navigating the extreme levels of systemic racial inequality ignited his passion for racial equity and poverty reduction. Please join me in welcoming Henry Love. \[APPLAUSE\] Next, we have Joshua Louis Gills. Gills is an exercise physiologist with graduate and fellowship level clinical and research training in exercise and sports science, gerontology, neuropsychology and public health. He is a Rutgers Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at the Aging and Brain Health Alliance. His underlying research focus is on lifestyle modifications, exercise, sleep and diet, aging, the Alzheimer's disease-- aging and Alzheimer's disease. His research investigates how fitness, sleep, and vascular risk impact cognitive decline and Alzheimer's risk health disparities in middle to late life Black adults, and he utilizes mitigation strategies to improve cognition and quality of life. Please join me in welcoming Joshua Louis Gills. \[APPLAUSE\] And finally, we have Yolo Akili Robinson, who is a non-binary award winning writer, healing justice worker, yogi, and the founder and executive director of BEAM, Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective. BEAM is a national training, movement building, and grant making organization dedicated to the healing, wellness, and liberation of Black communities. Under Yolo's leadership, BEAM became one of the leading Black organizations that funds mental health in Black communities, and the organization has been given support from foundations and celebrities, including the MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation, celebrities, including Jordan Peele, Kelly Rowland, Chloe and Halle, Debbie Allen, and many others. For his work, Yolo has received numerous accolades, including being recognized by the Surgeon General of the United States, Vivek Murthy, for Minority Mental Health Month in 2023. He has been an invited presenter at the National Academy of Sciences, Math and Engineering, the Milken Institute, the Congressional Black Caucus Conference and much more. He has been awarded the prestigious Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Equity Award for his work and featured at the BET Awards as an empowerful spotlight, highlighting his work facilitating the vision of being. His writings and work have appeared on Shondaland, GQ, Women's Health, USA Today, Vice, BET, Ebony, Everyday Feminism and more. He is the author of the social justice themed affirmation book entitled, Dear Universe: Letters of Affirmation and Empowerment for All of Us. And he is a contributor to the New York Times best seller, Trauma-- I'm sorry, Tarana Burke and Brené Brown's anthology on Black vulnerability and shame resilience, You are Your Best Thing, published in 2021. Please join me in welcoming Yolo Akili Robinson. \[APPLAUSE\] We're excited to hear the wisdom of our panelists. They each will be given about five to seven minutes to present, and then I will follow up with a question for them, and then we'll open it up for Q&A. SEVONNA BROWN: Good afternoon, everyone. I received such a warm welcome last night over dinner and also today from Dr. Bartholomew to HDS. So I feel like I can be at home. Can y'all confirm? Is that true? All right. Thank you so much. So I'm going to talk today about Black maternal mental health and the search for Black maternal divinity. I'm really excited about this. As a doula and also in the lineage of my grandmother, who was a labor and delivery technician in the Jim Crow South, this is a sacred work to me to be able to engage and bear witness and to sit at the feet of women as they are crossing and making many crossings. And so I want to just be in a conversation with you about this, talk to you about some of the ways that we're interacting with this at Black Women's Blueprint which is the organization that I am representing and so happy to be national director at Black Women's Blueprint. We were born and raised in Brooklyn in 2008, so we've been there. That's our stomping ground. But over the last several years, we've expanded to a 300 acre campus upstate New York where we are actually holding and facilitating retreats to really integrate these somatic modalities and interventions and truly ceremonies for Black women and girls to come around their sovereignty and their dignity. So our center is really centered on empowering Black women and girls and gender fluid people, to advocate for human rights, and to secure gender and racial justice through the eradication of sexual violence. And we're also intersecting that with full spectrum reproductive health and maternal health. So we've been in the business of Black feminist leadership for the last 13 years. Some of you might Black Women's Blueprint. But if you don't, we are guided by what the great lantern Bell Hooks calls, sisters of the yam, those that advise and guide and nourish our work and us and sustain and resource our work and spiritually ground our work as well. We are guided by a collective intergenerational Black feminist scholars as well and their voices in their work and this includes those who are living and also our ancestral cloud, right. So I want to frame Black maternal mental health for us. It'll be a combination of just some case studies, but also some data that I hope also helps this group understand, like, where are we situated when it comes to Black maternal mental health. Black populations in particular carry the burden of historical intergenerational trauma stemming from experiences that we know, right, very well in this room, slavery, systemic racism, and discrimination. This cumulative trauma can influence the neurobiological responses to stress potentially impacting the perinatal period. We know. We have evidence of that. Black mothers face disproportionately high rates of Black maternal mortality and morbidity, and we're seeing that the fear around maternal mortality and morbidity, Black maternal death, is also impacting the mental health, right. So stressors with systemic health care, disparities, and fear of inadequate medical care can also contribute and be indicators of this trauma. We know this is not new, right, so I really want us to look back at the story of Margaret Garner. I'm really interested in the Black maternal psycho spiritual state. And the question that I ask, and I'll just share a little bit of background for those who need to be reminded, is was God in the room with Margaret Garner? So we know Margaret Garner's story for several reasons, but in Toni Morrison's "Beloved," I love that Toni Morrison was called upon earlier today, the Margaret Garner incident is really what kind of propels us into set the story, right. The Margaret Garner incident of 1856 tells us the story of Margaret Garner who was born into slavery June 4, 1834 on Maplewood plantation somewhere in Kentucky, maybe Boone County. Working in a house-- working as a house slave for much of her life, Garner often traveled with her masters, and even accompanied them on shopping trips to free territories in Cincinnati, Ohio. After marrying Robert Garner in 1849, Margaret bore four children in 1856. The 1850s were also the period in which the Underground Railroad was in its height, transporting numerous slaves from freedom-- to freedom in Canada. The Garner's decided to take advantage of such an opportunity and escape enslavement. On January 27, 1856, they set out for their first stop on their route to freedom, Joseph Kite's house in Cincinnati. The Garner's made it safely to Kite's home on Monday morning where they awaited their next guide. Within hours, the Garner's master, A.K Gaines, and federal marshals stormed Kite's home with warrants for the Garner's. Determined not to return to slavery, Margret decided to take the lives of herself and her children. And when the marshals found Margaret in the back room, she had slit her two-year-old daughter's throat with a butcher knife, killing her. The other children lay there on the floor wounded but still alive. In a bid to gain freedom for Margaret and her children, Joliffe, another abolitionist and lawyer, convinced officials to arrest Margaret on, they say charge for the murder of her children, but really on stolen property, right? Margaret Garner was released back into freedom, but she went through several trials, right. And what I want us to ask in terms of the question around Margaret Garner's story is what was her psycho spiritual state when she made the decision that pulled her to the edges of herself, right. And the question that we typically get is, is slavery worse than death when it comes to Margaret Garner? But also is the horrific nightmare of the psychic trauma of slavery worse than death, is the question. I wanted to hearken to Joy James', The Captive Maternal while we're looking at this issue and investigating this issue of Black maternal mental health and these legacies of slavery. And she says, "We move or fall, breathe or suffocate, while living and caretaking amid hostilities toward Black life. Black parents and communities labored to keep children, elders, and themselves stable and protected. That care can be fueled by love or fear, or loyalty, or a mixture of motivations. Our labor is often used to stabilize the very structures that prey upon us, particularly our rebels and resisters. In the first stage of the Captive Maternal-- which there are several stages-- we are conflicted or celebratory caretakers in the "hold" or in the big house. Agape-- love through political will-- is our cradle and compass. Our generative powers are often stolen, siphoned, and repurposed by the state, corporation, and non-profit. Steal them back. We fear, but crave rebellions, walk like a toddler given the mixed messaging, re-steal oneself from slavery." And again, I turn to Toni Morrison, which was really the place by which I was able to bear witness deeply to the testimonies of Black women, and the Black maternal in ways that there's a deep silence around in our societal spaces. But Toni Morrison actually delivers for us a catalog of the Black maternal psychosocial posture. We see it in all of her novels. We see examples of God's immaculate presence, plenty of examples even of women laughing at God when others bring God to them in the midst of maternal crisis or in some instances, communing with God, as Ahmad pointed out shouting, right. These radical sites of undoing are actually the Black religious spaces that we keep asking about, right. This site, this room where Margaret Garner is seeking and searching personal and collective divinity that is linked to liberation, that is tied to her sovereignty and tied to her dignity. There's a mercy seeking lineage and genealogy of mothers that we get to bear witness to in the sermonic chapters of Toni Morrison and also in unmonstering of Black mothers, right. There was so much work done to monstersize Black women and to claim that we were not fit to parent our children or to have the reproductive choice that we fight for. So we're watching Morrison write women into wholeness, right. And Andrea Daniel Matthews shows us how Morrison's fiction is actually a Black religious space in this theological perspective where we see, in various examples, recognition of the divine, reclamation of the body, cultivation of Earth, and gathering of community as tropes over and over again. So Toni Morrison shows us the past, but we also have a current present example, right. So if we look at historical fiction, yes, we see it. But the Black maternal psychospiritual state also shows up in Ebony Wilkerson. Has anybody heard Ebony Wilkerson's story? Some. Yes. So Ebony Wilkerson is a Black mother who headlines read, "A pregnant mother drives a minivan into the Florida surf, carrying her young children with her into the waves." So several years ago in Daytona, a Black pregnant mother who has experiencing a pregnancy psychosis, but also potentially postpartum psychosis as well because she has young children, she reports in court, she says, "I just kept going, kept following the Holy Spirit. I was following the Holy Spirit wherever I went." And so while her children are screaming in the backseat, and she's driving into the ocean, she's telling her children go to sleep. The Holy Spirit is calling me to the waters, right. So what is this edge, right, that we're seeing the Black maternal on? What is this edge that the captive maternal is working through and how does it happen? So some data around Black maternal health, and I won't go through it exhaustively, because I cannot wait to hear my brothers come to speak, there are some data that I think is really, really poignant for us, which is that Black mothers are more likely to experience these perinatal disorders, these mood disorders, these anxiety disorders and also still receive lower quality mental health care than their white counterparts. 60% of Black mothers do not receive any treatment or support at all in the case of Ebony Wilkerson. She calls her sister, and she says, I'm being called to the water. Her sister calls the police. The police come and sit and interview her. The police leave her at home just hours before she drives to the edge of the water. While postpartum depression can affect 1 in 7 women on average, studies suggest that Black women experience postpartum depression at higher rates. And barriers to accessing mental health services, and when we talk about barriers to accessing mental health services, we're talking about culturally competent, spiritually informed responsive care to Black women. Maternal suicide is also on the rise. While there's not a lot of data around Black women and maternal suicide, we have data around how diagnoses of suicidal ideation amongst Black women is not being caught but has surged more than 700%. A longitudinal study shows us that over a 10 year period depression and suicide suicidal ideation increased amongst Black women. Some of the other places that we see this onset of psychosis for pregnant and postpartum women is also in racism and toxic stress and weathering, present day, right. So exposure to racism, racial discrimination, this is a significant stressor for Black women. And then obstetric racism. So Dana-Ain Davis gives us this kind of six dimensions of obstetric racism that we're seeing more and more in hospital-based care, gynecological care. And so the six dimensions are diagnostic lapse, which is when a clinician's uninterrogated belief that blackness is pathological and leads them to-- Black people's conditions are pathological and leads them to de-emphasizing, or exaggerating, or ignoring their pain. We get diagnostic lapse. Just go home and lay down. Just rest. Neglect, dismissiveness, or disrespect. When medical professionals ignore or dismiss a person's expressed need for reproductive health or care, intentionally causing pain when medical professionals fail to appropriately manage pain steeped in a racialized belief that Black women don't experience pain. We also see coercion, ceremonies of degradation where we have ritualistic and routinized ways of causing pain for Black women, medical abuse, and racial recognizance which describes the Herculean effort made by Black women to avoid and mitigate racist encounters that includes hypervigilance against their care. So the data is there. There's no dearth in terms of data and research on Black maternal mental health, obstetric racism. Black feminist scholars are taking that up. So we see it, but we're not intervening. So we see existing neurobiological presentations of trauma in the prenatal period, and the perinatal arc which includes hormonal changes, epigenetic modifications, neurotransmitter imbalance, attachment and bonding and the one we know so well, transgenerational transmission of trauma. This happens in the perinatal period. It happens in gestation. And so of course, the question is, where can religious spaces intervene, right? Where was the church for Ebony Wilkerson who was following God out to the water? Where was God in the room with Margaret Garner, right? And so there is a missed opportunity, I would say, across religious communities in spaces where we're not taking up for the Black family, parenting folks, people across the gender spectrum as well who are pregnant and parenting and it goes beyond a cry room on Sunday morning, right, where you can get up from the pew and take your nursing baby and sit in the back and actually be separated from the kind of community that you need. So I'm really excited to explore, just in conversation with you all, where we think those interventions are missed and where we go from here. Thank you so much. \[APPLAUSE\] HENRY LOVE: So good afternoon, everyone. Really, really excited for this conversation. Before I get started, I just-- I want to just give a little bit of a background on WIN, the organization I work for. We're the largest homelessness provider in the country. We serve over 7,000 individuals every night, and we have 15 shelters across the five boroughs of New York City. So again, and I've been really thinking about this from the conversation that was raised this morning about the fact that what I'm experiencing in my work is that I am in a crisis moment. I am in a moment where we are dealing with homelessness, immigration, and racism all converging at the same point in time. And I would say that we're living in exceptional times of inequity, globally, and we're at an inflection point, particularly in New York City, nationally and globally. The legacy of colonization, the slave trade in the global south has caused mass global migration, especially in the western hemisphere. The pandemic, climate change, global geopolitical instability are all driving mechanisms for this movement. Folks are fleeing for their lives. The overwhelming majority of the over 300 asylum seeking families that we house at WIN came on foot. And let that sink in. I get a little emotional when I think about these-- what some of these women have been through. They left-- a woman in particular who comes to mind, she left Caracas, and she was pregnant. And she went with her two-year-old child from Caracas, and she left her three-year-old at home and traveled from foot from Caracas to the Darién gap. So then through the Darién gap and had to deal with all the traumas that forced her to flee Caracas and then all the traumas that had forced-- that she experienced on that journey, and then all the traumas that she received at the border, then all of those traumas that she received being detained by the officials in Texas. All the trauma that she then received through being human trafficked by the government of Texas to New York, and then being used as a pawn, again, arguably, by the city of New York. So there's this multilayered level of trauma that we're experiencing that we haven't dealt with before in this kind of population. We work in homeless services. We're used to it but this is a whole different level. So one of the things I want to dig in today as I'm talking through this is how do we bring in the Indigenous healing practices to the ways that we think about how do we support these groups that are overwhelmingly Indigenous and Black immigrants? So just to start us off, I want to lay the foundation, because I want to do two things. One is just kind of give you the lay of the land of New York City's homelessness crisis, and the migrant crisis, and then sort of what are we doing to address it. What are religious groups, faith groups, communit-based organizations doing to change this? So these are national numbers besides that one on the bottom. And when we think about homelessness, I think people sometimes separate it from how we think about structural racism. I don't know why they do. But overwhelmingly, African-Americans and Native Americans are overrepresented in homelessness nationally, and in New York, it's even more pronounced. And so this 56% number is a little misleading, and the reason why it's misleading is because that's 56% of people who identify as Black. That's not counting the large Afro Latino population that is in our shelters. If you look at just the numbers of the folks that are in shelter in New York City, it's about 97%, 98% that are nonwhite. And so we see these gigantic disparities. So again, this is just a little snapshot, too, of student homelessness in New York. And for those of you that know New York, you'll notice some trends here. There's a cluster in the north which is-- I don't know if anybody just knows what that neighborhood is by any chance. Please call it out. Does anybody know what the neighborhood is? A big cluster like right up here. AUDIENCE: Heights. HENRY LOVE: So the Heights, Harlem, the Bronx. And then-- I think-- George, I think you lived down here. \[LAUGHTER\] What neighborhood is this? AUDIENCE: \[INAUDIBLE\] HENRY LOVE: Right. So these are two clusters of areas where there's predominantly Black and Latino, and we see racial segregation, sort of, on mapping exactly almost to the disproportionality of student homelessness in New York City. And the other thing I'd like to ask people, when we think about homelessness, I think people often think of a single adult male that's older. And so I pose this question to folks all the time. When people think of the most common age that someone is in a shelter, more likely than not, they wouldn't think infancy and that's the reality nationally is that it's not an older man. It's a child under the age of 5. And in New York City, over 75% of the folks who are experiencing homelessness are families. So I show this to you this show that before this whole crisis that we're dealing with right now, we already saw uptick in trends in family homelessness over the past decade. And so those trends are already in that direction, because we are in a housing crisis. So what happened? So we have a housing crisis. We have these issues. We have the eviction moratorium ending with the pandemic, and then the governor of Texas decides that he wants to start shipping people to New York in mass. And so we have sort of this phenomenon that started where we're getting upwards of 3 to 5,000 people every week from the southern border that are coming to New York City to stay in our shelters. Prior to this happening, which would have been in like 2021, the shelter since, it was about 50, 60,000. Now we're at 146,000 as of like October. These numbers are a couple months off. So in less than a year and a half, we almost tripled the system in New York City. And I showed this slide because it's important because prior to this whole situation, happening we had four systems that dealt with homelessness and post this, we have close to 10 or 15 as a result of that explosion, primarily due to these migration patterns that we've seen over the past decade particularly with Black and Indigenous migrants, as I mentioned. And then, you know, this is not new to New York, and I think that's been sort of this interesting sort of phenomenon that I think a lot of us on the advocacy side are navigating is that immigration is not new to New York. It's not new to America. But what is new is sort of this level of anti-- this level of Black migration that's happening in this scale that's causing these reactions in communities. And so one of the things that we're seeing that we're navigating is the disproportionality of Black migrants being evicted from shelters, residing in precarious situations, and this is sort of where the faith community has come in, because the city is sort of more or less said that they've run out of shelter space. But what faith groups have done, particularly in the African community, is really step up to house folks, particularly in mosques. And so this sort of brings us to, so what are we doing? And so we set up this organization called New York SANE. This really started-- and if anyone knows, this is Saint John the Divine. And this originated out of just us being in conversation with a host of religious officials, particularly the Episcopal Diocese of New York, and we also we need to do something. And so we organized a group of faith leaders throughout the Christian traditions, mosque leaders, imams, folks from the Buddhist community, folks from the Hindu community, folks from the Jewish faith to all come together to figure out and strategize and put pressure on the government to make sure that these newest New Yorkers have safe and adequate places to stay. And this is really important, because I want to emphasize this, and I think we'll probably get into it a little bit later in the discussion that housing is health care and for so many of these folks, the fact of the matter is that we can't even get to the place of intervention because folks don't have a place to sleep. And one of the things that we're seeing, the deeper we get into this crisis, is that multi-level trauma now finally starting to kind of inkle out. But we have had these issues related to the cultural accessibility of folks in terms of linguistic supports that match with particular groups, particularly Indigenous African, Indigenous American languages. And the last one I just want to emphasize too is our work on Local Law 35 with a coalition of groups, including some religious groups to work with the city council to draft legislation to ensure that there's mental health services in all family homeless shelters in the next five years. So I'll stop there, because \[INAUDIBLE\] \[APPLAUSE\] JOSHUA LOUIS GILLS: First, I'd like to thank George and Ahmad for inviting me here for this powerful symposium. Some of the talks are very-- have been very insightful, and also interesting as well, especially the psychiatric inequities in malpractices in the past and how they affect us now. It kind of makes sense why the Black community has a mistrust within psychology. But I'd like to start off saying I grew up playing sports as an active lifestyle, which led me into exercise physiology as my major. And at first, I studied more younger adults and metabolism research for sports supplements and things like that. And I moved into aging because it was more impactful, right. Aging population. Baby boomers are aging. So it's going to amplify the risk for certain aging related diseases such as neurodegenerative Alzheimer's disease and other cardiovascular issues as well. And so I studied physical activity, and now sleep and Alzheimer's disease. Can anybody guess what those have in common? Alzheimer's, physical activity, or exercise and sleep. That is a great-- that's a great answer there. It was a modifiable-- those are my modifiable risk factors of Alzheimer's disease, but I was actually aiming at a health disparity angle. So-- but you're right. It's also-- there are disparities that contribute to this, right, especially in the Black community compared to whites, like. Alzheimer's disease, Blacks have two to three times the rates of diagnoses of Alzheimer's disease compared to white Americans. We also have more sleep disruptions, sleep fragmentation, lower sleep times, and we don't get as much physical activity, right. We don't meet the American College of Sports Medicine guidelines of 150 minutes a week. I'm not saying you got to reach that all the time, but at least you can start somewhere just moving your body, getting your body going. So currently, I study more sleep-related illnesses of obstructive sleep apnea comparative between white and Black Americans, looking at some intermediates of this pathology there. Studying like inflammation and slow wave sleep. But also, on a higher level and a more holistic approach, we study mediators such as social and structural determinants of health. So we're talking about discrimination, neighborhood level disadvantage, socioeconomic status, health care access. Those all play a role in the relationships of these disparities. And this helps us create a personalized interventions or personalized medicine, right, because now we know what's contributing to these diseases, whether it's environmental or whether what's going on with inflammation, maybe genetics as well playing a role into all of this. And I'm particularly interested in how sleep mediates that physical activity and pathology and cognition as well-- as well as a moderator for poor sleep on ADRD or Alzheimer's disease pathology. That's what the ADRD stands for. And as far as relating it back to religion and mental health, religious institutions provide framework for us to educate the masses, especially on Black folks understanding what's going on with mental health but also brain health and those modifiable risk factors to sleep, exercise, socializing and cognitive engagement. So those-- we use those religious platforms to educate but also form a connection with them as well. Like, we have to form a trust within the community. So we make those connections with community liaisons, religious institutions, community organizations to form a-- to form a foundation of trust there where we can reach out masses in the New York and Jersey communities. And also-- and also to form health fairs as well, health fairs maybe host exercise classes in these institutions as well. The health fairs obviously can bring in mental health specialists, practitioners to look at blood pressure and cholesterol, things that we need to track that also contribute to other diseases outside of Alzheimer's disease so. And lastly, I'll go off. We don't want to necessarily be helicopter researchers going into community, getting the data, and then coming out and not giving the community anything. So we try to provide the sustainable relationship and also outlets to help mental health. \[APPLAUSE\] YOLO AKILI ROBINSON: All right. First, I want to say thank you so much to everyone who's made this possible. This has been a really beautiful and powerful space. And I also want to acknowledge that in this moment, we have spent some time hearing some things that can be activating, right, things that can show up in our bodies, bring up feelings, experiences that we ourselves have lived through, the people we love and care have been through. And so I want to invite us for a moment to take a deep breath. Just kind of a deep cleansing inhaling breath on your own as you would like to. It's easy to get swept away in everything that we are changing and transforming because that's what we're doing today, right. And I want to invite you if you would like to do a consent-based practice with me as a call and response. You do not have to participate. That's what consent means. But if you would like to, you can repeat after me and say, I cleanse this space. AUDIENCE: I cleanse this space. YOLO AKILI ROBINSON: Hold on. I don't believe y'all. I cleanse this space. AUDIENCE: I cleanse this space. YOLO AKILI ROBINSON: And own my power. AUDIENCE: And own my power. YOLO AKILI ROBINSON: I cleanse this space. AUDIENCE: I cleanse this space. YOLO AKILI ROBINSON: And own my power. AUDIENCE: And own my power. YOLO AKILI ROBINSON: Ashay. JOSHUA LOUIS GILLS: Ashay. YOLO AKILI ROBINSON: All right. I want to begin by holding space and naming the practice lineage I come from, because I think that's important. I want to particularly name the under respected, often unnamed and uncredentialed healers I come from who have done the work of holding our folks long before we were allowed to be psychiatrists, therapists, and social workers. I want to name the pastors and the prayer warriors, the root workers, the big mamas, the tarot ladies, the stylists, barbers, activists, and herbalists who were healers, and who continue to hold the front line of distress in our communities, often underrepresented and under respected. That is my lineage, and where I come from and those are my folks who are still in every hood in this country doing the work when there is no therapist and no social worker present. AUDIENCE: Ashay. YOLO AKILI ROBINSON: There are a couple of things I want to name before I get into the context of my conversation that I think are really important to name this, and I just want to-- in any conversation around Black religion and mental health. As we continue to cultivate these really beautiful spaces, I think it's important that we name explicitly that we are being hyper vigilant about decentralizing and unseating Christian dominance and Christian supremacy and embrace the varied range of black spiritual practices, both include from Vodun, from Islam, to Santeria, to hoodoo. That we make sure that we have to be hyper-vigilant about seeing the diversity of Black folks for spiritual practices because it's very easy for us to slip into Christian centrism. AUDIENCE: Mm-hmm. YOLO AKILI ROBINSON: Right. Because we are taught Black folks are just Christian, but the data says something very different, right. I also want to hold that it's important that as we have these conversations, that a Black mental health politic that does not critique the foundations of psychiatry, and the ableist pathology centric diagnostic frameworks that have been cultivated by the western world and funded through the conflicts of interest from pharmaceutical entities. If we don't do that work, it will fail us and lead us on to the expansion of the carceral state which will use the mental health system as an excuse to expand the prison industrial complex under the guise of mental health as we already see in our communities. AUDIENCE: Yes. YOLO AKILI ROBINSON: It is important that we sometimes-- even as we have to understand these diagnostic criteria and frameworks, have some degree of legitimacy, which is also questionable by many research entities, but we have to also hold it like how-- how are they being framed and used, and for what purpose? Right. I am the executive director and founder of BEAM, the Black Emotional Mental Health Collective and a big part of our work is we believe that we must build ecosystems of care, right, sustainable care in Black communities that are not dependent upon federal institutions, but actually build upon our already ongoing legacies of healing in our barbershops, in our churches, in our salons, and in our hoods and all spaces, right. That that's more sustainable because often we're not at the whims of the federal or state institutions that have tried to decide to strip away our power or our access to mental health. To talk about the organization, we were founded in 2016, and the real premise of our organization is that largely we are training institution, right, that we believe that in order for Black communities to heal, we can not just rely on social workers and therapists. We need to build up the skills and tools of everybody in the community. That means everybody needs to have more skills and tools and reframing, and we need to take collectivist approaches, which is really well rooted in African Indigenous perspectives, right. So in terms of just going briefly over our work in like some spaces, I'm just going to talk about it. We have our training. We have our grant making as well. We are a grant maker. We are unfortunately-- I say unfortunately, but it's also surprising to me when funders tell me this and say, oh, you're the largest Black led and found funder of specifically Black mental health work in the United States. We're a $3.5 million organization. That's not large, right. And most of the people that we fund are actually small organizations and entities, like people who have budgets under $500,000, a lot of people who are actually independent actors, people in Birmingham, Alabama doing social work groups out of their churches, people who are doing barbershop education, having herbalists pop ups in their communities. So most of what we're resourcing is the folks that the big foundations will never touch or talk to, because they don't have that connection, right. And so that's a big part of our work and just giving you some sense of our flyers, our Black mental health and healing justice work training, which is one of our training's that we build the evidence for. So when we say evidence-based, we mean Black-based evidence. Want to make sure that's very clear. \[LAUGHTER\] We did a three year longitudinal study with social insights research to assess the impact from a qualitative and quantitative approach. And so this is a lot of our work, just giving you a high level. Also, our parent support fund. We-- every quarter, we give out about $17 to $20,000 directly to Black families in the form of cash. My funders say, how is that a mental health intervention? And I have to make sure it's clear that money is a mental health intervention, because to be depressed is one thing but to be depressed without lights is quite another situation, right. And so a lot of our work has been focusing on the training, the grant making and really kind of and getting community money back into the hands of our folks, right. So I'm going to skip these pieces. Now I want to move into a little bit talking about our practices, right. One of the things that we recognize-- we do at BEAM to give you a sense of our work, we are training in spaces that I say some of the white dominant institutions don't go to, OK. We're in Wetumpka, Alabama, and the churches. We're in Detroit, and the community centers. We're pulling up in high schools and colleges and universities, right-- community colleges, excuse me. And so one thing we recognize in our training's which really if you talk to people who participate in our training's, they'll tell you that this was a healing experience that gave me some training, but it felt like-- And that's the way we tried to frame them. We try to really be intentional with that framework. But one thing we recognize is that we want to integrate spiritual concepts into the training that could be presented in ways that didn't necessarily invoke religious debates, because I was like, I can't be arguing with your uncle about the interpretation of the Bible every Tuesday, OK. \[LAUGHTER\] So we had to figure out some strategic ways to build spirit practices, is what I call them, into our training work, right. And I'm going to share with you. And we're going to practice some together, and you're going to see some of them in some of the tools that we have as well, all right. So in every training that we do, we have a grounding. We do not start talking about mental health and trauma with our communities without grounding folks in a somatic-- in a somatic way, right. So we're thinking about breath work, getting them clear-- helping de-escalate anxiety, building trust because if we go into these spaces talking about these really visceral experiences, people get even more elevated. And we've done this-- not due diligence, but people leaving being in more duress than when they came. So first of all, one of the things that we do in all of our trainings, we start with a sacred pause. And it's similar to what I did with you. We do a lot more, a longer one. But it's an intentional practice that I encourage anybody. Don't go on the hood or any-- we're talking about mental health and not doing a sacred pause and getting people in their bodies and connect to y'all. It creates stress. And there's this kind of history that we have of people coming to you. Let me tell you about trauma, trauma, trauma. Wait a second. Wait a minute. Hold on. If we know that we are already navigating these things, how are we cultivating a body practice, a wellness practice, a pause practice so I can come into this with a little bit more rootedness? Another piece that we do in all of our trainings-- this is from our Black Masculinity Reimagined training. It is a training really rooted in Black feminism that works with Black men and masculine folks to address the intersection of mental health and patriarchy, essentially. And so what we do in all of our trainings is we open up the space by honoring the legacy of those who come before us. So we're calling in ancestors. And I wouldn't call it that when I'm in Alabama doing the training. I'm not going to say that when I'm in places, in certain communities because certain communities will be hostile to that idea. But when I say, let's honor the legacy of who came before us, who was a person in your life that modeled for you a healthy masculinity? Now everybody's connected. Do you see the strategy? And many people of faith are seeing what's happening. But the people who are not of faith can also feel included as well and not feel challenged in that way. So these are, once again, practices that we use to, once again, bring spirit-- address spirituality and religiosity without being explicitly Christian or Muslim, et cetera. There's also some other things we do. Very clearly in the very beginning of all of our trainings, which people are often shocked to hear us say and do, we say, we don't hold space for just one kind of Blackness. If you came here for the hotel Blackness, you're going to get your feelings hurt. We're holding space for all of us. That doesn't exclusively mean heterosexual, Christian. That doesn't mean African American, that Blackness is diverse. And sometimes some people's conceptualizations will make you feel uncomfortable. We want to invite you to lean into that. We also do some things around trust building that I think is really interesting. We have some spaces where Black folks who are-- people who are non-Black people will come into the space. And I love to say this very clearly to all our non-Black allies. I say, welcome, we're so grateful for you are here. But let me be clear that any attempt to redirect our decentralized Blackness will be met with compassionate redirection. We want to let you know we're grateful you here. But this is not a space that was sent to you and your perspective, creating more safety and more trust in there. There also are some other concepts that we consistently teach in our grounding that, once again, if any religious scholar would look at it and be like, wait a second, I know what you're doing here, we start off with everyone has eminence. We say, this is one of our shared values. When you come into a BEAM space, we move from the place that everyone has eminence. That means internal-- inherent value, inherent worth. That because you have this degree and because you have this money, this car doesn't make you less than anybody else or better than anyone else, which is an easier practice to understand intellectually than actually put into practice, because I've been in mental health conferences when I had my cornrows. And nobody wants to talk to me. Look like a little young student. Then I get on the stage. They're like oh, that's who that is? Oh, I wouldn't have value to you because of the way I looked, did I? You didn't think I knew what I was talking about. Even the piece about-- the second piece, one of my favorites is we address behaviors, ideas, and choices. We tell everyone-- when we start the space off, we say, when you come into a BEAM space, we are working to address behavior, ideas, and choices. We are not our behaviors, ideas, and choices. But we are responsible for how they show up in the world, once again, a spiritual concept because if we are not those things, then what are we, huh? Some people see that. They were at the invitation to spirit is what we're inviting people into. So once again, a number of practice, every course of the feelings, will, we invite people as well to begin to name a feeling as opposed to a story, which is often very difficult for many of us. We conflate our feelings with our stories. So all of these practices come in very early. And they're really built in to infuse spiritual and faith, faith kind of related concepts with folks without necessarily getting into religiosity. This is our BMR guiding principles for Black Masculinity Reimagined. You see one of our quotes is, "Healing is our birthright. We have the capacity to heal." We have certain frameworks in here that talk about all Black men and masculine folks are valuable and worthy of love, support, and care. They're supporting Black women's community. Mental health is a responsibility of all of us, including Black men. So at the intersection of social justice and spirituality, we're bringing in these precepts of people to sit and be present with in our work. One of my favorite tools we have here is another way me and some of the curriculum creators wanted to really tackle what we saw as the ways in which Christian theology had encouraged Black women to kind of martyr themselves in the name of taking care of communities. And so we came up with this concept called martyr nurturing. Martyr nurturing is a caring style that centers desecration and denial of self as a mechanism for both supporting and maintaining control over others. And this is very common because when we talk about mental health and Black communities, we have to talk about misogynoir because it's Black women who have been holding most of the wellness of the community. But at what cost? And so to be able to tackle that without saying how ideas of Christ have influenced this idea that martyrdom is something to be sacred, we introduced this concept and reframed it where we can engage with people in that space in a different way. And then we also introduced another concept called healing-centered nurturing versus martyr-centered nurturing. So healing-centered nurturing being caring style that centers the integrity, livelihood, and wellness of the caretaker as an essential aspect of being able to facilitate care and healing support. So we also give options on those pieces. But this is a big part of BEAM strategy is that we recognize that we all have a variety of different faiths. And we take elements of those faiths and put them in curriculum practices and tools in ways that-- how to unarmor some of the religiosity and the religious fighting that can happen in our spaces. And the last but not least, I'm just going to close with this piece, we have affirmations. We do a lot of circles and affirmations that we do in our spaces. And actually, there's one tool that I have. I'm going to have people pass out to you all to share. We have numerous tools that we have-- so we're going to pass around a tool, yeah. So these are also tools that we share as well. We actually do mass mailings of these. So many people will actually find us from like, I just found this in my postcard in my mailbox. And if you can check the tools, one is the LAPIS. It is peer support model. It is a tool that we do a whole training on. And the other one is PAUSE. We have barber shop posters across the country that also put these in here. Once again, if you read through these, you can see elements of not only psychological and behavioral interventions but also elements of spiritual themes that we infuse in them to engage folks. So that is a little bit about who we are and how we operate. I'm going to invite us to do this closing affirmation as a little bit of a practice so you can see how it feels. Every time we do a training, every time we hold space, a healing circle, we do this. This is a reminder of our power. So if you can repeat after me, my community has the power to heal. AUDIENCE: My community has the power to heal. YOLO AKILI ROBINSON: I don't believe y'all. Come on, one more time. My community has the power to heal. AUDIENCE: My community has the power to heal. YOLO AKILI ROBINSON: I have the power to heal. AUDIENCE: I have the power to heal. YOLO AKILI ROBINSON: Healing is my birthright. AUDIENCE: Healing is my birthright. YOLO AKILI ROBINSON: And that will make healing-- AUDIENCE: And that will make healing-- YOLO AKILI ROBINSON: --and joy-- AUDIENCE: --and joy-- YOLO AKILI ROBINSON: --and pleasure-- AUDIENCE: --and pleasure-- YOLO AKILI ROBINSON: --and liberation-- AUDIENCE: --and liberation-- YOLO AKILI ROBINSON: --the center of my life. AUDIENCE: --the center of my life. YOLO AKILI ROBINSON: And so it is. AUDIENCE: And so it is. YOLO AKILI ROBINSON: Thank you. \[APPLAUSE\] MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: Oh, yes, I apologize. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Sorry. SEVONNA BROWN: No problem. MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: Wow, this is wonderful, wonderful, wonderful and so rich, I cannot wait to engage you all in conversation. I have questions for each of you. And what I'll do is give you each the question. And then we'll come back to the beginning and have the first person respond. So Sevonna, if you could, I really, really appreciated hearing more about Margaret Garner's story. And you mentioned something entitled Radical Sites of Undoing and referred to Margaret Garner's-- the space where she was and where she took her child's life and tried to take her own as a site for radical undoing. And you said it was tied to her sovereignty and her dignity. It was a site that was tied to her sovereignty and her dignity. I wonder if you could share a little bit more about that and if there are contemporary examples today that you can point to as radical sites for undoing. And I'm thinking about nontraditional church, religious institutions as possibly being these sites. But I just would love for you to share more about that. And I'm also thinking about Ebony Wilkerson and just the car that she drove to the water as being a radical site. So say more about that for me, please. And then, Henry, I really appreciated the way you laid out all the systemic concerns. And when something that stands out for me is when you said that housing is health care. And you just highlighted the fact that you can't really talk about wellness without talking about the basic right to housing. You also highlighted the role of the spiritual, religious communities in the area who are supporting the work. So I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit more about how the church, mosque, other religious institutions can be more engaged in the work of addressing these structural challenges and if you can speak to how religious communities can-- while they're getting involved in these addressing the structural issues, also how they're addressing the wellness and spiritual care needs as well. And then, Joshua, you mentioned that there is a-- you talked about how religion helps to provide a framework for helping to educate communities about Alzheimer's. And I'm wondering if you could say more about that framework. And then finally, Yolo, first of all, thank you for giving us time to breathe. It's so important. I appreciate that. And towards the end, you talked about the importance of addressing the intersection of mental health and patriarchy. I want you to say a little bit more about that. I want you to say more about the role of religion in that and why it's so important to address this in religious, spiritual, and healing spaces in order to advance holistic wellness. And then talk about as well the modern nurturing if you can as you do that. Thank you. So we're going to come back now to Sevonna. SEVONNA BROWN: Wow, thank you so much for those thoughtful questions and to my fellow panelists for just the praxis that I feel that we've been in for the last few minutes. I'm really grateful for this question. And it's something that I have been working through as a practitioner who sits, again, as a doula, someone who really shadows someone in the crossing of birth giving. But also, that tradition has also expanded around grief. There are grief doulas now. There's bereavement doulas now. There's death doulas now. And it's actually something Monica and I were talking about at dinner last night around how it actually should be integrated in pastoral care so that these sites of undoing can actually happen. It's centered in community. One of the ways by which we are doing that at Black Women's Blueprint is I spoke about the 300-acre campus. And we are actually taking people, communities, folks who sit at the intersections of these historicized traumas into the woods, into the earth, into the ground to experience these sites of undoing facilitated by community, facilitated by practitioners who-- and you spoke about this-- are across those diasporic traditions of healing and ways of healing where it actually allows our cosmology and our Earth grounds to bear witness to our sites of undoing. So when I consider Margaret Garner in the room alone and/or with her children and Ebony Wilkerson in the car alone and/or with her children, but also potentially, we can only hypothesize based on their testimonies in the presence of God as well, what kind of facilitation could have been an intervention? Could have been a site for them to actually undo and unravel and be in confrontation with all that they are living inside of and up against? And so how do we actually create those spaces that, Yolo, you described where that is allowable and also safeguarded, and our communities are trained to be able to facilitate that kind of undoing that does allow for our sovereignty and dignity? It might mean that your clothes come off, or it might mean that you start speaking in a different tongue. Or it might mean that you need to be held and cradled in a particular way. But that's what I meant by the sovereignty and dignity component of it because often, because societally, we are not used to engaging in ritual and ceremony as often-- many of us are not practiced in that-- we will back away when something starts to look unfamiliar to us or unrecognizable to us. And this is actually what happens when we visit postpartum mothers. We see them, and there's a fog. Or there's a depression, or we can't understand them anymore who we thought that they were. And so what we do is we leave. We leave them in isolation. And so those sites of undoing end up happening in isolation as well. So I really wanted us to consider that. How do we get at this intersection where people are experiencing rupture, but they're also on the edge of repair? And how do we gain the assets and tools back from our Indigenous practices to be able to do that, what Yolo described as well? So I'm really curious about that. It's something that we've been practicing and mobilizing and seeking to do intentionally. I will also say when we talk about Black healing traditions and spaces, so much of that has been problematic as of late. And I say that because it has been commodified. So even though when I talk about leading and facilitating retreats, people will say, yeah, come pay $5,500 to drink this tea and go into the forest and do this and that. So we also have to remain accessible, remain in the seat and at the feet of community while we navigate the popularization of our Indigenous practices and traditions that are actually deep life-saving devices, especially across these varying points in the lifespan. MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: Thank you. Thank you. HENRY LOVE: So I think the first thing in response to your question-- and thank you for it-- is that homelessness is violent and particularly for Indigenous and Black folks. And when you look at almost every single health disparity, health outcome, disproportionately impacted are people who are unhoused. And I just want to flag one thing that I think Yolo said about this cash as an intervention for mental health. One of the things that we're really excited that we're doing it when-- we're in the process of launching a guaranteed income project that's targeting mothers with young infants. And the goal really is, of course, to reduce length of stay in shelter but also to improve parent-child relationships, maternal mental health outcomes to really get at these issues of isolation and postpartum depression, all these issues that so many of the women in our shelters are navigating. So there's a lot there in terms of cash. And then also, I just wanted to flag what Sevonna said about these healing spaces. And I think a lot of what we do in our work at WIN is thinking through, in what is a very violent and anti-Black system, how can we make our spaces more of healing spaces and more therapeutic for folks that are going through this? Which is hard and often contradictory, and there's no easy answer for that. In regards to your question about the spiritual and the faith community and what they can do, what I'll say is this. I have been absolutely moved by the way the West African community in New York and Harlem, in particular in the Bronx, has showed up for their community, in particular and done the impossible. And I'm thinking of our sister scholar, Dr. Sal, for example, who-- she called me one day. And she was just like, she saw it on the news, and she got so angry that these people were on the street in Midtown Manhattan and looked like her. They looked like her uncles. And she was like, I have to do something. I have to do something. And so she rushes with me to go to the hotel with a bag of-- with a suitcase of empanadas in Midtown Manhattan. And that's the energy. And so it was like her, and I'm like, calm down. Your bag of empanadas walking down Fifth Avenue. But it was like this beautiful thing because then it was like this truck that was in the front. And it was just like these random people, who were also Senegalese. And they were like, get in the car. The city's not letting us in to give out toiletries and items. Get in the car. We're going to circumvent them. We're going to this Overflow Church that another West African group had set up that was not an official shelter. So I say all that to say that the West African community in particular, and particularly the mosque, have really been, for the past almost two years, housing people, caring, loving on people. And we see this. And I showed you on this slide about a couple of days ago, there was a store that was closed. It was a furniture store. And then I think there was a warehouse. And the gentleman said like, where are they supposed to go? Because now we have this thing called the 30 and 60-day rule in New York. And so there's 30 days for singles, and they get evicted from the shelters, migrants. And it's only applicable to migrants. And so it's cold outside. And so there is no more space in so many of the religious spaces in these communities. The mosques are overflowing. And so the question is, so where do they go? And so now any space that we can use, they're using. But what I will say is that the Black church in particular has to do more and is not. And I think one of the ugly things that we're seeing in real time is this xenophobic language \[INAUDIBLE\] and just the way that Black migrants are being pitted against African American and to this really, really violent thing. And it was all on the news recently with-- there was a center in Harlem that they were trying to do for migrants. And then the community went back and forth and whatnot. And there's just this lack of understanding of why people are migrating. And I had a meeting with Leader Jeffries. And I was explaining what we're seeing in our shelters in his district. And I was like, we see these images, and we think of like, oh, there's like these people who are in gangs coming from-- he's like, no, these are Black folks. Even if coming from Venezuela, coming from Honduras, we have disproportionate amounts of people who are Garifuna, who are fleeing racial discrimination in Honduras, who are being systematically oppressed in Honduras, who are being displaced and unhoused because of US American foreign policy and because of our diseconomics in the way that we've done things. And they're coming here. And so there's this lack of coalition building across the diaspora that-- one thing I feel like we haven't talked about in these past day and some changes is really the power of the Black church, the political power of the Black church. And I think that's one of the things that we're trying to navigate in our advocacy work is like, how do we bring that organization, that history of organizing, that sophistication of organizing to be able to move this needle? Because what we're facing right now, it's going to get much worse the closer we get to the conventions and the closer we get to the election. And it's ugly, and it's just absolutely ugly. And there's going to be children and parents and folks on the streets. And like I said, the churches are doing and the mosques are doing everything they can to prevent that, but they're at their breaking point. And so we really have to push government to really be able to intervene. JOSHUA LOUIS GILLS: So my question was, "Explain more about the framework that religious institutions provide for our research." I'll take a step back so that we know a lot about Alzheimer's disease. But only 5% or 10% of it is in African Americans. So we don't have any data on there to what contributes to the disparities and also to the mechanisms behind it. And so why is that? Well, as you can guess, some researchers of certain racial backgrounds can't reach Blacks or don't know how, supposedly. Exactly. They don't want to. They don't go out to the community. They don't foster those relationships or care about those relationships-- or care about what's going on. Health disparities is making money. Now, the NIH, they have a callout for health disparity research. And so religious institutions-- or I'll start with the church. We will go in there. They provide access to their congregation. We educate them. But as you can imagine, there's one in particular sex that makes up the majority of the church, and that's women. So we're not reaching Black men. And for multiple reasons, Black men don't last past the age 65 usually because of different cardiovascular disease and different health contributions there. So you have to go to mosque. So we'll go to mosque, and we'll recruit there. And so we're not only trying to get them for research, but we're trying to educate them and also cultivate that relationship. So they'll take onus. We can hire them. And they can spread the word too. This is what we're doing. We're educating Black folks on mental health, really, brain health and different health outcomes as well. So yeah. YOLO AKILI ROBINSON: Yeah, you posed the question about patriarchy. In my opinion, patriarchy is the heart and core of the Black male mental health crisis. But not all Black communities have commitment to the dissolution of patriarchy. And we're not honest about that. When I say about patriarchy being at the heart and core, I want to talk about the ways in which patriarchal conditioning and reinforcement leads to ideation, depressive attitudes. When you were taught your whole life that your worth is assigned to your ability to get credentials, to work, to pay for things and then you live in a society where you don't have access to that, now you don't know who you are. Now your worth is questionable. And everything from the radio to Instagram will communicate that to you. And then we're wondering why all of a sudden, all these babies are taking their lives because they're not making $100,000 at 19 years old. The expectations have also shifted. They're some of the things we hear young people saying in our groups. And I'm just like, wow, I just don't remember being 20 years old feeling that pressure. But they have a different pressure in this political and social moment because of what they're seeing in the way we were not seeing. I might have saw a Word Up! magazine every once in a while. But I wasn't seeing Instagram every single day, so-and-so on a yacht. That just wasn't my life. But they're seeing this very early all the time. And there's not counternarratives being given to them about their sense of self-worth that is not that. They're not getting it from Black women and girls often because Black women and girls often perpetuate patriarchy as well. Black queer men are also struggling with it, too, because Black queer men-- even Black queer feminist men don't apply that feminist lens to their own relationships. I'm like, how are you looking at patriarchy that goes on with your relationships to other Black gay men because it's really sexist up in here? But there's no examination of that, or there's not an embodied examination of that, which is really important. And so when I talk about patriarchy and the dissolution of patriarchy, I think it's critical not only for Black men's health but for the community's health at large, Black women's health for all of us of all genders to really eradicate these John Henry-isms, these strength over everything. Process doesn't matter. Push through. You can't look like you can't have a bad day. You can't have a rough day. You always can have together, these inhumane concepts that are rooted in white supremacy. And they create so much psychological distress for us because our folks are literally dying in relationship to them. When it comes to religion and patriarchy, one of the things that has really colored my perspective on patriarchy-- my practicum, I always say, was at an organization called Men Stopping Violence in Atlanta, Georgia. It's a feminist organization-- at that point was a feminist organization that was dedicated to ending male violence against women. We don't say violence against women because, who's doing the violence? It's male violence against women we're talking about. And so one of the things that was always fascinating to me, we would get men of various different generations and backgrounds in spaces to really have these really difficult conversations, some of them ordered by the court, some of them ordered by the church, some of them self-chosen. And I think that we're just in denial about how insidious patriarchy is because I will tell you the things these men would say that they would not say in any of public platform. I'm talking about Black men, some of them really well known, saying things like, the problem is women don't know their place. And they need to learn how to be in God by divine right. The Bible says. The Quran says. And you see all the controlling and abusive behaviors and offset of that, those core beliefs. And I think that we cozy up to patriarchy in some ways. And I'm like I'm not cozying up to pastors any more about it. If you're not doing something to tackle misogynoir and half of your congregation is Black women, then I have some questions about how you see yourself in line with Christ or if you're in line with the pharaoh. Who are you in alignment with? And I think that there's a lot of fear of pastoral power that doesn't get challenged. I've been in these spaces where these Black men come in. And they're carrying all this psychic weight they're carrying with them, the projected power. But people are scared to really challenge it. And so when I talk about patriarchy, yes, I think the dissolution and challenging of patriarchal systems is absolutely integrable to our mental health and our wellness. There's no healing justice without Black feminism. There's no healing in Black communities without Black feminism, period. And I think that we have to be more organized. And I think that comes to people who are not Black women, to Black queer men, to nonbinary folks. We have to be more vigilant and also assess how much we're committed to patriarchy, too, because I see the ways in which it still is facilitated, whether it's Black queer men in relationship to Black cis straight women or however that shows up. So those are some things I would say. AUDIENCE: \[INAUDIBLE\] YOLO AKILI ROBINSON: I'm sorry. \[INAUDIBLE\] \[LAUGHTER\] MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: I mean, yeah. \[LAUGHTER\] Yes-- SEVONNA BROWN: Is it possible to respond to that? I just wanted to say thank you also for that framework around the martyr nurturing versus healing-centered nurturing and when we think about Black mothers and Black maternal health. I also just want to expand that to say parenting folks and those are people who don't have biological children as well. In our communities, we are seeking to all be parenting at all times. And so what does that look like? How is it situated in a way that lends itself to people feeling and being made whole as well while they're in kinship and in community with others and the assumption that falls specifically on Black women, the economics that are so distorted around care economies and ways of seeing Black women's labor and how, as you said, they carry the wellness of the entire community? I just wanted to say thank you for that. I really appreciated that and needed that today. YOLO AKILI ROBINSON: Well, I appreciate it. Thank you. But the real thanks is really to the Black feminists who taught me. And so it's to the Audre Lordes, the Bell Hooks, the \[INAUDIBLE\], the many folks in the space because I'm a product of the teachings of Black women and learning through them, so just naming that, just turning it back, OK? SEVONNA BROWN: Thank you. I receive it. MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: But I'm going to turn it right back because-- \[LAUGHTER\] SEVONNA BROWN: It's a site for now. MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: Because, I mean, Sevonna said I couldn't get out. Yes, they taught you. But just like you said, we need other people other than Black women saying this. So the fact that you are saying this is important and the fact that you're not only saying it, but that you're implementing strategies to help other people develop a consciousness of this is really important. So it's healing for us as Black women to hear you not only say this but talk about the work-- right. Right-- to talk about the work that you're doing. So yes, right back at you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We have a few minutes for some questions from the audience. SEVONNA BROWN: It's postlunch, right? \[LAUGHTER\] We get it. MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: A lot was shared. A lot was shared. We received clarion calls. AUDIENCE: Well, thank you so much for this wonderful panel. Thank you again for weaving and keeping it going. My question is for Dr. Love, but then I'd love to hear everyone else's perspective. But I was really struck by the disproportionate stats in terms of homelessness. And you're pointing out that Black and Indigenous people stand out for that. Can we pause there and think about that, why these two particular demographic groups in relation to everything we know about the history of property, everything we know about the history of property ownership, everything we know about dispossession? And having achieved it and having it taken away, what have you observed on the ground in New York that might shed some light on this as not just a new problem? HENRY LOVE: So thank you for that. When I showed that map, I think one of the neighborhoods in New York that has really fascinated me-- we have a couple of big shelters there-- is Brownsville, East New York. And if anyone knows anything about Brownsville, East New York, it's disproportionately African American. And that's important to note because it's in the middle of Central Brooklyn, which is a very large Afro-Caribbean population. And one of the things that we see is that there is this disproportionality. But the fact of the matter is that there are so many-- it is by design. And so when you look at the legacy of slavery, the legacy of all the things that were talked about yesterday in terms of just the institutionalization of Black folks, and I think that was something that I was grappling with yesterday was like, how do we go from these psychiatric facilities that have these really dark past to the present? Because there's a through line. And the through line is what I'm seeing in our shelters. And I remember the first time I went to one of our shelters in Brownsville, I broke down. I got so emotional, I didn't know what it was. And I realized what it was, was it reminded me of going to see my grandmother in prison because it smelled like the industrial scent and then the keys and then the \[MAKES NOISE\] and the shutting of the door. And then you have to write your numbers down. You have to yell it, and then the guard is screaming at you. You don't have any freedom. You can't walk in. You can't walk out without control. You can't have guests. You have curfew. It's designed to be this space where we're controlling people. And then there's this piece of labor that's weaved in and the way the Department of Homeless Services in particular. But I think how we as Americans think about homelessness is like there's something wrong with these people because they're not contributing to-- they're not working. And they need to work, and we need to get them ready to work. So we're going to put them in this thing to fix them so that they can work. And so when you see those elements-- and yes, my mind would just-- light bulbs are going off because as we were listening to the keynote yesterday, I was like, oh my god, this sounds just like what we see in shelters right now or what we see the people are navigating with street homelessness right now. But there's no acknowledgment of that history. I think that's what's so frustrating. And I think someone mentioned the racial awakening. That's been so frustrating to us in the field because it's like, OK, now George Floyd, now you want to talk about race and homelessness. It's like, how did you-- 90-something percent of these people are nonwhite. And you didn't think that, oh, you should address this now. And so there's this lack of-- until now, until recently-- to understanding those structural reasons that history to why we are here, from slavery to Jim Crow to the fact that we were property transfers to redlining, housing companies. All these different policies that were enacted that systematically prevented Black people from owning property and gaining wealth are the direct reason why Native Americans and African Americans specifically are overrepresented in homelessness. And then even in terms of street homelessness, too, there's this same sort of thing, particularly in New York. There are people who have-- and I think that's what I'm most like after leaving this. I think someone mentioned the book yesterday. And I really want to dive into this about that linkage between where we are today with folks who are dealing with street homelessness and that whole notion of religious excitement and that gap because there's so much there. And when I see now how we deal with people who are going through psychosis, Jordan Neely, or just when we think of homelessness, we think of it as people who are going through psychosis. And then it's like, OK, well, we need to lock them up or something. And it's like, no, what is the root cause of the psychosis? Is it they don't have a house? Is it they don't have a safe place to sleep? Is it that they have schizophrenia, and they're hyper paranoid, and they're acting very, very normally, given the fact that they are hyper paranoid? So what do we need to do to meet them where they are and get them the services they need? And I think Yolo said this yesterday. And it's so frustrating. I think, for so many of us, we know what works, housing. Give people housing. We have the research. We know vouchers work and housing works. It reduces all of these different health outcomes. Just give people a place to sleep. But there's this cognitive dissonance around that because people have to work, and they have to do it. And so I think we're in a unique moment that people-- and I think with this generation, too, I think people are finally really grappling with the structural reasons as to why we have these social issues. MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: There's another question. Thank you. AUDIENCE: Thank you so much to the panelists for this really wonderful conversation. I have two questions. And the first is for Dr. Gills. I'm wondering if you could-- we've talked a lot about the systemic and the structural, which is very important. I'm curious for you, as one who has expertise in neurobiology, what can we be doing to improve and to better brain health in relation to mental health? So that's kind of a practical question. So there's that. Just for consideration, I think while we have the expertise of someone with scientific knowledge, it actually would be very helpful to think proactively about how to circumvent a number of the statistics that you quoted for us. The other question is for everyone or whoever feels inclined. I know time is not on our side. But we are at Harvard Divinity School as a multireligious theological institution. Many of our students are interested in the public sector. Not everyone here comes to necessarily go off to do ministry, or people think very expansively about what ministry can be. And so I'm curious about, what call do you have or directive do you have to theological education in this particular moment? Even if it's just a word or a final thought of reflection for us as we move into the closing keynote. Thank you. JOSHUA LOUIS GILLS: OK, I'll go first. I want to tackle the homelessness question as well from a systems approach. Being lonely and being homeless and the stress from finding your next meal and where you're going to stay next amplifies stress and inflammation in the body as well. So that plays a role in the health outcomes. So I just wanted to touch upon that real quick. As far as modifiable risk factors to improve brain health and mental health, I've talked about exercise, exercising more, maybe just the slight movement, maybe yoga as well. Those tiny things do help-- not tiny but they're big things. But they really help provide more neuroplasticity in cultivating the neurons and maintaining neurons in the brain or the brain cells. Right sleep helps memory consolidation, clears the body out of toxins overnight. So sleep is very important as well. Socialization, that's super imperative and important because you have to keep that brain working, so muscle too. And if you don't use it, you're going to lose some of those neuronal cells. And then cognitive engagement-- so learning a new language, learning a new dance, things of that nature will also help modify that as well. And what was the last one? Socialization, cognitive-- diet. So what we know about diet is that omega-3s, fish, Mediterranean diet are the healthiest diets there. And we call it the MIND diet now, so the Mediterranean and the DASH. And if you're not familiar with the DASH diet, it's to reduce blood pressure, so more vegetables, antioxidant properties. Those are all good ways to help improve brain health and also mental health. We know that exercise and sleep and things of those natures do help improve mood, overall mood, help decrease the risk for anxiety and depression as well. So it is important to utilize those tools that we have at our disposal. YOLO AKILI ROBINSON: I want to take on that question about what theological institutions can do. So y'all, healing justice is not like traditional Western mental health. I just want to preface it with that. We believe we got to take it to the streets. And one thing we've recognized is that working with a lot of clinicians and traditionally trained folks. They're not trained to take it to the streets. They're trained to be worker bees. And I think that when it comes to theology, I want to see some antagonism, some activism. I want to see these folks who have these broader and more comprehensive understandings of theology taking it to the churches, in the hoods and the communities and antagonizing these pastors and challenging them around their language. I have stood up in churches and raised my hand. And the ushers look at me like, who is this? Because we need to get angry. We need to get angry, and we need to get mad. And we need to tell these men or these people in power, you do not have the monopoly on God, and you are abusing God. And it is unrighteous for us to sit by and watch them abuse God and the manipulation of our folks. I want to see people get angry, and I want to see theology folks get out there in front of the churches, in these institutions and make it appear more apparent what they are doing to our folks, the spiritual death they are contributing to. That's what I would like to see. HENRY LOVE: And I just want to second everything that Yolo said. And I think get angry. You can get out there. Get angry. Get out there, and don't stay in these spaces. And it's so vital. And these faith-based institutions are such a pillar for our communities. And we are in crisis mode right now. I think there was a question about, oh, how do we take care of ourselves when we encounter a pandemic? We are in it. We are living in it right now. And so really, how do we get those churches, those organizations to step up and really meet with us on the ground and do-- I mean, I've been floored by just the work that we've been doing with the Episcopal Church. And just one of the bishop, he saw-- there's a statue at Saint John the Divine. And it's a statue of Jesus as a homeless man and just how angry he was about how no one-- everyone talks about Jesus, but they don't talk about Jesus and homelessness and really, really take it seriously the way that he was and getting upset, vehemently upset to the point where he's like-- to your point, he's yelling, calling the deputy mayor. Get angry. Call. People listen to them. And so the same thing, just a call to action, call to get out there and get into the community. YOLO AKILI ROBINSON: I just want to add to my previous statement, too, because what you said there, I just want to make sure I clear that up piece. I want to acknowledge that the Western world has not trained many of the clinicians to be more than worker bees. Many of us, Black folks become a lot more than that we become activists in that context. But I want to acknowledge that also, the system is invested deeply in creating systems and structures that prevent psychiatrists and therapists from bucking against the system and challenging the system. And there's a lot of risks they take when they do that. I just want to clarify that point. AUDIENCE: Hi. Thank you to all of the panelists who've spoken today. This has been just a wonderful conversation that I've been able to witness. But I really just had a question. One of the main themes that I think everybody on this panel touched on is epigenetics and this concept that there are genetic predispositions for some of this trauma to manifest itself physically, Black women in prenatal health. And so I guess I wonder, is there any sort of empirical research or sociological research or psychiatric research regarding how epigenetics might inform the psychological experience of Black people in this country today? I wonder if any of you have anything to say. Thank you. SEVONNA BROWN: Looking at you, Joshua. AUDIENCE: Before you respond, we're going to take \[INAUDIBLE\]. AUDIENCE: Oh, OK. Thank you. First, I wanted to say that, Dr. Gills, thank you for your response about some of the preventive care. We at Harvard mourned greatly the loss of Lani Guinier and Charles Ogletree, great minds to all timers. And I wanted to say to Dr. Love, my heart was aching when you were talking about the kind of African-descended conflicts that are going on in this area. I was born in Harlem, and I grew up in El Barrio. So my neighborhood is there. And I just wanted to say call on some of us to come in if you're hosting any of those Africana spaces where we can talk and use the skills that we have in the academy to be there on the ground, doing some of that education so that the education is not in the halls of these places but in the places that helped to form us. And for me, looking at that cluster on the map, that's my home. And so please call on us to do some of that work and some of that educational work around Pan-Africanism, Africana studies, and that kind of collective piece there. I grew up in El Barrio. My best friend was Garifuna. She's there in Honduras now because she lost a family member. My collaborative partner, who you know, Dr. Dianne Stewart, Jamaican. That is the richness of who we are. And so call on us so that we can be on the ground, on the streets, lifting up that historical richness that has allowed us in the diaspora to collectively survive. HENRY LOVE: For the epigenetic questions, I feel like there's work that the Smedleys have done on this. That's the only group that-- the mom and son. But other than that, I can't think of off the top of my head. But that's the first one that comes to mind. YOLO AKILI ROBINSON: We don't have enough time for me to talk about epigenetics and some of the questions I have to raise about that framework and how it's being used. I think I spoke about it earlier. For people who are familiar with the Diagnostic Statistical Manual and familiar with the NIH and the RRDC, essentially, if you don't know this conversation, the DSM, there are a lot of researchers who have questions about how the nosology of how it was designed and built and it being based off observation and not off science. NIH had a very public battle. The then director of the NIH, Dr. Thomas Insel, essentially said that this is not a scientific document. And they have been on a task to essentially craft something that has more of a medical basis, if that makes sense. And so for example, most recently, there's been this conversation I wish I could find the information on my phone. But there was a billions of dollars being spent on finding the gene for schizophrenia. Many of you may have heard of this if you've seen this news circulating. And essentially, scientists are saying, well, that was a waste of a lot of money because we found no singular gene that makes you predisposed to schizophrenia. So a lot of this science needs to be really kind of a question. The more you look into it deeply, I'm curious about what the intention is of it. It just feels like we're about to resilience our way. Well, he's pretty predisposed to it. So what are we're going to do? It just feels like it's leaning that direction, and that's what I'll say there. Are we out of time? I think we're out of time. Can you all just-- did you want to say the last word? You do the last word. SEVONNA BROWN: Oh, my goodness. Well, I don't have much more to say with regard to that. And I apologize that I don't know as much about the pedagogy here at HDS. But I wanted to just say back to the question about the call to the students just to not wait. If there's a clinical or a practicum or an opportunity to partner with a community-based organization, where people are, spirit dwells. So there's constant ground for you to learn and advocate and really be inside of this work with us. We're also right here, so just come up to us. Ask us how to practice with us. We'll invite you. I know I will. So I just wanted to name that in terms of the call. MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: Thank you. Can I just say thank you? Thank you to each and every one of you for sharing your brilliance, for sharing your example of praxis and giving us all tools for the struggle and to respond to the clarion call that you have put forth. So can you join me in giving thanks for our \[INAUDIBLE\]? Thank you so much. AHMAD GREENE-HAYES: Thank you, Dr. Bartholomew, for chairing this panel. One more round of applause. We got to love our practitioners. And I think one parallel between this panel and our prior is truly the ancestral template and blueprints that we have. So I do want to call in Dr. Anna Julia Cooper. I want to call in Rosa Parks. I think they'd be proud of us today for really putting theory to practice, practice into theory, back and forth. I like the phrase "compassionate redirection." And I saw a lot of that today on the panel. So we have our final community-based keynote. It's going to be very special. Get ready to interact with one another. We'll take a brief break, and we'll get started again at 3:05 since we went over a little. So everyone online, please join us again at 3:05. Thank you. SEVONNA BROWN: Thank you so much for coming. SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2024, the President and Fellows of Harvard College.