George Aumoithe: I’m happy we get to speak, Ahmad, following our February 2024 Black Religion and Mental Health symposium at Harvard. We assembled scholars and practitioners to talk about the Black experience of mental health institutions. We’ve since been invited to discuss our work at The Immanent Frame with an evocative prompt about religious studies and STS. What kind of knowledge emerges between these fields?
Ahmad Greene-Hayes: It might be helpful for readers to get a sense of who we are. I’m an assistant professor of African American religious studies at Harvard Divinity School. My work focuses largely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Africana religions, gender, and sexuality in the afterlife of slavery, and the various Africana technologies that Black people cultivated to navigate state violence and Jim Crow policing. Can you chime in about who you are?
Aumoithe: Absolutely. I’m on the faculty in History and African and African American studies at Harvard. My dual appointment encourages sits at the nexus between interdisciplinary Black studies and more rigid disciplinary History. I study the lack of healthcare in the United States—particularly for Black and brown folks. Public hospitals are singular sites for thinking about the fight for healthcare rights in the United States. One of those institutions that used to be much more prominent before the midcentury deinstitutionalization movement was the long-stay psychiatric hospital—a place to treat severe mental illness, but also a place with a very thin line between care and incarceration. Many people are horrified by the depths of mistreatment in this history. Whether it’s Foucault’s philosophical writing or more recent historical work by scholars like Martin Summers or Judith Weisenfeld, we see a completely different view of the hospital of how freedom, who warrants autonomy, and normative ideas of liberal subjecthood are inflected by racism and classism.
The contemporary practitioners we invited to the symposium opened my mind to how “alternative” or non-allopathic approaches to treating mental disturbances can be in conversation with more institutional, Western-centric practices of managing and dealing with mental health. The tensions are not wholly resolvable, however, which points to the power of juxtaposing religious studies with STS.
Greene-Hayes: Yeah, that’s insightful. It sounds like both of our works, from these different vantages of Black studies, are thinking about the institutional violation of Black life and thriving—and the modalities that Black people cultivate to circumvent and circumnavigate all kinds of institutionalization.
We began our collaboration in the aftermath of the 2023 killing of Jordan Neely on a New York City subway. Neely was an unhoused Black man experiencing mental distress who a Marine Corps veteran strangled to death. The spectacle of his death across the Internet triggered questions for own work about how we deal with the epigenetic memory of that event. This is not only a public health issue or question—it is theological, religious, and historical. We invited psychiatrists, practitioners, religion scholars, and historians interested in answering these questions from different scholarly and practical locations. The symposium was impactful precisely because we hadn’t seen that level of collaboration between the Divinity School and other parts of the University on a question about Black people and mental health.
Aumoithe: The turn after George Floyd’s murder and Jordan Neely’s killing broadened academia’s interest in confronting these particularities. How has violence against Black people, especially those exhibiting mental distress, been framed as a societal problem? How has this also been a moral and theological issue regarding the sanctity and divinity of selves in a wider community? Answering these questions through segregated disciplines and siloed schools impoverishes the way we make sense of the world, particularly in the unyielding emergencies that face Black people globally.
In addition to Summers, much of our inquiry was inspired by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s concept of “the politics of respectability.” The concept encapsulates the long history of Black people adjusting to anti-Black notions of personhood and worth under the pretense that being well-adjusted through impeccable dress and presentation could ensure one’s survival in a maladjusted society. How successfully did that strategy help Black people avoid premature death? The present moment and the disproportionate mortality we have faced has forced us to reconnect with those lessons from history, question those strategies, and consider the nadir of “post-slavery.” Though scholars in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests have questioned the contemporary stigma against respectability politics and placed it within its historical context as one of many strategies, we also saw the falsity of that hope. We saw the folly in thinking well-adjusted liberal subjectivity, a buttoned-up public self, or a papering away of the stress of living through capitalism in the name of professionalism, was somehow achievable through one’s own volition and one’s own action.
The historian Darlene Clark Hine also informed our work. She’s argued that the silence around mental and physical health, specifically in the context of sexual violence, results in Black people turning to “self-imposed secrecy” to safeguard themselves against white supremacist violence. In a foundational Signs article, Hine writes, “Black women, as a rule, developed and adhered to a cult of secrecy, a culture of dissemblance, to protect the sanctity of inner aspects of their lives.” Witnessing public violence has been painful, but it is also psychic violence. Strategies of respectability or dissemblance collapse when the crisis within erupts for redress in the public.
I wonder what you think of this being a scholar of Africana religions. One thing that I know from my study of Ifá and Santería was, for example, thinking about African ways of resolving an individual’s crisis in the circle. This is a moment in which individuals need to survive collectively, but instead we need to both self-diagnose and find interventions to redress hardship. What does your work say about why that approach is absent in our neoliberal moment?
Greene-Hayes: I’m thinking immediately of Toni Morrison’s article “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” which is a lovely piece where Morrison, as this literary foremother of Black studies, is thinking about intramural and Black religious spaces, particularly the church, as a site of not only survival, but refuge, and the cultivation of Africana technologies of resistance through community building.
She points to the scene of shouting in the church as a profound moment where “[it is] done in the context of community, [and] therefore safe.” It’s this moment where people could unbutton themselves—in contrast to the politics of respectability as dressing up with the suit and tie or dress. In that spiritual moment of catharsis, there is an unbuttoning, a releasing of inner tension, and the community surrounds the shouter. Ushers, for example, might hold the shouter’s hands to make sure they don’t hurt themselves coming undone. Morrison evokes an interesting moment where you can work during the week as a domestic or a custodian and then come to church and be Deacon So-and-So, Reverend So-and-So, Sister So-and-So. You can also scream and shout and say all the things you need to say to God and to the community that you can’t say to Mr. White Man.
Our ancestors developed a host of remedies, recipes, technologies, and traditions precisely because they had nowhere else to go. I think about my own family from Americus, Georgia, Sumter County, in the early twentieth century. The nearest hospital that Black folks could go to was over fifty miles away. Therefore, the community had to be strategic when there was an ailment to treat or birth. They sought those experts and ritual specialists in the community to heal or deliver the child. And so, what do we do and where do we go when in crisis? Many of our speakers addressed this problem. Reverend Dr. Monica Coleman talked about her own journey as a practitioner and a scholar who lives with bipolar disorder. Sevonna Brown, working in reproductive justice spaces in New York City, talked about the connections between the attack on Black mothers and the threat to Black women’s mental health and wellbeing. Dr. Henry Love spoke on the homelessness crisis in the United States, showing how homelessness and mental health crisis cannot be disentangled.
Why was the immediate reaction to the “acting out” of someone like Jordan Neely, who was unhoused on a New York City subway train, to strangle, to kill, to obliterate, rather than to provide the resources that he needed for shelter? These are the questions our symposium centered. Religion is all up and through that, even as religious spaces struggle to have open dialogue about what’s going on mentally. We do a good job with thinking about the spirit and the soul, but not always enough dealing with the mind. That’s where our practitioners working in public health and practical spaces came in to ask: How do we combine what’s going on in the spirit with what’s going on in the mind?
Aumoithe: We also must acknowledge taboo. As a Haitian-American growing up in the church, I was quite struck by how much there was a rejection of Vodou, for example, and how much that was linked to a sort of taboo folk practice: non-Christian or at least syncretic approaches to making sense of the world. Recalling this brings to mind the concept of “excited delirium,” which is a widely rejected clinical diagnosis yet still commonly used legal defense alleging that people in a sort of excitable or agitated state can go into cardiac arrest or respiratory distress. We know that this pseudoscientific, pseudo-medical justification was elaborated as a defense for the officer who murdered George Floyd and the vigilante who killed Jordan Neely. It’s difficult to make those connections without these kinds of conversations between the space of the taboo—or the hidden aspect of what precedes mental distress—and what justifies the more public or respectable aspect of a violent intervention. There’s potential in thinking about the synonyms of violence that function as neologisms reliant upon stigma, taboo, and vagueness to cover up abuses of power.
Greene-Hayes: I appreciate your reference to excited delirium, which brings up Aisha Beliso-De Jesús’s new book on the contemporary inflections of this very colonial history.
I’m also reminded of Dr. Judith Weisenfeld’s keynote lecture, which honed in on what happens when you find Black religion in the archives of the psychiatric hospital. She described this as a kind of policing and criminalization of Black religion. And it’s not necessarily in the church that we find these sources. She points to a different kind of archive—one that is partly legal but located elsewhere. She tracked medical, legal, census, denominational and other textual and visual records to show how psychiatric professionals had religious affiliations and commitments. So, what does it mean to unearth and uncover those particulars? How does religion and one’s own personal religious beliefs play out in the field of psychiatry? This is something we rarely talk about. It is always in the room, yet unnamed. Her book thinks about that history. It was so powerful to have her set the tone for our symposium.
A year has since passed, which is kind of wild to think about. A lot has happened. What are your thoughts on Black religion and mental health given the social and political climate?
Aumoithe: There are so many ways to answer that question. A sort of teleology almost springs out of my mind between Baldwin’s prophetic word, the devastation wrought upon the MOVE organization and the Africa family in Philadelphia, and this very moment. What’s been instructive are patterns revealed by the history of state-based repression of Black people building institutions to take care of their own.
As people normalize the stripping away of the welfare state, they don’t realize that in absolute numbers, white people benefit the most from it. There’s a way in which the political imagination of who is threatened by rollbacks, who is threatened by cutbacks, is only melanated or poor people, when it affects us all. And now we see that awareness slowly seeping into wider public consciousness—those who thought the closing of the border would save them, those who thought disinvestment in the public would somehow root out some ephemeral corruption or waste.
There’s something else about this moment that is revealed to me: that the critical race theory or the critical legal studies of the moment, which opponents described as left-of-center or not empirical, all of a sudden seem old hat. We are now entering a new round of reckoning—namely in the form of environmental degradation and climate disaster. Something my collaborator Scott Gabriel Knowles describes as “slow disaster.”
So often people look at the postmodernists as a product and consequence of the left. Yet today we see the frameworks of relativism being wielded most powerfully by a revanchist right. Therefore, a lot of these intellectual questions no longer seem confined to the realm of the mind—whether well- or maladjusted. Ironically, the reverberations are very much material and manifest in a sort of brutalism on the body.
We’re in a place where we can certainly count dollars and cents and do a type of social and political history that the historical revisionists of the 1960s and 1970s did to bring the Black freedom struggle to the center of our understanding of the past. Yet we now find those techniques insufficient and with important terminology on the verge of being outlawed.
I don’t know if that’s an answer, but I sense an urgent question emerging. We are now responsible for devising new ways to continue, for example, W.E.B. Du Bois’s attempts in The Philadelphia Negro, his multi-part study of Black social life, to understand underground and provisional spaces of survival rather than once shiny and now crumbling institutions.
J.T. Roane’s Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place, Matthew Morrison’s Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States, or your own Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion Making in Jim Crow New Orleans are the cutting edge. These books explore elements of what were once termed cultural or racial history as material, legal, and political stories. The latest work shows how the doxa, the social dictates of the time, also influence the way in which we think about who is regulated by the law and how people escape abuse in its name.
We face a tremendous responsibility now as budding scholars. It feels like a year out we’d like to think we closed the door, found answers, and yet we are approaching more challenges to make sense of dizzying encounters. This moment is sobering but also presents the clearest need for Black study I think I have felt in my very short scholarly life.
Greene-Hayes: Yeah, I really appreciate that response and the kind of meditative reflection you’ve offered for consideration in part because I think, in some ways, I have felt a bit disoriented as of late—unsure of what to do and what my work is. And the question of self-preservation is fresh in my mind. I also have a kind of desire to be in community and to work with those who are navigating immense challenges that I might not be facing. But there’s no telling what could come our way. In other words, what’s happening to someone else could very easily happen to us, and that is the idea that’s on my mind.
I keep thinking about how the media and the kind of political rhetoric that we are being accosted by daily, day in and day out, will really make you feel that you have a psychological disorder if you are desiring freedom and justice. The rhetoric is: There’s something wrong with you if you are desiring these things, there’s something wrong with you if you want to talk about race—if you want to talk about systemic oppression, if you want to talk about anti-Blackness or genocide.
And yet, here we are in 2025 and there’s a shared sense of direction among those of us who are desiring a better world, a different world, a new world. And that’s from here to Mexico to Palestine to the Congo—all over. There’s a real longing for freedom. We must keep crying aloud for freedom. In some ways, perhaps in many ways, I do think our mental wellbeing is tied to us being honest and truthful about the world that we ultimately are creating and desire for ourselves and for the generations to come.
Aumoithe: Indeed. When you spoke by way of Toni Morrison about the ring shout as a tradition for releasing hyper-vigilance, I thought about the somatic states of trying to survive when one is required to enter a dangerous space. I would argue that the attempt at survival also evokes a hush harbor. The musician and scholar Imani Uzuri did some interesting work on this and wrote an opera about it. Yet I found it so striking that in that moment of hyper-surveillance, of the sort of anti-insurgent panopticon erected through the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and later hardened in 1850 in the United States, that there has never been true, lasting escape—even after so-called emancipation. The ring shout also started as a whisper. It started as a murmur. It started as a sanctuary adjacent to the plantation: an industrial space of exploitation and extraction.
There’s something about the whisper, as a furtive speech act, that feels powerfully instructive in this moment. As you say, in this moment of media bombardment that leads to dissociative and exhausted states for everyone—both those who are dangerously exposed to premature death and state and extrajudicial violence as well as those who may think themselves safe—being able to have a conversation, to whisper to your neighbor, to make sense of the social that way, seems powerful.
So, there are two registers. We have these privileges as professors to name, and I think there’s something deeply biblical about that, rooted in Genesis, but it’s a naming that’s not rooted in dominion. It’s a naming that is oriented toward maintaining the reality of the impact of power on oneself, and I think that’s a subtle, but vital difference to remember. It’s easy to lapse into the categories and the grammar of power, to so to speak go along to get along.
And I think those are the areas of Black social life that remain understudied. Those are the areas revealed through things like memoir, but also things that can be parts of our scholarship. And I think it begins with cultivating the forum, which is, despite the shadows on the wall, where we can convene to interpret not only what we perceive, but what we deeply feel and can see on our own bodies and the body politic.
But also, where does the metaphor of the shadow on the wall break down? Inversely speaking, where can we use naming to say what is decidedly not a shadow or a figment of the imagination? How do we name something that we are not sure of, but something we’re quite sure about in the face of gaslighting? Conditions of power may require us to have a different tonality, a different cadence, a different volume to speech to preserve this knowledge so that it can survive another generation, so that it might roar with a resounding voice when conditions allow it.
So, there’s something about time and temporality here, abiding one’s time as techniques and methods of survival, that’s revelatory through the practice of collective scholarship. Whether that practice is akin to “strategic essentialism” or something else, I am not sure, but these times demand creativity and trickster energy. While our invited symposium was not a reproduction of the open forums of ancient times, it was a practice in how scholarship can hold time for breakthroughs to come.
Greene-Hayes: I know we’re coming to time, but I’m thinking—and maybe this is a concluding thought—about Tricia Hersey and the Nap Ministry. She talks often about her grandmother who would sit in her chair and close her eyes. You wouldn’t necessarily know if she was fully asleep or if she was half-asleep. What Hersey points to, as many African Americans often say, is that “every shut eye ain’t sleep.” There’s something about the need to engage in intellectual work but also the need to preserve ourselves and our minds and our spirits. How do we work and struggle in community and show up where we need to show up and do the work that we’re called to do as professors, as thinkers, as scholars, as writers, and how do we step back when we need to and say “no” when we need to? To keep going, we should consider these questions because there’s a long fight ahead of us.
Aumoithe: There’s a long fight ahead of us. I think the format of bringing practitioners and scholars together is also instructive because some of the best parts of the symposium were moments like Yolo Akili Robinson speaking about BEAM (Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective). Robinson brought actual practice and lived experience to these questions of mental health as did Dr. Stephanie Y. Evans who studies Black women in yoga. How powerful is it for us to remember that Rosa Parks was an avid Vinyasa yoga practitioner and one of the first to popularize that form of inner contemplative practice—syncing mind, breath, and body? What do we learn from these Black women who show us techniques of reclaiming the body, moving away from a dissociative state back into integration, back into regeneration, to sustain social movement?
I’m persuaded by the sort of Eastern concept of “svadhyaya,” which is essentially defined as self-study. It’s an ethos that’s antithetical to the scholastic way of thinking about knowledge as generating books and referencing past publications to make sense of the world. Svadhyahya says you already know, you already contain everything within you—it just requires quieting down the external so you can hear that knowledge shine through.
Through our study of historical figures and hearing today’s practitioners we see svadhyaya happening in the past and present. And we get the most productive, hopeful, optimistic, and sustainable insight by paying attention to the fact that these practices and philosophies were quite effective for some of the most recognizable civil rights leaders and Black radicals of the past. They remain so.
The practice of svadhyaya, the practice of breathing, the practice of resting, the practice of closing one’s eyes and yet using it as a time to process—these are ways of being and making sense of the world that we can reclaim now. It’s not enough to just state it, but we practice it in our dialogue.
Greene-Hayes: Thank you for that. I’m reminded of words from a recent sermon by the Reverend Dr. Anika Wilson Brown who is the senior pastor at Union Temple in Washington, DC. She mentioned that she feels deeply in her spirit that we’re all being called to reclaim “the ancient technologies of our African ancestors” in this moment. She pointed to canning and meditation and root work and all these different practices that aren’t all gone but, in many ways, we have invested so much in consumerism and ordering on Amazon and Uber and so on that we forgot a lot of those things. Those are the precise technologies that are going to carry us at this moment. So, thank you, George, for this wonderful conversation.
Aumoithe: Thank you, Ahmad, for making sense of the world with me.