By Daktari S. Hicks, PsyD and
Monique “Kiki” Lyons, MA, AMFT

Except for some ceremonial moments and times, i.e., Kwanzaa, Juneteenth, Memorial Day, etc., we don’t think a lot about our ancestors.

Most of the time, in fact, we don’t think about those who walked in life before us and left footsteps for us to follow.

In many cases, we just bury them six feet under; or we cremate their physical bodies and scatter their ashes in a body of water or house them in an urn.

But are the dead really dead? As Black psychologists, we think not. The master Congo Nganga Dr. K. Kia Bunseke Fu-Kiau has taught us that we are seeds in a seed, from a seed, in a seed, from a seed ad infinitum.

We come and go and return and go and come back and go and come continually. As Black psychologists, we do believe in the continued existence, spirit, and power of our Ancestors, the invisible ones, or the dwellers of heaven (the sky world).

Ancestors are those in our maternal and paternal bloodlines born before us (in most cases) who have transitioned from the Earth to an invisible-spiritual-sky realm. We use ancestors interchangeably with Ancestars to honor some African ancients’ belief that our dearly departed return to the stars from which they came once they leave the Earth.

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Us Black folk also adopt chosen, non-blood related Ancestors due to their vital impacts on us while they were alive and long after they’ve gone. Ibaye (“blessings to ancestor”) Sir Duke Ellington, Marvin Gaye, Chuck Brown, and Billy Stewart, a few of our Chocolate City-DC ancestors, where Dr. Daktari was born and raised.

Ibaye Monica Renee Hastings-Smith, Dr. “Papa” Zakariya Diouf, Zeke Nealy, Kamau Amen-Ra, and Dr. Angelina Graham, some of our local Oakland community Ancestors.

Nana Peasant, a character from Julie Dash’s film “Daughters of the Dust” says, “The Ancestors and the womb … they’re One, they’re the same. Those in the grave, like those who’re across the sea, they’re with us. They’re all the same. The Ancestors and the womb are one … Call on those old Africans. They’ll come to you when you least expect them. They’ll hug you up quick and soft like the warm, sweet wind. Let those old souls come into your heart. Let them feed your head with wisdom that ain’t from this day and time.”

Our Ancestars are vital because they serve as ever-present driving forces that guide and direct us on our divine paths.

An African proverb states, “A wise will is dedicated to the Ancestors, for it’s them who gave you everything.”

With that notion in mind, we inherit the good, bad, ugly, and phenomenal from our ancestors via genetic, familial, psychical, spiritual, cultural, and social modes of transmission. Within our collective ancestral memory bank, we can tap into intergenerational memories/stories of distant Ancestors that impact how we think, feel, and act yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

We co-authors crossed paths in 2017 when our ancestors deemed it necessary while attending an ancestral veneration ceremony at Oya Nike’s Botanica in Berkeley, CA, led by Curandero/Santero/Palero Baba Ruben Texidor.

We continued along our shared ancestral journey in 2019 by participating in Lead to Life’s Guns to Shovels Ceremony at Oakland City Hall where we erected altars for the ancestors, drummed/danced for the orishas (deified ancestors in the Yoruba tradition), and witnessed fireworkers meld guns (used to take lives) into shovels, which were used to plant trees on reclaimed local Ohlone land.

Via public/private communal ceremonies, we learned to cultivate ancestral healing. We acknowledge, communicate, and collaborate with our beloved Ancestars in an effort to resolve their unresolved trauma and access our inherited legacies of dynamism, resilience, revitalization, spirituality, and vitality.

The ancestors are, in fact, you. Acknowledging our ancestors is to honor the best of ourselves. We are the ancestors come to complete what they left incomplete, to finish the song, to finish the dance step, to finish their task, to finish our elevation and affirmation.

We encourage you to reach out, connect with, and honor your ancestors for reciprocal rejuvenation by creating an ancestral altar in your home/community, offering them omi tutu (fresh water), giving them their flowers, cooking their favorite meal, playing their favorite songs, and paying attention to your dreams, which are the “voices of Ancestors.”

We also invite you to attend the Annual Maafa Commemoration Sunrise Ceremony at Ocean Beach, which typically occurs on the second Sunday of every October.

The Association of Black Psychologists (ABPsi) Bay Area Chapter is committed to providing the Post Newspaper readership with monthly discussions about critical issues in Black Mental Health. The ABPsi-Bay Area Chapter is a healing resource. Readers are welcome to join us at our monthly chapter meetings every 3rd Saturday via Zoom. We can be contacted at bayareaabpsi@gmail.com.

By Emil Guillermo

Oakland resident Ishmael Reed’s 11th play, “The Conductor,” came to a close last week in New York.

If “The Conductor” never plays again, I will have been privileged to be part of its evolution from Zoom readings from a year ago to two full off-Broadway runs in 2023. That’s six weeks of live shows, 24 shows in all.

But wouldn’t it be nice to have the show satirizing the Bay Area’s race politics actually have a run in the Bay Area?

That would make it a homecoming of sorts for Kenya Wilson, who spent her early years in the Bay Area, the daughter of two members of the Black Panther Party, Walter and Tracy Wilson.

One of the perks of doing the show is being part of such a great group of actors. None of the cast members are household names yet. All are working, paid, professional actors still pursuing their dreams.

Wilson was part of a cast that included Brian Anthony Simmons as Warren Chipp, a fired SF Bay Area columnist; Sri Chilukuri as Shashi Parmar, an Indian American activist in the San Francisco school board recall; Monisha Shiva as Kala Parmar, a lecturer in women’s studies at a local college; Laura Robards and me as conservative television commentators Hedda Duckbill and Gabriel Noitallde.

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A play about a diverse America should have a diverse cast, including understudies Joy Renee, Humzah Akbar, and Aaron Watkins.

I should note, Reed has cast me, a Filipino American, in all of the white roles (voice over only).

And then there was Wilson, who played reporter Melody Wells, fitting because Reed has subtitled the play “A Living Newspaper” after a 1930s WPA project where artists and writers took the subtext of the news into the theater to create informative and provocative works that took its cues from society as it unfolded.

And that adds to the significance of Wilson’s role in the play as a Black woman journalist. Not only does she get to spout the poetic literary lines of Reed, but she also gets to lay out factual information on Black women that makes audiences see her as their champion.

As an actress, Wilson admits she only knew about some of the powerful things she was given in Reed’s writing. She knew about the now-deceased writers Bell Hooks, Ntozake Shange, and Toni Morrison. But she also realized how politicized the education system is in America, as to who gets taught what ideas, and what ideas are simply ignored.

Black women, generally, are ignored.

“When it comes to Black women, we are on the bottom of the totem pole,” Wilson said. “I feel when we voice our experiences people don’t want to hear it, and they just assume that we’re all just complaining.”

In her one big scene, Wilson is not complaining but rather making the case for Black women.

“For instance … unintended pregnancies for African American women are 19 times higher than those of white women,” Wilson said. So are chlamydia and gonorrhea infection rates, as well as rates of cervical cancer and breast cancer. “And all of these things are reproductive and sexual in nature. And it just takes me back to times when my ancestors were enslaved, and we were there to breed for more slaves,” Wilson said. “And it’s not a coincidence to me that we have a higher chance of dying in childbirth. None of this is a surprise to me because this is a country that doesn’t care about Black people.”

Wilson’s key scene is a “debate” with an Indian American woman about the plight of Dalits, or lower caste “untouchable” women. Wilson always wins the audience back when, after the hearing about the plight of Dalits, Wilson responds, “Being a Black woman is no lottery prize.”

It’s a line that should also win back critics of Reed from years past who saw him as somehow anti-feminist.

“Definitely not this play,” said Wilson, who has already appeared in multiple productions this year, and is scheduled to appear in another play in Philadelphia. After a 14-year respite from acting, she’s been back at it the last six years and hopes to be on Broadway soon.

But she would definitely welcome a part in the further evolution of “The Conductor.”

Reed’s dubbing the play a “living newspaper,” is instructive. That may be the conceit that keeps “The Conductor” alive, with new iterations written by Reed and performed by a stable cast in real time, telling the story of America’s changing racial politics.

But would that be on some grassroots stage in the Bay Area? Or digitally via podcast or as radio drama?

Oakland resident Ishmael Reed’s “The Conductor” has closed off-Broadway for now, but its future is wide open.

Emil Guillermo is a journalist and commentator. His one-man theater performance, “Emil Amok, Lost NPR Host: A Phool’s Filipino American History,” runs on Sept. 14 @930pm Eastern in New York this week.

https://www.frigid.nyc/event/6897:499/

By Joe W. Bowers Jr. and
Edward Henderson
California Black Media

The U.S. Department of Education’s (ED) Office for Civil Rights and the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division are jointly releasing resources to help colleges and universities lawfully pursue diversity in their student bodies.

The departments have issued a Questions and Answers resource to help colleges and universities comply with the Supreme Court’s decision that ruled affirmative action unconstitutional.

“Educational institutions must ensure that their admissions practices do not create barriers for students based on any protected characteristics, including race,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney General for Civil Rights Kristen Clarke.

The resource gives examples of how colleges and universities can lawfully take steps to achieve a racially diverse student body. Examples included targeted outreach, recruitment, pathway programs, evaluation of admission policies, and retention strategies and programs.

ED will release a report in September that showcases practices to build inclusive, diverse student bodies, including how colleges can give thoughtful consideration to measures of adversity when selecting among qualified applicants.

This includes the economic status of a student or their family, where a student grew up, and personal experiences of hardship or discrimination, such as racial discrimination, in their admissions process.