If you just tune in a civic cipher. I am your host Ramsey's job. Big shout out to my man c Ward, who is off in Manila, literally because that's what he does. Lucky him. But I'd like to also say lucky me, because I am here with the brilliant
mind that is ya Afo. And I'm also here with a good friend of the show and a fellow activist once upon a Time, and a fellow do gooder and one of my favorite people, Leanna Taylor, and we're having a conversation about generational trauma that I feel is very important for you to stick around for the second half of the show and listen to and learn from the
conversation that we're having today. That so far it's been very informative, and I know we're not going to cover everything, but we'll definitely be sure to leave you with some connective tissue so you can do some independent studies and hopefully create a link with you Yah and the work that you're doing. But for now, we have to take a pause and teach you a new way to become
a better ally. Baba Baba and Today's Baba is sponsored by Friends of the Movement you can sign up for the free voter wallet from Fotmglobal dot com to support black businesses and allied businesses as well as make an impact with your spending. Again, that's Fotmglobal dot com. All right. I want you to check out his Keelhistorical Trauma dot com and you can become a historical trauma specialist with a certification and from IAPO. Cultural competence begins with respecting
generational and trauma. All right. This is the only entity offering a comprehensive forty eight hour Historical Trauma Specialist certification program. The program is broken into six levels and is built on a foundation of bipod cultures and neurobiology. It is taught from a multicultural perspective, injecting traditions and ideology from various cultures from around the world. This inclusive study relies on the ancient tradition of storytelling, visual art, and interconnected
relationships to international sorry intentionally explore difficult topics. The indigenous teaching methods are woven with current academia and research, along with coveted knowledge from medicine, women and men, traditional historians, and cultural leaders from various African, Native American Aboriginal and Asian communities to solify the following topics Indigenous wellness, historical collective and integgenerational trauma, epigenetics, colonization, structural racism, race based
traumatic stress, anti racist attachment, cultural attachment theory. The list goes on. For more information, visit Healhistoricaltrauma dot com and get your certification as a historical trauma specialist. And if
nothing else, again Healhistoricaltrauma dot com. It'll give you some insights, some tangible stuff, some sharable stuff that you can use outside of radio and outside of the podcast or wherever it is you're listening to this content that you can take with you or share with other people who might benefit from it. All right, back to the lecture at hand.
To quote, I'm chomping at the bit, yes, Okay, I've been waiting to be able to say this. I'm blown away that you use I mean, we're aligned in a lot of ways, Okay, but yeah we are. I'm blown away that you use this example of the barrel of laughs. Collectivist people, people from collectivist cultures have what some scientists call the funny bone gene. Okay, I won't get to sciencey because then I'll lose you. Okay, but I'm gonna
explain it without all the science. But our genetics are different, and we have this gene for laughter and for humor. So when we are in environments where we're not able to laugh and have collective humor, it disturbs our neurological regulation.
There's parts of the.
Brain that are designed for us to laugh collectively. Every single thing that you mentioned that you said, well, we also you were quoting someone and you said, well, you know, we had these barrel laughs. But then we also bounced babies on the knee, and we had interconnected relationships and we got together and all of those things, all of those things, as human beings.
Were wired for that.
So when we have interconnectedness and we have relationships, it allows our brain to release the feel goods into our system. Right, the dopamine, the serotonin, the oxytocin, the things that make us feel good, make us feel joy, pleasure, safety, And so when we don't have an opportunity for those things, when that is stripped of us, right, this is another part of our culture. Right, culture and neurobiology go hand
in hand. In fact, we have studies. Now you know a science known as cultural neurobiology, because we're un understanding that culture and neurobiology go together. If we are people from a collectivist culture and we're environment and environments where we don't dance collectively, where we don't sing collectively, where we don't have an opportunity to laugh, it's going to disturb our neurobiology. So it doesn't surprise me, right, that
we weren't allowed to laugh on the plantation. More does it surprise me that we were always trying to get together to laugh, because the brain is always seeking regulation working on the plantation, right, we're neurologically disregulated because we're always in fear. And those moments of laughter, those moments of connectedness, those moments of babies on our lap, allows us to activate the pleasure center of our brain, which then allows us to have the dopamine release where we
can feel joy and pleasure and safety. So it's just it's you know, that story is really in alignment with what I'm talking about. What you mean, these are ways that we can heal ourselves. You see, we're looking our communities in trouble, right, Our communities need healing, and we think that we're going to get that healing from Western medicine. We think we're going to get that healing from outside providers and outside people. But we have the capacity to
become self healing communities. We have the capacity. We're wired, we have the inate ability to heal ourselves. We just have to be reminded because our ancestors knew how to manage adversity, but through colonization, we've been stripped of our cultural identity and we no longer know how to manage adversity.
You know, I see what you mean about her, she's uh something special especially, Yeah, I think that's that's that's a bit of an understatement really, So let's do this, okay. I remember you said that you didn't want to get to sciencey, but while we have or listeners here, I do want to at least touch on a little bit
of the science here. Because it's one thing to say that these are some good ideas, or these are some culturally relevant practices, or these are things that this group of people likes to do, and then Jewish people like to do this, and tel Aviv and you know, on and on and on. But if there's a scientific basis for it, science is a language that tends to transcend a lot of prejudices. So let's take a moment and discuss for folks that don't know, what is epigenetics.
Okay, So epigenetics is the science that deals with how our genetics has to adapt to our environment. So we have genes, right that we inherit from our family, from our parents. That stays solid, right, that's static. We have that genetic information no matter what. But and that lives in the genome of the DNA. We then have something that's on the outside of the genome, which is the epigenome, and that contains chemical markers, and those chemical markers determine how, when,
and if that genetic information gets expressed. Okay, so if we have so let's just do an example. If we have an ancestor that was on the continent during the slave trade. Right, there's an ancestor walking around doing their day to day work. They know that there's someone that is stealing and enslaving Africans, so they're fearful. Right, somebody might get me. I don't know if it's going to
be somebody from another tribe. I don't know if it's going to be somebody, you know, a colonizer, but somebody.
Might get me. So they're moving around in fear.
They become hypervigilant because we must become hypervigilant in order to right. So suddenly we can see farther than we used to be able to see because we have to train ourselves. Our body is going to adjust to this for survival. We can see farther. Our sense of smell, right, we see these silly movies where you know, like either a Native American person or an African person, I smell bear, right,
these things are true. Right, our smell becomes discerning because I need to know if I'm in the bush, I need to know is that was there a human being just here?
Was that? You know? Did they come from another tribe? Are they European? Is it a bear? You know, who's in the woods?
And so our DNA adapts to whatever environment we're in. When that adaptation happens, it can be passed. The adaptation of let's say, hypervigilance can be passed one generation to the next for potentially fourteen generations. We can look at the cherry blossom study to have more information about this. So during in the cherry blossoms study, what they did is they took a bunch of rats and they exposed
rats to the smell of cherry blossoms. At the time that they were exposing those rats, they were giving the rats a shock at the same time, So they were experiencing pain and smelling cherry blossoms at the same time.
Fourteen yes, similar, yes, fourteen generations later, those rats who have no experience of being shocked when they smell cherry blossom, they will have the same amount of stress hormones in their system the cortisol nor adrenaline adrenaline as the group of rats that initially smelled the cherry blossoms while they were getting shocked. So that's why the scientists are starting to say, wait a minute, there's a connection here, and
this can be passed fourteen generations down the road. But I have to also say, because I am not a doom and gloom, I'm not everything as bad. This is wonderful information. This is fantastic to know write as traumatic as it is for us that potentially we have all this trauma, and trauma's trauma is cumulative, so we have the potential of all this accumulated trauma.
But at the same time we have the potential.
To pass love and positive experiences and benevolence, all those things.
Fourteen generations forward. This is healing our communities.
I love that. I want to man, I wish my dad was alive still. He would like to hear you say that that was a very special thing. You for saying that that was very good.
Yeah, you're welcome.
To hear that. Okay, fourteen generations. Yes, I believe Leanna that once upon a time we either read or had a discussion about the Willie Lynch Letters. That's how I'm familiar. A long time ago.
It was a long time ago.
Okay, all right, are you are you're familiar with the little Lynch Letter. Okay, so we've talked about the Willie Lynch Letter on this show before, but if you missed that episode, I have to give you a little bit of background information. So there was a letter that was reported to have been written by a slaver in the Americas who really taught or really established a framework for breaking a slave in the way that you would break
a horse. You would break them from their natural state, which is the state of human and you would you would cause them to devolve into a subservient lesser state of humanity. It was a psychological undertaking that required for you to take the entire family. And I have to say this because as I need to retain my journalistic INCREDI credibility here that whether or not the the the letter is a truthful accounting of or or that Willy
Lynch was was an actual individual who wrote this. Whether or not that is true has been up for debate for some time, but the Library of Congress has chronicled the Willie Lynch Letter nonetheless, and so even if it is a work of fiction, it gives insight into actual practices that took place during slavery. Now, if you've never heard of the Willi Lynch Letter for black people, in particular black people in the world of academia, it's it's
a letter that we use. And for those that listen to hip hop like me, you might hear it come up in like a talib verse or you know, most step those type of people. But read it. It's called
how to Make a Slave? Okay. The reason I'm referencing this right now and giving you such a background on it is because a it is a subject of conversations, you know, for those of us who are black and are trying to combat things that have been levied, leveled, sorry against our community initiatives and so forth, the disenfranchisement and kind of the psychological state of our people. And so this has kind of been I don't want to call it a guidepost, but sort of a reference point.
We'll call it that now. In this letter, toward the end. Funnily enough, it uses the word self refueling, which is part of why that word is part of why the letter is debated because the word refueling wasn't used popularly way back when the letter was supposed to have been written. But self refueling. I want you to keep that word
in mind. In the letter, it says, if you implement these things the way this letter instructs, if you take the black man away from his woman with the children present, and you tie them to four horses, and you send the four horses in four directions and tear his body apart. And you take another black man and you tarn, feather him and beat him to the point of death. Do this in front of the black woman, and she will raise her children in reverse roles. You need to read it.
But this is the quick and dirty version of it. If she raises her children in reverse roles, she will be subservient, but she will be the one that negotiates with you. Her daughter will be subservient and he will negotiate with you. Her son will be paralyzed in fear and will eat out of the palm of your hand. More or less, this is kind of what is said, and this is where you end up getting the black
Mama trope. Black you ain't going to come over here with all that, you know, that sort of attitude, and you know what else, angry black woman, that sort of stuff. You know, these things are kind of built off of this psychology that's in this letter. The thing is back to what I'm saying. It says in the letter. If these steps are implemented correctly on your plantation, the slaves will exist in a perpetual state of servitude, a self refueling cycle that will last up to three hundred years
is it three hundred? Yeah? Okay, three hundred years, or until something resets the natural state of thinking for these people. So you have to break the language, You have to break everything familiar. Teach them a new peculiar language, a new peculiar religion. These are words actually from the document. I can't believe I'm remembering so much. Maybe I am smart, I don't know, but well maybe I have a good
memory all of a sudden. But anyway, so you're talking about fourteen generations, and that falls right in line with what I believe to be true of the Willie Lynch letter. It sounds like you've already made this connection before I have.
And the thing about the wally you know, well, no, I mean, it's part of what I lecture in my course. Okay, you know we talk about yes, because we see so much of those things still in our communities, in our black community, sure, right, And so we're talking about a few things there, right, we're talking about what's happening neurobiologically. You're living in fear all the time. You're constantly in fear, you're seeing violence, you're you know, constantly witnessing violence.
You're always in fear. It changes your neurobiology.
If we're always in fight or flight response, right, fight or flight. We know what fight or flight is because everybody's always talking about it, right, But we're wired for that. If we're walking along in the world and we see a bear, we're wired so that either we fight the bear, we run like we've never run before in our lives, or we drop on the ground and play dead before we can even think about it, because that's how we're
wired for survival. If we're fighting the bear, we become very, very aggressive, right, because we have cortisol and nor adrenaline and adrenaline and all of these a whole cocktail of stress hormones in our system that's going to cause us to be aggressive, cause us to be hostile, controlling, agitated, violent, because we need to survive if we have generations, right, and we'll go before the Willie Lynch letter, Right, We're going to go all the way from our ancestor that
was on the continent waiting to be stolen. Right, So we have the fear that's there, we have the trauma that's there. We have the trauma of once they get caught, the trauma of the dungeons that they waited in chain together, defecating and urinating on one another, and then all the
people that died. Then the trauma of walking down that last road before they got onto the boat, and then the trauma of some of our ancestors drowning themselves in defiance, refusing to get on that boat and watching that happen, and then surviving the Middle Passage. Right, all of this is cumulated trauma. Then we get to the new Land, we're put on the auction blocks. We have the trauma of that, and anybody that we might have been related to. Then we're going to be separated from our loved ones,
and we have the trauma of that. And then we get to the plantation, and then we have the Willy Lynch letter and the behaviors described in the Willy Lynch letters. Right, this is trauma accumulated over time from various sources. It impacts the neurobiology. So we cannot wonder why if we go into our communities and we see big behaviors, we see aggression, we don't say it's cultural, it's their messed up. Genetics is an and environmental. This is an issue of environment.
We have been put in an environment where we are in constant fear over these generations.
Then we add in.
All of our brothers and sisters being shot in the back by the police. Then we add in incarceration, We add in all of those things.
So what happens.
Often, what is it? Man? I was going to say it black odes, Jim.
Crow, Jim Crow, absolutely, Jim Crow, all of those things. So when you go into our communities, you're going to see people who haven't activated threat response system. They're operating in the brain. I'm going to get sciencey, but you're going to follow me beautifully and you're going to love it. But when we activate that fight or flight response, we are activating the brain stem and part of our brain, the most primitive part of our brain, the part of
the brain that's intact when we're already born. That's a part of the brain for survival. Limic system is part of the right So that's a terrific system for survival. It's going to control my heart rate, my blood pressure, my respiratory rate, all of those things. I need my die incephalon to inhibit some of my behaviors. I need my cortex in order to learn. The brain is very efficient. If the brain says danger, danger, danger, and we need to survive, it's going to activate the brain stem. Now
we're in survival mode. The other parts of the brain are going to power off. So I don't have access to my dyeing cephalon. I don't have access to my cortex. So I can't have empathy, I can't have memory, I can't have good self reflection, I can't make good decisions because I don't have access to the part of the brain that I need in order to do that.
Well, that just means we're going to have to schedule a part two for this because I feel like we could talk for I wanted to ask you so much, what is it your hope for the outcomes? What is it? And we'll table those things for next time. In the short run, we please do me a favor and share any social media websites anything like that with our listeners so that they can I healhistoricaltrauma.
Dot com is my website. If you're interested in learning more about epigenetics, check out the cherry blossom study. It's fascinating. Check out the Human Genome Project and you'll get to more information about.
That as well. All right, and Leanna, the Arizona Pet Project.
Log it, oh yeah, my nonprofit Arizona Pet Project.
You can find us at Arizona Azypetproject dot org.
On social media is the Arizona Pet Project.
Oh right. If you're in the pets, she's the person you want to talk too, all right, okay, and you can follow us at social on all social media at Civic Cipher. I'm ramses John. Until next week, y'all. Peace,