Arc I: Naming the Distortion (Know Thy Self)

Arc I: Naming the Distortion (Yurugu is as Yurugu Does Pt. 2)

I did not plan this episode. I was on Threads sharing what I was reading when someone I follow responded. By Tuesday we were recording. JDaniel Richer is a philosopher and decolonization thinker who came to Yurugu: An Afrikan-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior by Marimba Ani [https://shadesofafrika.com/yurugu-an-african-centered-critique-of-european-cultural-thought-and-behavior-marimba-ani/], through a path I recognize even though it looks nothing like mine. Transracially adopted, raised by white parents in Rhode Island, having moved south and felt for the first time what it means to be seen as Black in the world. The decolonization path was already underway before he had the language for it. Neither of us was raised in the church, and that ended up being a real entry point into what Ani is doing in this text. My mother chose Buddhism when she was pregnant with me specifically because she was not going to follow a religion used to enslave our ancestors. That was her decision as a child, made under punishment. Once she told me that, I held it. That context lives in this conversation. Where this episode finds its footing is in what Cartesian dualism actually did; not as a philosophical abstraction, but as something institutionalized from childhood in every space we were taught to trust. Jay brought something into the conversation I had not heard before, and what emerged about the body, about what gets trained out of us, and about who that serves, is the kind of exchange I hoped this arc might eventually produce. This is Part 1. We ran an hour and had to stop before we got to objectivity. That conversation is still coming. Jay is on Threads at @JDwritesthefuture and on Substack at dharmaplusdescent.com [http://dharmaplusdescent.com]. Keywords: Yurugu, Marimba Ani, Cartesian dualism, mind-body split, decolonization, African centered psychology, transracial adoption, extended self, Linda James Myers, We Been Knew, Arc I, Black philosophy Get full access to Seeds of WizDoom at muzabi.substack.com/subscribe [https://muzabi.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Arc I: Naming the Distortion (Yurugu is as Yurugu Does Pt. 1)

I took two weeks before this one because I knew what I was walking into. Yurugu: An Afrikan-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior by Marimba Ani [https://shadesofafrika.com/yurugu-an-african-centered-critique-of-european-cultural-thought-and-behavior-marimba-ani/], is not casual reading, and I was not going to come to it carrying book-launch energy. What I did do when I first encountered Yurugu about a year ago, before I had the bandwidth to sit with the full text, was go straight to the glossary. Three terms in particular: Asili, Utamawazo, Utamaroho. I talk about all three in this episode, and I start there because without that language, the patterns are visible and still un-nameable. Arc I is called Naming the Distortion for a reason. The part that stopped me in this chapter was recognizing something I had been building years before I had this framework. Years ago, working as a cultural strategy program manager inside a corporate organization, I was trying to construct a model that could measure the gap between what an organization says it values and what it actually produces. I didn't have the word Asili. I didn't have the word Ubuntu. I had a spreadsheet and a set of questions that, I now understand, were trying to answer the same thing Ani is doing in this book. Chapter 1 also gets into Plato and Platonic thinking, specifically the move Ani argues he made that has structured European thought for centuries. It is a precise argument, and it touches directly on why intuition has been the most consistently penalized way of knowing in every institutional space I have ever moved through. This is episode seven, and the first of what will be several episodes on Yurugu. We are just getting started. Get full access to Seeds of WizDoom at muzabi.substack.com/subscribe [https://muzabi.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Arc I: Naming the Distortion (Know Thy Self)

I read the opening chapter of Know Thyself on the eve of my own book launch [https://our.savvywizdoom.com], and the timing couldn't be more impeccable. Na'im Akbar opens by going back to the root of the word — educare, to draw forth. Not to fill. To bring out what is already there. He identifies four functions that a genuine education must perform which I explore in the episode. By the time he finishes outlining them all, the shape of everything that has been deliberately withheld is impossible to look away from. The immunity section is where the chapter gets surgical. Akbar draws the analogy to biological immunity — resistance passed through blood, through community, through survival. Education is supposed to do the same thing: transmit the strategies that worked, the resistances that held, the names that mean something because of what they did and how they did it. Cinque. Tubman. Douglass. Garvey. Du Bois. Woodson. The Ashanti. These are not feel-good stories. They are the immune record of a people. And the educational system that refuses to teach them is not being neutral. It is performing surgery. And then Akbar says what no one wants to say plainly: the people who carry the cure are accused of carrying the infection. That pattern — calling the immunization the disease — is not an error. It is the strategy. We saw it with "drapetomania". We are seeing it now. The episode closes inside my graduate treatise, The Performance of Civility: Exiting Stage Left [https://youtu.be/mhKX1DTiHHg] https://youtu.be/mhKX1DTiHHg— and the realization that the gap between stated values and enacted behavior in American institutions is not a design flaw. It has a founding document. Arc I is still doing its work. Keywords: Know Thyself, Na'im Akbar, education and liberation, legacy of competence, acquired immunity, shared vision, African American identity, miseducation, Afrocentric curriculum, We Been Knew podcast, organizational culture, Ubuntu, drapetomania, psychological conditioning, self-determination Get full access to Seeds of WizDoom at muzabi.substack.com/subscribe [https://muzabi.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Arc I: Naming the Distortion (Break These Mental Chains)

Woodson showed us what was kept from us. Akbar goes inside what was put there instead. Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery is behavioral archaeology. Every pattern we've been told is a moral failure — the relationship to work, to property, to leadership, to family, to self-worth — Akbar traces each one back to a specific condition of chattel slavery. I kept having to stop reading because I kept finding myself in the pages. I cover the Psychological Legacy of Slavery and Liberation from Mental Slavery sections of this book. I bring in my own story — corporate cycles, material acquisition mistaken for freedom, the I/O psychology textbook that erased enslaved Africans as the first American workforce, and a research question I was already sitting with in graduate school that this book gave me new language for. The liberation section is where Akbar shifts from autopsy to strategy. It is not comfortable. And it ends with three words: let's get to work. This is Arc I, Episode 5. We are still naming the distortion. Now we are learning its interior. Keywords: Na'im Akbar, Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery, Black psychology, psychological legacy of slavery, internalized oppression, African American mental health, Black liberation, grafted leadership, pet-to-threat, colorism, Black family destruction, divide and conquer, knowledge of self, African-centered psychology, We Been Knew, Arc I Get full access to Seeds of WizDoom at muzabi.substack.com/subscribe [https://muzabi.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Arc I: Naming the Distortion (Miseducation Pt. 4)

I finished The Miseducation of the Negro on the last day of Black History Month and the same day I completed Module 1 of my certification in African Black Psychology (CABP) through ABPsi. [https://abpsi.org/cabp/] I did not plan that. And by the time you finish this episode, you will understand why I am telling you it landed the way it did. These final chapters are Woodson's turn from diagnosis to prescription. After eighteen chapters of precise, painful evidence, he asks: what do we build instead? His answer is reconstruction from a completely different foundation. Built on self-knowledge. Built on Black genius. Built on the radicalism that rises from within because the outside was never coming. ABPsi has been part of my world since early 2025 — I attended my first conference last July, where I had the extraordinary experience of meeting Baba Wade Nobles and Na'im Akbar. The CABP is what I registered for around Christmas. And Module One — which opened with the Kemetic seven-element model of the human being, the deep cultural structures of African peoples across the diaspora as the foundation of the science, and the transmission that if the ancestors are not lost, neither are we — landed on the same day I closed this book. That is not coincidence. That is Spirit. In this episode I also work through Woodson's economic argument on imitation versus innovation, Dr. Linda James Myers on the nature of power, what I witnessed at a Black History Month fair, and the warmth and competence dynamic I lived as a vendor and as someone who had material access in a community navigating manufactured scarcity. Woodson was describing that psychology in 1933. It is still producing its outputs now. This is Arc I, Episode 4. The Miseducation of the Negro is complete. We are naming the distortion with our own language now. And we have the institutions our ancestors built to hold us while we do. Keywords: Carter G. Woodson, Miseducation of the Negro, ABPsi, Association of Black Psychologists, CABP certification, African Black psychology, Kemetic philosophy, seven elements holistic human model, Ka Ba Khaba Akhu Seb Putah Atmu, Sakhu, Wade Nobles, Jegna, Jegnaship, optimal psychology, Linda James Myers, APA walkout 1968, Black self-determination, imitation vs innovation, radicalism from within, Black political autonomy, Black History Month, Tree of Life, African worldview, mother-mind, diaspora, Arc I We Been Knew Get full access to Seeds of WizDoom at muzabi.substack.com/subscribe [https://muzabi.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]