November 3, 2022 • 28 mins
Why is it that men, straight Black men, are so afraid of being seen as “soft?” Why is it that so many in this country have learned that the most damaging thing you can be is queer or trans and that to see that in another triggers a wound so deep that it results in violence?
In this episode meet Yolo Akili Robinson, who shares his story of manhood – and the experience of being in relationships that were mentally, sexually and physically abusive. Because despite being raised in a home that taught him how to be a man’s man – repressing his true authentic self – he was able to unlearn the culture of femininity seen as something wrong and overcome the homophobia and self-hatred that runs so deep within his community. Through his work, he’s been able to reach people far beyond his community, proving that the experiences of trauma can be binding across human beings, and that the healing journey can be somewhat universal as well.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Learning to love ourselves and our messy and complicated truth
is hard enough. But what happens when you have that
feeling of otherness just hanging over your head, where you
don't feel understood even within your own tribe. How do
you confidently grow into your own skin or maybe even
grow out of it when the road to acceptance and
healing is so rough and bumpy. Hey there, it's Zach
(00:27):
Welcome back to in the Deep Stories that shape us.
I hope you've been able to catch our past episodes,
especially part two of our conversation with Leon Ford. If
you haven't checked it out, I really really recommend it.
It's the powerful story of a man that is shot
by the police, left paralyzed, but uses his experiences to
help men the relationship between the police and his community.
(00:49):
Take a list of So today I want to talk
about those people that reach us, that represent us, that
are a reflection of us without ever having met us.
Today's guests feels like that to me because of how
his work has impacted how I look at myself in
the world, and also how I look at that very
same world. You've probably seen yolo Achiley Robinson's writings about
(01:11):
mental health or maybe even heard of being the Black
Emotional and Mental Health Collective. But after reading his work
and following him, I wanted to learn more about the
person behind it all. I wanted to hear his story
because before he became the resource to so many people
that he is, Yolo was hurt a lot by people
that he loved, and like most of us, he has
(01:31):
had to learn how to pick himself up, how to
heal from sexual and emotional abuse, and how to forgive
those in his life. Not an easy journey for anyone,
but to get to that, we have to start at
the beginning his early life. I was born in Fort Lado, Florida.
I am the child of military father who spent forty
(01:54):
years in the military and retired to go back and
work for the military, and a mother who um has
been an education for but I think most of her life.
They came from a background which we are still discovering
a lot of their background. For example, my mother didn't
know her father very well, but we're discovering he's from St.
Kitts via Haiti via d r and so that's a
(02:14):
big part of the kind of heritage trends that I'm
holding as a Southerner, but also with a Caribbean like heritage.
I lived all over the United States, in the world,
lived in Germany until I was um in fifth grade
and came back to the South. One thing that is
really curious about military bases in foreign countries, particularly in Germany,
is while there was racism, without a doubt, there was
(02:34):
the ways in which are kind of connection as Americans
influenced the dynamics of race differently. So I just remember
coming back to Augusta, Georgia, which is Deep South, home
of James Brown, and you know, I remember like going
to the cafeteria and my earliest memory and sitting at
the table with white kids right like you know, and
not thinking much about it because that was kind of
the experience I had in Germany. And um, you know,
(02:55):
this white kid is saying to me, you can't sit here,
you you need to go sit with the black kids.
And I remember being like, oh wow. And then because
of the way I spoke, because I had been living
in a military base, I didn't have a Southern accent.
I had, like you know, this point, was speaking the
way I've been taught and going to the black kid's
table and they'll be like, why do you talk like that.
I didn't have a drawl at that point, which I
have a little bit more now, you know. So it
(03:17):
was an adjustment, you know, coming back and like and
Couturally I was behind right. My parents were big into music,
but like you know, you didn't have the internet, so
the things you were listening to by the time we
got to the stage, they were like nobody's checking from
EMC Hammer. I really need you to do something different
with your life. So the way I addressed the music
I thought was interesting, and Augusta I was like an
alien walking around, like what is going on? And for
(03:38):
years took me a while to adjust. It's hard to
think of someone that's so confident feeling like an outsider,
an alien. And it's especially hard to think about the
timing of all of this during this formidable years of
manhood where we were growing into our own The influence
of military played on Yollo's early life. His father in particular,
was hard because on the one hand, you had a
(04:00):
father that only wanted to protect his son, wanted to
make a good man of him, But on the other
yollow have these feelings of repression where the discipline was
just too much. I think it's important to get the
context that my father comes from, like, you know, a
very difficult background, you know, and the military for him
was the speaking for him of hope. It gave him
(04:22):
discipline and gave him structure. My father grew up in
environments like many black men are many men do, really
seeing the qualities and traits that I was gravitating towards
and expressing the softness to kind of the fluidity of
my movements, the interests in arts and music, et cetera,
as something that kind of put me in danger and
it was a threat to my well being, right, and
(04:42):
so it was very much so like you know, um
reinforced by his military upbringing, where every day he was
getting that message reinscribed and in many ways, like was
trying to put that onto me. You know, talk about
my father. Now we have a great relationship, but most
of my life that has him in the case, it
was very hostile because I believe if that a part
of what my father was navigating was he was trying
(05:02):
to create safety for me, but I experienced it as repression.
He was trying to remove an element of my character
that he saw as putting me as risk. For so
much violence and harm um as opposed to understanding this
is how I'm expressing and showing up in the world,
and I need to have that nurtured while also cultivating
safety and protection for me. Yeah, it was it was rough.
My dad we have a joke now, we laugh about um.
(05:24):
He was very big about yard work and just kind
of like, you know, making sure things meticulous. And so
my father, who did not understand landscape because he just
kind of starting to become middle class. You know, he
got these white rocks in his side to put all
around the outside of the house that he bought, and
he wanted to keep them white, but he didn't know
to put a tarp underneath this so the dirt won't
be there, right, So he would have us wash the
rocks weekly. We would get a wheelbarrow and watch the
(05:47):
rocks to put them back on the dirt, which makes
no sense. How did you begin to find yourself in
this tension with your father who's trying to kind of
mary militantly take this out of you, but you began
to know that this wasn't going away anyway. This is
actually you. And how do you find love between a
father when you know that he's and his heart trying
to protect you but also hurting you. When they're saying
(06:07):
I'm so scared for you, they're speaking as survivors of
gendered patriarchal violence. They remember and some part of them
knows the softness they once had access to, or maybe
didn't have access to, in the same way they do now.
They remember what it felt to have that attacked and
belittled and destroyed, and sometimes, as survivors of that trauma,
the only thing that can think of is like, let
(06:29):
me do it to you first, because the world's gonna
do it to you to protect you from the other
folks doing it to you. And that's the logic, that's
the coping strategy, right And that's what they see. And
just like a lot of trauma, it doesn't always get
um examined in a way that helps expand the possibilities
of how we could respond to this. So here is
Yolo trying to be himself in this very strict, very
(06:50):
tough love household, and learning a little more about his
upbringing helps me understand how he can connect with people
through his work See the Other Side, so to speak.
Take his spoken word album Purple Galaxy for example, this
is a fifteen track piece reflecting on himself, his queerness,
his heritage, his identity, and yet it touched so many people,
(07:11):
and not just queer black men, but sis black men
and women, and I wanted to know more about one poem,
in particular, we are not the kind of Boys We want,
which was such a powerful account of self expression and awareness.
Around the time, I was working in an LGBT community
center in Atlanta, and so much of the themes that
(07:32):
came up and that I also was struggling with, was
the ways in which that like as men who were
not like, you know, super butch and like all the time,
or who had a fluidity to their expression, that we
weren't as desirable. And I began to think about what
does it mean to not be the kind of boy
that you want? Like? What does it mean to be
so much disdain when you see someone who moves the
way you move and your response is to like yuck
(07:53):
them and be like oh and disgusted at them? What
does that look like? I did a video where I
Wouldn't pe Up Park and I literally was out with
a random camera and asking people, you know, would you
date you? Are you the kind of boy you want?
And I got so many responses from all these different
black queer people. Um really kind of like grappling with
that and thinking like, well, no, I would never date myself,
(08:15):
but wait why would not? And it was such a
beautiful moment to kind of reflect on why we would
not find ourselves desirable, to say an astrology, like, you know,
the symbol for venus is a hand mirror, right, and
venus being the symbol of love. You know, what does
it mean that like desires starts with us, desires starts
with like finding ourselves is desirable and attractive, and how
that's disruptive when we don't have that because of homophobia, transphobia,
(08:36):
et cetera. I love that you brought up the mirror
and asking people if they would date themselves. In Greek mythology,
there is a person named Narcissus, and he was so
infatuated with his beauty that he There different interpretations. I
will say he drowned in himself. Other people say he
starved to death because he was still in love with himself.
(08:58):
People have taken this idea and said, well, it's because
he was queer, and like, that's the only man that
he could find to love him. But what people never
talk about is narcissist is a white man staring at himself.
And I think white gay men, queer man especially have
been given the runway, the ability to fall in love
and find love that looks a lot like them. I'm
not saying it's a good love. I'm not saying it's
(09:18):
perfect love, but they find it, and then we have
a culture that really props it up. Black queer men
do not. I think black people are never given that
mirror to say you are beautiful, you deserve to love yourself.
And it feels every time when you're telling that story,
it makes me think about the cultural violence we deal with,
Like we were set up to not get there. How
(09:38):
do you deal with hearing those stories of people saying
they don't love themselves that would say that, like as
black were people, as black transfolks, we have to create
those mirrors, Whereas I think that like white men get
the opportunity to see it's themselves so easily reflected in
the world around them as desirable and as wanted, we
have to kind of like create the art, the shows,
the all these things to bring ourselves in that space.
(10:02):
It's always hard for me to hear that black who.
I mean, I'm in a different place with it now
because I've heard it so much and I understand where
it comes from and I understand the roots. But I
will tell you that in my early days doing counseling,
it used to be such a big trigger for me.
I'll never forget. You know, this person is no longer
with us, But I remember one time in a group,
a young person saying, I know why my life never
(10:25):
goes well. This is a black trans person. They were like,
it's because, you know God, I'm not in God's favor.
God doesn't favor me, and I know that's why the
bad things happened to me. I know that's why I
get treated this way. And I've accepted that and that
message I heard that so much. Defining yourself desirable and
lovable was something that I think. That's I know some
(10:47):
of those young people and some and some of those
folks never got a chance to really explore you know. Um,
So it is rough. It is rough to hear it.
Let's sit without for a second. I'm not in God's favor.
Those five short words hold so much power, but it
helps us see where that deep rooted self hatred can
stem from within the lgbt Q plus community. And when
(11:10):
we tell ourselves this, that we are destined for bad
things to happen to us, things begin to snowball. That's
when we start to see the secrecy where the shame
begins to manifest into violence. And that's especially true with
black trans women, who are the most vulnerable when we
can seal and hide who we really are and who
we love. That this thing is important to really center
(11:33):
the experiences of black trains women and how challenging that
is for them to navigate these men who can be
both their lovers and also potentially provide a really big
threat to their livelihood, you know, for the for the
men who do these terrible things, these who commit these
acts of murder and violence. You know, you definitely see
how it's deeply connected to like toxic masculinity right there,
Like this deep fear of I don't know who I am,
(11:58):
and so I have to destroy you, because to destroy you,
I will somehow destroy that within myself because I can't
contend with the discomfort, the dissonance that it produces within
myself around who I think I am. Right, So much
of It is that fear of being found out so
much of that that that idea that like my manhood is,
my masculinity is the core of who I am. So
(12:18):
now me having sex with you, me being attracted to you,
disrupts that very centered notion. And so if I don't
have someone else helping me build a different bedrock of
who I am, then the act of engaging you begins
to unravel that and and me too, and trying to
clamor back and hold onto that. I'm going to do
whatever it takes to kind of reground, which might mean
violence and harm, so so that I can no longer
(12:41):
have to feel that feeling of distress, you know what
I mean. And that's what's happening a lot all black
men in this country, and I would say, oh man,
but I'm gonna speak to black men have been socialized
with the most terrible and disgusting thing you can be
is queer or trans right. And whether you're queer TRANSI
strate you receive that message. And for a lot of
straight men are in who identify a straight seeing us
(13:03):
in the world represents that kind of wound that they
may have received when they were told to stifle the
queerness of the transniscent themselves to suffocate the softness in themselves,
to suffocate the femininity. And then you see someone existing
in this way that you have been beaten down for generations,
and of course it activates that memory, that feeling of
oh my god, like, what the hell is he doing
(13:23):
wearing that dress? What is she doing looking like that?
You know? I mean what happened to me was I
had I got beat up by the kids, I got
beatn up by my father, I got like assaulted, right,
and that trauma. I then took that trauma on and
I replicated it because I wanted to fit in with
the guys. So like now when I said, instead of
like um, honoring my softness and trying to fight for it,
I assimilate into this rigidity and I and I helped
(13:47):
I joined the police force around softness and femininity and
and gender variance. Right, And that's what happens on the streets,
That's what happens in our community. So often, the inability
to go internal to ask themselves weight hold on, I
see you, and this feeling is awakened within me. My
response is a man has been taught there Like if
I destroy you I won't feel that. It's like if
I see a trans person or a quick person and
(14:08):
all these feelings come up in me, but then you
see and you're like, oh girl, work you know what
I mean? Like, you know, the response is about something
in me. But men haven't been taught to men and
masterl and folks in this country have not been taught
to go within and see, like, what is that disruption
in me about? They've been taught to go outside and
squash it so they don't have to feel it within themselves.
You know, when you're the adult fourty year old who's
(14:29):
having that experience and you're seeing trans queer people and
you're having those emotions, you've likely gone through forty plus
years of gender socialization, which I have like taught you
to disconnect, to cut off, to dismember your emotional self.
You know, I often tell the story about, you know,
my godson and many of the kids I've loved and
support throughout my life. My godson learning how to walk
(14:49):
and like falling and being like, you know, like and
me coddling him, and immediately his father coming in and
being like he gonna grow up to be a punk,
let him cry, like you gotta put him down, you know,
he gotta learn how to be a man. Like that
person who's forty years old who's on the street and
sees that trans and queer person and has that emotional reaction.
Is it's often the same person who received the message
as a toddler to man up and suffocate your feelings.
(15:13):
And so now you've done that for decades, and so
you don't have the emotional self reflection because you've been
taught to press it down. Whereas a lot of like
I say, a lot of women in film and queer people,
we often develop emotional self flexivity out of shame um,
out of being held responsible for other people's feelings, particularly women,
like you're responsible for everybody's feelings about you, or out
(15:34):
of like safety hyper vigilance. We've got to know what
people are feeling because he might be transphobic, he might
be queer. So we're very cognizant of those things. Whereas
when you're when you're you know, traditionally masculine and many men,
you may not develop the same faculties. Just like with
his godson, Yola's work has helped so many people, strangers
and family alike, look within and be empathetic, but just
(15:57):
like he can connect with people through his art and
his work, I was curious to hear about his own
story of domestic violence because Yolo is an artist, he's
educated and introspective, and sometimes it's easy to forget that
this can happen to anyone, and that is why it's
so helpful to hear the stories of others. You Know.
(16:19):
One thing I say is that for black queer men,
our threshold for what we understand violence to be can
be very high. We're used to being in such vaulatile environments,
whether it's with each other or just the way the
world relates to us, that we don't always recognize certain
dimensions of violence as violence because it's like it's, oh,
we didn't hit you in the head, so it's not
that bad, and it's like, well, actually, there were a
(16:39):
lot of things happening here right. I met a person
at a point in my life where I was post um,
suicidal attempt, low self esteem. I had um left USC
where I started my social work degree and felt like
I failed, and I was feeling that who I was
(16:59):
was not viable and that I need to be something else.
And I met this person who was in a different
part of their journey. We connected in a relationship, and
in that relationship they showed up in ways that they
were working through their things, and I showed up in
ways in which I was working through my things, you know.
And I think it's so important. I try to say
(17:21):
this consistently because I think it's so important to talk
about domestic violence. He is not a boogeyman. That's like
what I said when I when I worked in men
Stopping violence, the men that I helped um learn new
behaviors were like our brothers, our uncles, are cousins. These
were men who are learned terrible things and had sometimes
done terrible things. But they were not boogeymen. They were
human beings who often were survivors themselves. And so the
(17:42):
man that I met, you know, was the survivor of
a lot of violence and harm. But I developed coping
strategies that replicated that harm in many really destructive and
harmful ways to me. And I learned I had learned
in my life, and I showed up in that relationship.
The ways in which I seen modeled by caregivers in
my life was to be, you know, the people pleaser,
(18:02):
which was to like try to please you as much.
Was just trying to placate you, to make you, you know,
as happy as much as I could, Like, you know,
my father is a different man now, but my father
was explosive. He had a temper when he was younger,
and that's something we all talked about. And I fell
into a role that I had seen modeled where I
would assume that his anger was about me, as opposed
(18:23):
to he needs to learn how to manage his anger.
He had suffered so much harm and so much pain,
and thought that if I make myself bigger, then I
will not be hurt, which is what the yelling and
screaming and in the in the the attacking is about.
Like I feel small, so I need to make myself
as big as possible and threaten you to to feel safe.
And so we were in a dynamic that was really um,
(18:45):
you know, toxic and really volatile, and a lot of
terrible things happened, and you know, um, it's not one
of my product moments in my life. I recognized the
ways in which I played into that dynamic, the ways
in which I could have left. But I also see
how my trauma kept me engaged it was a really
difficult time for me. I realized how much me and
(19:06):
him were living in shame and how that shame was
propelling that entire dynamic. And I often tell the story
too that, like, I started going to therapy, and I
never forget the biggest shift that changed that relationship was
when I was in therapy and she sat down and
she asked me to close my eyes and go through
this practice where she was like, I want you to
imagine yourself as a little child and what you're feeling
(19:28):
right now as a little child in yourself. And I
saw myself as this little child who was this kind
of crying in the corner, who was just really hurt
and scared and afraid. She instructed me to imagine myself
as an adult going to pick up that child and
protect that child, and protecting that child from the experience
that we're having, which in my vision was that person's temper,
(19:50):
that person's volatility, that person's rage. And I imagine myself
standing up to that person, and as I did that,
that person's face faded into my father's face, which was
such a deep psychological thing for me, like because it
was really showing the ways in which I was reliving
the pattern that has seen imprinted, where I was trying
to please a man the way I try to please
(20:11):
my father, as opposed to knowing this man needs to
get help, that it's not about me. What are some
reasons you see people make, rationality make to stay in
these cycles. There are so many reasons that people stay
in abusive relationships, and they're all connected to so many
different things, from capitalism to economics, to fear, to real desirability,
(20:32):
to to their own kind of psyche and the things
they're navigating. And I think that um for folks who
you know, if you're listening and you find yourself in
that space, because I've been there, you know, and I've
been in that space when I ask myself why am
I still here? And and having an intellectual understanding of
why I'm still here but still but like you should leave,
but still there because my body is in it and
I don't have community support to help move me beyond it.
(20:55):
You know. I think that like one thing that happens
for a lot of folks who are going through that
and trying to figure their way through it and trying
to find out how love feels for them. And then
they get abandoned by their friends and their loved ones,
and they get isolated further by that person in that relationship,
which is not helpful. What a lot of us who
are in those dynamics needs sometimes someone to be present
with us, not from a place of shaming, but from
(21:18):
a place of this is happening, and I love you
and I care for you. I'm going to be here
for you. I want different for you, and I'm here
to support you and how that could happen when you're
ready or however we can support you in that piece.
I got that at some point, but I didn't have
that for a lot part of that journey, you know.
And I think that a lot of our folks who
are struggling don't have that for a lot of reasons.
And the risk of being killed, particularly for women. I
(21:40):
don't have a lot of data for that for queer
men and trans women, but like for since women, we
know that, like the likelihood of getting killed after you
leave goes up, the threat of violence goes up, right,
So there's like this real deep seated fear. And I
think that like when we shift the focus onto why
does he do that? And why do his community allow
him to do that, because we all know folks and
we have known elks who are like he is abusive
(22:01):
emotionally physically, and we don't. We're still learning how to intervene,
how to support, like a lot of times, and you know,
I've done a lot of these kind of like transform
of justice spaces, and people think that, like, I want
to be loyal to my friends, so I want to
deny that he's really capable of doing that. And I
have to tell people that, like, being loyal to your
friend is saying I love you, I'm here for you,
and I'm here to help you reveal your behaviors and
(22:23):
your choices and help you stop any patterns that are
creating harm for you, are for anyone else. And that
is loyalty and that is love. It's not denying that
you're that, oh he's a good person. It's not about
good and bad people. It's about people who have coping
strategies and and tactics they have developed to survive our
cope with a variety of different things. And I think
we need to we need to help people understand that
(22:44):
loyalty is intervention is saying I see this and I
want you to stop this behavior as opposed to like
you're too good and you can never do that, which
is not helpful. I love this idea of accountability as
loyalty because Yolo is beyond loyal to community, to his family,
to himself. I wanted to know more about Being and
(23:04):
why he decided to create the space and show up
with love and support in this way. So, you know,
as the executive director of Being, which is the Black
Emotional Mental Health Collective, you know, our organization is really
focused on mental health broadly, but we definitely address, of
course the intersections of HIV or substanties of transphobia and
all these different dimensions you know UM. My first work
(23:27):
was in queer communities doing any kind of pure counseling
or counseling work, and so of course HIV, you know,
UM was always a present topic. And one of the
things that was always a constant theme was the ways
in which people who were UM, either newly diagnosed or
navigating UM living with HIV felt that living with HIV
diminished their worth, of their value as human beings, made
(23:50):
them less than and that was that was hard for
me because one of my core wounds is around worthiness,
around being good enough and less than and and um
seeing how that belief and the HIV stigma continue to
perpetuate that belief, it really became like activating peace for
(24:11):
me to be, for my friends and myself, for my community,
to really change the narrative that like, you know, living
with HIV and worthy, right, Like you know what I
mean that like that this this is not a reflection
of our worth or our value. This is a reflection
of the ignorance of the world that we live in, right,
And I think that would like seeing so many young
queer people that I've lost because otherwise the stigma talked
(24:32):
into their lives, weren't valuable, and they stopped taking medication,
and they stopped caring for themselves. Seeing the ways in
which it had just um disrupted so much opportunities for
love and intimacy and other queer folks life in my
own life, you know, it was always pivotal for me,
for me to make sure that we are always explicit
about educating around HIV and AIDS and supportive people living
with HIV around the real mental health challenges that the
(24:53):
stigma brings in this country. You know, you you as
I'm thinking about what I'm taking away from our our
conversation today, it just brings you to this idea that
you know, young Zach, little Zach who was so afraid
of people seeing me, seeing me Swiss, or seeing me
like beat you, black and white space, all these things
that like I wish I could go back and say no, no,
(25:15):
be seen, be your full self, show up, and that's
where you will find happiness. And it feels like your
work is so much about telling people that, sure, you
may have been through domestic found situation, but like, show
up and be seen in that. Sure you may have
an HP, positive starters, show up, it's okay, it's okay,
it's okay, Okay, you are okay. And I just want
to thank you for that. Talking with Yolo such a
(25:39):
breath of fresh air, because despite everything he's been through,
all his work, all the support he brings to others
that are in dark and desolate places, he is still
so hopeful. I'm hopeful because I know that a lot
of us the world that we want is here in
small pockets. I'm hoping that we can make it bigger
and larger. And I and I know I've seen I've
(26:00):
had the opportunity to be a community across the country
with so many black and brown healers doing dope work,
I know, I know the other world as possible. I
feel it. It's here, and so I know that for
black queer men, for black non binary folks, with black
trans women, we can feel differently in our bodies so
we can be loved and supported. It takes practice, and
it takes failure, and it takes effort, But I know
(26:22):
it because I've seen it and I've lived it, and
I'm a product of it, you know. And would it
be the purple galaxy that you got right and think about?
We'll see if it's maybe maybe it's purple galaxy. I
don't know what it is, but I imagine it's a
lot of different visions from a lot of different folks
that we just kind of share, co craft and co create.
For me as a visual person that I did that
(26:42):
queer black freedom equity, you know, just peace is a
purple galaxy. I think it's a beautiful idea. As a writer, philosopher,
and community leader, you'll creates space with so much love
and care. But it's his story that stands out the
most because he was raised with these values that I
(27:03):
think a lot of us were raised in with people
and in homes that try their best to protect us,
and it's interesting to see that despite those efforts, for
better or worse, he was still hurt in ways that
are terrible, in ways that no person should be hurt.
But although this pain marked him deeply, I love the
idea that we can touch others through our own stories,
(27:23):
even if they're not pretty. Gull's work has reached and
connected with people far outside the l g B t
Q plus community, and it shows that the issues of violence, pain,
mental and physical health are not unique to a specific group,
and it offers a new idea or way of thinking
that if pain can be this universal, this familiar, then maybe,
(27:44):
just maybe the healing journey can be similar to We
are so excited for you to be here for season
two of In the Deep Stories That Shape Us. Keep
coming back every other week and taking these power full
stories of Black and Latins people as they take us
on their own healing journeys. In the Deep Stories That
(28:06):
Shape Us is executive produced by myself, Zach Stafford, and
Ivan Chian and mastered by James Foster and our writer
is Yvette Lopez. A shout out to our guest Yolo
Achille Robinson,
Learning to love ourselves and our messy and complicated truth
is hard enough. But what happens when you have that
feeling of otherness just hanging over your head, where you
don't feel understood even within your own tribe. How do
you confidently grow into your own skin or maybe even
grow out of it when the road to acceptance and
healing is so rough and bumpy. Hey there, it's Zach
(00:27):
Welcome back to in the Deep Stories that shape us.
I hope you've been able to catch our past episodes,
especially part two of our conversation with Leon Ford. If
you haven't checked it out, I really really recommend it.
It's the powerful story of a man that is shot
by the police, left paralyzed, but uses his experiences to
help men the relationship between the police and his community.
(00:49):
Take a list of So today I want to talk
about those people that reach us, that represent us, that
are a reflection of us without ever having met us.
Today's guests feels like that to me because of how
his work has impacted how I look at myself in
the world, and also how I look at that very
same world. You've probably seen yolo Achiley Robinson's writings about
(01:11):
mental health or maybe even heard of being the Black
Emotional and Mental Health Collective. But after reading his work
and following him, I wanted to learn more about the
person behind it all. I wanted to hear his story
because before he became the resource to so many people
that he is, Yolo was hurt a lot by people
that he loved, and like most of us, he has
(01:31):
had to learn how to pick himself up, how to
heal from sexual and emotional abuse, and how to forgive
those in his life. Not an easy journey for anyone,
but to get to that, we have to start at
the beginning his early life. I was born in Fort Lado, Florida.
I am the child of military father who spent forty
(01:54):
years in the military and retired to go back and
work for the military, and a mother who um has
been an education for but I think most of her life.
They came from a background which we are still discovering
a lot of their background. For example, my mother didn't
know her father very well, but we're discovering he's from St.
Kitts via Haiti via d r and so that's a
(02:14):
big part of the kind of heritage trends that I'm
holding as a Southerner, but also with a Caribbean like heritage.
I lived all over the United States, in the world,
lived in Germany until I was um in fifth grade
and came back to the South. One thing that is
really curious about military bases in foreign countries, particularly in Germany,
is while there was racism, without a doubt, there was
(02:34):
the ways in which are kind of connection as Americans
influenced the dynamics of race differently. So I just remember
coming back to Augusta, Georgia, which is Deep South, home
of James Brown, and you know, I remember like going
to the cafeteria and my earliest memory and sitting at
the table with white kids right like you know, and
not thinking much about it because that was kind of
the experience I had in Germany. And um, you know,
(02:55):
this white kid is saying to me, you can't sit here,
you you need to go sit with the black kids.
And I remember being like, oh wow. And then because
of the way I spoke, because I had been living
in a military base, I didn't have a Southern accent.
I had, like you know, this point, was speaking the
way I've been taught and going to the black kid's
table and they'll be like, why do you talk like that.
I didn't have a drawl at that point, which I
have a little bit more now, you know. So it
(03:17):
was an adjustment, you know, coming back and like and
Couturally I was behind right. My parents were big into music,
but like you know, you didn't have the internet, so
the things you were listening to by the time we
got to the stage, they were like nobody's checking from
EMC Hammer. I really need you to do something different
with your life. So the way I addressed the music
I thought was interesting, and Augusta I was like an
alien walking around, like what is going on? And for
(03:38):
years took me a while to adjust. It's hard to
think of someone that's so confident feeling like an outsider,
an alien. And it's especially hard to think about the
timing of all of this during this formidable years of
manhood where we were growing into our own The influence
of military played on Yollo's early life. His father in particular,
was hard because on the one hand, you had a
(04:00):
father that only wanted to protect his son, wanted to
make a good man of him, But on the other
yollow have these feelings of repression where the discipline was
just too much. I think it's important to get the
context that my father comes from, like, you know, a
very difficult background, you know, and the military for him
was the speaking for him of hope. It gave him
(04:22):
discipline and gave him structure. My father grew up in
environments like many black men are many men do, really
seeing the qualities and traits that I was gravitating towards
and expressing the softness to kind of the fluidity of
my movements, the interests in arts and music, et cetera,
as something that kind of put me in danger and
it was a threat to my well being, right, and
(04:42):
so it was very much so like you know, um
reinforced by his military upbringing, where every day he was
getting that message reinscribed and in many ways, like was
trying to put that onto me. You know, talk about
my father. Now we have a great relationship, but most
of my life that has him in the case, it
was very hostile because I believe if that a part
of what my father was navigating was he was trying
(05:02):
to create safety for me, but I experienced it as repression.
He was trying to remove an element of my character
that he saw as putting me as risk. For so
much violence and harm um as opposed to understanding this
is how I'm expressing and showing up in the world,
and I need to have that nurtured while also cultivating
safety and protection for me. Yeah, it was it was rough.
My dad we have a joke now, we laugh about um.
(05:24):
He was very big about yard work and just kind
of like, you know, making sure things meticulous. And so
my father, who did not understand landscape because he just
kind of starting to become middle class. You know, he
got these white rocks in his side to put all
around the outside of the house that he bought, and
he wanted to keep them white, but he didn't know
to put a tarp underneath this so the dirt won't
be there, right, So he would have us wash the
rocks weekly. We would get a wheelbarrow and watch the
(05:47):
rocks to put them back on the dirt, which makes
no sense. How did you begin to find yourself in
this tension with your father who's trying to kind of
mary militantly take this out of you, but you began
to know that this wasn't going away anyway. This is
actually you. And how do you find love between a
father when you know that he's and his heart trying
to protect you but also hurting you. When they're saying
(06:07):
I'm so scared for you, they're speaking as survivors of
gendered patriarchal violence. They remember and some part of them
knows the softness they once had access to, or maybe
didn't have access to, in the same way they do now.
They remember what it felt to have that attacked and
belittled and destroyed, and sometimes, as survivors of that trauma,
the only thing that can think of is like, let
(06:29):
me do it to you first, because the world's gonna
do it to you to protect you from the other
folks doing it to you. And that's the logic, that's
the coping strategy, right And that's what they see. And
just like a lot of trauma, it doesn't always get
um examined in a way that helps expand the possibilities
of how we could respond to this. So here is
Yolo trying to be himself in this very strict, very
(06:50):
tough love household, and learning a little more about his
upbringing helps me understand how he can connect with people
through his work See the Other Side, so to speak.
Take his spoken word album Purple Galaxy for example, this
is a fifteen track piece reflecting on himself, his queerness,
his heritage, his identity, and yet it touched so many people,
(07:11):
and not just queer black men, but sis black men
and women, and I wanted to know more about one poem,
in particular, we are not the kind of Boys We want,
which was such a powerful account of self expression and awareness.
Around the time, I was working in an LGBT community
center in Atlanta, and so much of the themes that
(07:32):
came up and that I also was struggling with, was
the ways in which that like as men who were
not like, you know, super butch and like all the time,
or who had a fluidity to their expression, that we
weren't as desirable. And I began to think about what
does it mean to not be the kind of boy
that you want? Like? What does it mean to be
so much disdain when you see someone who moves the
way you move and your response is to like yuck
(07:53):
them and be like oh and disgusted at them? What
does that look like? I did a video where I
Wouldn't pe Up Park and I literally was out with
a random camera and asking people, you know, would you
date you? Are you the kind of boy you want?
And I got so many responses from all these different
black queer people. Um really kind of like grappling with
that and thinking like, well, no, I would never date myself,
(08:15):
but wait why would not? And it was such a
beautiful moment to kind of reflect on why we would
not find ourselves desirable, to say an astrology, like, you know,
the symbol for venus is a hand mirror, right, and
venus being the symbol of love. You know, what does
it mean that like desires starts with us, desires starts
with like finding ourselves is desirable and attractive, and how
that's disruptive when we don't have that because of homophobia, transphobia,
(08:36):
et cetera. I love that you brought up the mirror
and asking people if they would date themselves. In Greek mythology,
there is a person named Narcissus, and he was so
infatuated with his beauty that he There different interpretations. I
will say he drowned in himself. Other people say he
starved to death because he was still in love with himself.
(08:58):
People have taken this idea and said, well, it's because
he was queer, and like, that's the only man that
he could find to love him. But what people never
talk about is narcissist is a white man staring at himself.
And I think white gay men, queer man especially have
been given the runway, the ability to fall in love
and find love that looks a lot like them. I'm
not saying it's a good love. I'm not saying it's
(09:18):
perfect love, but they find it, and then we have
a culture that really props it up. Black queer men
do not. I think black people are never given that
mirror to say you are beautiful, you deserve to love yourself.
And it feels every time when you're telling that story,
it makes me think about the cultural violence we deal with,
Like we were set up to not get there. How
(09:38):
do you deal with hearing those stories of people saying
they don't love themselves that would say that, like as
black were people, as black transfolks, we have to create
those mirrors, Whereas I think that like white men get
the opportunity to see it's themselves so easily reflected in
the world around them as desirable and as wanted, we
have to kind of like create the art, the shows,
the all these things to bring ourselves in that space.
(10:02):
It's always hard for me to hear that black who.
I mean, I'm in a different place with it now
because I've heard it so much and I understand where
it comes from and I understand the roots. But I
will tell you that in my early days doing counseling,
it used to be such a big trigger for me.
I'll never forget. You know, this person is no longer
with us, But I remember one time in a group,
a young person saying, I know why my life never
(10:25):
goes well. This is a black trans person. They were like,
it's because, you know God, I'm not in God's favor.
God doesn't favor me, and I know that's why the
bad things happened to me. I know that's why I
get treated this way. And I've accepted that and that
message I heard that so much. Defining yourself desirable and
lovable was something that I think. That's I know some
(10:47):
of those young people and some and some of those
folks never got a chance to really explore you know. Um,
So it is rough. It is rough to hear it.
Let's sit without for a second. I'm not in God's favor.
Those five short words hold so much power, but it
helps us see where that deep rooted self hatred can
stem from within the lgbt Q plus community. And when
(11:10):
we tell ourselves this, that we are destined for bad
things to happen to us, things begin to snowball. That's
when we start to see the secrecy where the shame
begins to manifest into violence. And that's especially true with
black trans women, who are the most vulnerable when we
can seal and hide who we really are and who
we love. That this thing is important to really center
(11:33):
the experiences of black trains women and how challenging that
is for them to navigate these men who can be
both their lovers and also potentially provide a really big
threat to their livelihood, you know, for the for the
men who do these terrible things, these who commit these
acts of murder and violence. You know, you definitely see
how it's deeply connected to like toxic masculinity right there,
Like this deep fear of I don't know who I am,
(11:58):
and so I have to destroy you, because to destroy you,
I will somehow destroy that within myself because I can't
contend with the discomfort, the dissonance that it produces within
myself around who I think I am. Right, So much
of It is that fear of being found out so
much of that that that idea that like my manhood is,
my masculinity is the core of who I am. So
(12:18):
now me having sex with you, me being attracted to you,
disrupts that very centered notion. And so if I don't
have someone else helping me build a different bedrock of
who I am, then the act of engaging you begins
to unravel that and and me too, and trying to
clamor back and hold onto that. I'm going to do
whatever it takes to kind of reground, which might mean
violence and harm, so so that I can no longer
(12:41):
have to feel that feeling of distress, you know what
I mean. And that's what's happening a lot all black
men in this country, and I would say, oh man,
but I'm gonna speak to black men have been socialized
with the most terrible and disgusting thing you can be
is queer or trans right. And whether you're queer TRANSI
strate you receive that message. And for a lot of
straight men are in who identify a straight seeing us
(13:03):
in the world represents that kind of wound that they
may have received when they were told to stifle the
queerness of the transniscent themselves to suffocate the softness in themselves,
to suffocate the femininity. And then you see someone existing
in this way that you have been beaten down for generations,
and of course it activates that memory, that feeling of
oh my god, like, what the hell is he doing
(13:23):
wearing that dress? What is she doing looking like that?
You know? I mean what happened to me was I
had I got beat up by the kids, I got
beatn up by my father, I got like assaulted, right,
and that trauma. I then took that trauma on and
I replicated it because I wanted to fit in with
the guys. So like now when I said, instead of
like um, honoring my softness and trying to fight for it,
I assimilate into this rigidity and I and I helped
(13:47):
I joined the police force around softness and femininity and
and gender variance. Right, And that's what happens on the streets,
That's what happens in our community. So often, the inability
to go internal to ask themselves weight hold on, I
see you, and this feeling is awakened within me. My
response is a man has been taught there Like if
I destroy you I won't feel that. It's like if
I see a trans person or a quick person and
(14:08):
all these feelings come up in me, but then you
see and you're like, oh girl, work you know what
I mean? Like, you know, the response is about something
in me. But men haven't been taught to men and
masterl and folks in this country have not been taught
to go within and see, like, what is that disruption
in me about? They've been taught to go outside and
squash it so they don't have to feel it within themselves.
You know, when you're the adult fourty year old who's
(14:29):
having that experience and you're seeing trans queer people and
you're having those emotions, you've likely gone through forty plus
years of gender socialization, which I have like taught you
to disconnect, to cut off, to dismember your emotional self.
You know, I often tell the story about, you know,
my godson and many of the kids I've loved and
support throughout my life. My godson learning how to walk
(14:49):
and like falling and being like, you know, like and
me coddling him, and immediately his father coming in and
being like he gonna grow up to be a punk,
let him cry, like you gotta put him down, you know,
he gotta learn how to be a man. Like that
person who's forty years old who's on the street and
sees that trans and queer person and has that emotional reaction.
Is it's often the same person who received the message
as a toddler to man up and suffocate your feelings.
(15:13):
And so now you've done that for decades, and so
you don't have the emotional self reflection because you've been
taught to press it down. Whereas a lot of like
I say, a lot of women in film and queer people,
we often develop emotional self flexivity out of shame um,
out of being held responsible for other people's feelings, particularly women,
like you're responsible for everybody's feelings about you, or out
(15:34):
of like safety hyper vigilance. We've got to know what
people are feeling because he might be transphobic, he might
be queer. So we're very cognizant of those things. Whereas
when you're when you're you know, traditionally masculine and many men,
you may not develop the same faculties. Just like with
his godson, Yola's work has helped so many people, strangers
and family alike, look within and be empathetic, but just
(15:57):
like he can connect with people through his art and
his work, I was curious to hear about his own
story of domestic violence because Yolo is an artist, he's
educated and introspective, and sometimes it's easy to forget that
this can happen to anyone, and that is why it's
so helpful to hear the stories of others. You Know.
(16:19):
One thing I say is that for black queer men,
our threshold for what we understand violence to be can
be very high. We're used to being in such vaulatile environments,
whether it's with each other or just the way the
world relates to us, that we don't always recognize certain
dimensions of violence as violence because it's like it's, oh,
we didn't hit you in the head, so it's not
that bad, and it's like, well, actually, there were a
(16:39):
lot of things happening here right. I met a person
at a point in my life where I was post um,
suicidal attempt, low self esteem. I had um left USC
where I started my social work degree and felt like
I failed, and I was feeling that who I was
(16:59):
was not viable and that I need to be something else.
And I met this person who was in a different
part of their journey. We connected in a relationship, and
in that relationship they showed up in ways that they
were working through their things, and I showed up in
ways in which I was working through my things, you know.
And I think it's so important. I try to say
(17:21):
this consistently because I think it's so important to talk
about domestic violence. He is not a boogeyman. That's like
what I said when I when I worked in men
Stopping violence, the men that I helped um learn new
behaviors were like our brothers, our uncles, are cousins. These
were men who are learned terrible things and had sometimes
done terrible things. But they were not boogeymen. They were
human beings who often were survivors themselves. And so the
(17:42):
man that I met, you know, was the survivor of
a lot of violence and harm. But I developed coping
strategies that replicated that harm in many really destructive and
harmful ways to me. And I learned I had learned
in my life, and I showed up in that relationship.
The ways in which I seen modeled by caregivers in
my life was to be, you know, the people pleaser,
(18:02):
which was to like try to please you as much.
Was just trying to placate you, to make you, you know,
as happy as much as I could, Like, you know,
my father is a different man now, but my father
was explosive. He had a temper when he was younger,
and that's something we all talked about. And I fell
into a role that I had seen modeled where I
would assume that his anger was about me, as opposed
(18:23):
to he needs to learn how to manage his anger.
He had suffered so much harm and so much pain,
and thought that if I make myself bigger, then I
will not be hurt, which is what the yelling and
screaming and in the in the the attacking is about.
Like I feel small, so I need to make myself
as big as possible and threaten you to to feel safe.
And so we were in a dynamic that was really um,
(18:45):
you know, toxic and really volatile, and a lot of
terrible things happened, and you know, um, it's not one
of my product moments in my life. I recognized the
ways in which I played into that dynamic, the ways
in which I could have left. But I also see
how my trauma kept me engaged it was a really
difficult time for me. I realized how much me and
(19:06):
him were living in shame and how that shame was
propelling that entire dynamic. And I often tell the story
too that, like, I started going to therapy, and I
never forget the biggest shift that changed that relationship was
when I was in therapy and she sat down and
she asked me to close my eyes and go through
this practice where she was like, I want you to
imagine yourself as a little child and what you're feeling
(19:28):
right now as a little child in yourself. And I
saw myself as this little child who was this kind
of crying in the corner, who was just really hurt
and scared and afraid. She instructed me to imagine myself
as an adult going to pick up that child and
protect that child, and protecting that child from the experience
that we're having, which in my vision was that person's temper,
(19:50):
that person's volatility, that person's rage. And I imagine myself
standing up to that person, and as I did that,
that person's face faded into my father's face, which was
such a deep psychological thing for me, like because it
was really showing the ways in which I was reliving
the pattern that has seen imprinted, where I was trying
to please a man the way I try to please
(20:11):
my father, as opposed to knowing this man needs to
get help, that it's not about me. What are some
reasons you see people make, rationality make to stay in
these cycles. There are so many reasons that people stay
in abusive relationships, and they're all connected to so many
different things, from capitalism to economics, to fear, to real desirability,
(20:32):
to to their own kind of psyche and the things
they're navigating. And I think that um for folks who
you know, if you're listening and you find yourself in
that space, because I've been there, you know, and I've
been in that space when I ask myself why am
I still here? And and having an intellectual understanding of
why I'm still here but still but like you should leave,
but still there because my body is in it and
I don't have community support to help move me beyond it.
(20:55):
You know. I think that like one thing that happens
for a lot of folks who are going through that
and trying to figure their way through it and trying
to find out how love feels for them. And then
they get abandoned by their friends and their loved ones,
and they get isolated further by that person in that relationship,
which is not helpful. What a lot of us who
are in those dynamics needs sometimes someone to be present
with us, not from a place of shaming, but from
(21:18):
a place of this is happening, and I love you
and I care for you. I'm going to be here
for you. I want different for you, and I'm here
to support you and how that could happen when you're
ready or however we can support you in that piece.
I got that at some point, but I didn't have
that for a lot part of that journey, you know.
And I think that a lot of our folks who
are struggling don't have that for a lot of reasons.
And the risk of being killed, particularly for women. I
(21:40):
don't have a lot of data for that for queer
men and trans women, but like for since women, we
know that, like the likelihood of getting killed after you
leave goes up, the threat of violence goes up, right,
So there's like this real deep seated fear. And I
think that like when we shift the focus onto why
does he do that? And why do his community allow
him to do that, because we all know folks and
we have known elks who are like he is abusive
(22:01):
emotionally physically, and we don't. We're still learning how to intervene,
how to support, like a lot of times, and you know,
I've done a lot of these kind of like transform
of justice spaces, and people think that, like, I want
to be loyal to my friends, so I want to
deny that he's really capable of doing that. And I
have to tell people that, like, being loyal to your
friend is saying I love you, I'm here for you,
and I'm here to help you reveal your behaviors and
(22:23):
your choices and help you stop any patterns that are
creating harm for you, are for anyone else. And that
is loyalty and that is love. It's not denying that
you're that, oh he's a good person. It's not about
good and bad people. It's about people who have coping
strategies and and tactics they have developed to survive our
cope with a variety of different things. And I think
we need to we need to help people understand that
(22:44):
loyalty is intervention is saying I see this and I
want you to stop this behavior as opposed to like
you're too good and you can never do that, which
is not helpful. I love this idea of accountability as
loyalty because Yolo is beyond loyal to community, to his family,
to himself. I wanted to know more about Being and
(23:04):
why he decided to create the space and show up
with love and support in this way. So, you know,
as the executive director of Being, which is the Black
Emotional Mental Health Collective, you know, our organization is really
focused on mental health broadly, but we definitely address, of
course the intersections of HIV or substanties of transphobia and
all these different dimensions you know UM. My first work
(23:27):
was in queer communities doing any kind of pure counseling
or counseling work, and so of course HIV, you know,
UM was always a present topic. And one of the
things that was always a constant theme was the ways
in which people who were UM, either newly diagnosed or
navigating UM living with HIV felt that living with HIV
diminished their worth, of their value as human beings, made
(23:50):
them less than and that was that was hard for
me because one of my core wounds is around worthiness,
around being good enough and less than and and um
seeing how that belief and the HIV stigma continue to
perpetuate that belief, it really became like activating peace for
(24:11):
me to be, for my friends and myself, for my community,
to really change the narrative that like, you know, living
with HIV and worthy, right, Like you know what I
mean that like that this this is not a reflection
of our worth or our value. This is a reflection
of the ignorance of the world that we live in, right,
And I think that would like seeing so many young
queer people that I've lost because otherwise the stigma talked
(24:32):
into their lives, weren't valuable, and they stopped taking medication,
and they stopped caring for themselves. Seeing the ways in
which it had just um disrupted so much opportunities for
love and intimacy and other queer folks life in my
own life, you know, it was always pivotal for me,
for me to make sure that we are always explicit
about educating around HIV and AIDS and supportive people living
with HIV around the real mental health challenges that the
(24:53):
stigma brings in this country. You know, you you as
I'm thinking about what I'm taking away from our our
conversation today, it just brings you to this idea that
you know, young Zach, little Zach who was so afraid
of people seeing me, seeing me Swiss, or seeing me
like beat you, black and white space, all these things
that like I wish I could go back and say no, no,
(25:15):
be seen, be your full self, show up, and that's
where you will find happiness. And it feels like your
work is so much about telling people that, sure, you
may have been through domestic found situation, but like, show
up and be seen in that. Sure you may have
an HP, positive starters, show up, it's okay, it's okay,
it's okay, Okay, you are okay. And I just want
to thank you for that. Talking with Yolo such a
(25:39):
breath of fresh air, because despite everything he's been through,
all his work, all the support he brings to others
that are in dark and desolate places, he is still
so hopeful. I'm hopeful because I know that a lot
of us the world that we want is here in
small pockets. I'm hoping that we can make it bigger
and larger. And I and I know I've seen I've
(26:00):
had the opportunity to be a community across the country
with so many black and brown healers doing dope work,
I know, I know the other world as possible. I
feel it. It's here, and so I know that for
black queer men, for black non binary folks, with black
trans women, we can feel differently in our bodies so
we can be loved and supported. It takes practice, and
it takes failure, and it takes effort, But I know
(26:22):
it because I've seen it and I've lived it, and
I'm a product of it, you know. And would it
be the purple galaxy that you got right and think about?
We'll see if it's maybe maybe it's purple galaxy. I
don't know what it is, but I imagine it's a
lot of different visions from a lot of different folks
that we just kind of share, co craft and co create.
For me as a visual person that I did that
(26:42):
queer black freedom equity, you know, just peace is a
purple galaxy. I think it's a beautiful idea. As a writer, philosopher,
and community leader, you'll creates space with so much love
and care. But it's his story that stands out the
most because he was raised with these values that I
(27:03):
think a lot of us were raised in with people
and in homes that try their best to protect us,
and it's interesting to see that despite those efforts, for
better or worse, he was still hurt in ways that
are terrible, in ways that no person should be hurt.
But although this pain marked him deeply, I love the
idea that we can touch others through our own stories,
(27:23):
even if they're not pretty. Gull's work has reached and
connected with people far outside the l g B t
Q plus community, and it shows that the issues of violence, pain,
mental and physical health are not unique to a specific group,
and it offers a new idea or way of thinking
that if pain can be this universal, this familiar, then maybe,
(27:44):
just maybe the healing journey can be similar to We
are so excited for you to be here for season
two of In the Deep Stories That Shape Us. Keep
coming back every other week and taking these power full
stories of Black and Latins people as they take us
on their own healing journeys. In the Deep Stories That
(28:06):
Shape Us is executive produced by myself, Zach Stafford, and
Ivan Chian and mastered by James Foster and our writer
is Yvette Lopez. A shout out to our guest Yolo
Achille Robinson,
Host
Zach Stafford
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