ANDREA PINO-SILVA: Okay. I wanna go ahead and get started on some questions. I wanna start with your childhood and how you got here. My specific question, tell me a little bit about what your world looked like as a child, and what your family looked like. Can you take me back to those days?

BEVERLY GREENE: Sure. I grew up in East Orange, which is a small 00:00:30suburb of Newark, New Jersey. At that time in my neighborhood, it was a fairly diverse neighborhood economically. There were people who were well ensconced in the middle class as school teachers, people who worked in offices. Two doors down from us, one of our neighbors was a dentist. Across the street 00:01:00was an optician. There were also people, there were women, elder women who did day work. There were a couple of families that were on welfare. There were many people who had trades back then. I'm sure my mother had at least five or six friends who were hairdressers who owned their own businesses. It never occurred to me that growing up, watching these black women run businesses and 00:01:30employ people that this was not the norm, but that these were the examples that were role models in my life. My father was a carpenter by trade. Apprenticed with my grandfather, but he worked as a carpenter for the veteran's hospital system. There's a large veteran's hospital in East Orange, which is 00:02:00also where I did my internship. At the time hospitals didn't contract out a lot of their maintenance work. They had their own complete department of all kinds of trades, people who did all of the work in the hospitals. He had friends on the block who were painters. I guess I wanna try to paint a picture of a fairly eclectic kind of neighborhood, that there was a great deal of 00:02:30diversity within that, that there were no restrictions on what you could be or what you might choose to do. The education was highly valued. East Orange, I think at the time, had probably the best or one of the best public school systems in the state. They weren't called this at the time, but now, 00:03:00they would be seen as gifted and talented classes, probably. I had the same set of peers almost from first grade through my senior year in high school. Many of us are still in touch with each other. You get a sense of a cohesive community. I think that's important because when you see the dissolution of 00:03:30black communities and you see the decimation of economic diversity within those communities then you see an emergence of greater hardship and pathology. In my household, my family has their roots in the deep south, on both sides, going back to, probably, my second and third great grandparents. They were born, it seems, in North Carolina, somewhere around Cumberland county and 00:04:00Swift Creek, North Carolina. My father's people moved to Mississippi, God only knows why. My mother's to Southern Georgia. We were a family of people from the deep south and despite my siblings and I being born in the north, we were greatly informed about who and what we were and what the world was 00:04:30like based on those narratives of people who grew up in the heart of American apartheid for all practical purposes. During the first 10 years of my life, sometime every summer was spent making trips, going south to where my mother's family lived to see my grandmother, cousins, and a lot of people that 00:05:00they grew up with. They had very strong ties to that community. My father felt less well-disposed about Mississippi and declared when he left the service that he would never go back there. To my knowledge, in his 95 years, with the exception of maybe once or twice when someone was sick and he had to go down and take care of them, he didn't go back. We didn't go there either, so I 00:05:30have no idea what the Greene family ancestral home looks like there. Except to know that my grandfather was a sharecropper, at least the census reports keep referring to him as a farmer sharecropper, but in reality, he was a very skilled carpenter. In fact, through blueprints, but that couldn't be known 00:06:00because black men weren't supposed to be able to do that. It would further label him as a "smart nigger", and in the south, to be known as a smart nigger was to be seen as a threat. One comes to be acquainted with the ways in which black people had all kinds of knowledge, but it was dangerous to display your knowledge. He also was vehement about education and learning. I would 00:06:30say on both sides of my family, people valued learning. My mother had 11 sibs, and of probably those who lived long enough to do so, they all graduated from high school, and it was a segregated high school, but it was high school. In the 1930s and 40s, for black folks in segregated towns to get high school 00:07:00diplomas was kind of unusual. On my father's side, my grandfather's sister had went to kind of a teacher's college. During her life as a teacher, went to Tuskegee Institute during the summers and got her master's degree, which was also very unusual. There's this stream theme of the importance of 00:07:30education that ran through my family and also ran through our community. I'm the eldest of four. I have a younger sister and two younger brothers, and we grew up in a multi-generational household where my paternal grandmother, paternal aunt and uncle, at one point the, a cousin who was the son of that aunt, and another uncle who was killed when I was very young, all lived in the same 00:08:00house. I think I had a lot of advantages in that respect. If my mother worked outside the household until I was maybe eight or so, and then she was a stay at home mother, but she was also a working stay at home mother because she was doing childcare as my grandmother had been for women in the community 00:08:30who had to work, but who needed care for their children and who needed a kind of care where if they had to work late, that wasn't gonna be a problem. My mother did that for some time until she just, on a fluke, went to an interview for a paraprofessional in the public schools in East Orange and was hired. She spent the rest of her work life as a para in schools, working primarily 00:09:00with kids with neurological disorders and learning problems. It's, I think, appropriate to say I was raised by a village and that the notion of it taking a village is cliche now, but very much so we were ensconced in this 00:09:30village of people who, even within our families, just loved us very deeply and made it clear that we were loved deeply and that if they could do anything to help us to move forward -- was my aunt's favorite term -- they would do it. And they had very little, but they did an incredible amount, with more adversity than I can imagine and fewer resources than I can imagine.

ANDREA PINO-SILVA: You've answered several of my questions, but one of the questions that I had specifically was about community and a family and care. What you're saying about the village perhaps is a cliche, I don't think it's a cliche, and it really wasn't something that I really had a language for until being in predominantly white spaces. But these networks of kinship that are so

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

instrumental to the diaspora whatever the diaspora might be, the black diaspora particularly is something that is just not legible to whites supremacy, to whiteness. But it's so instrumental to raising the black child to making sure that the black child can succeed. It's something that, again, it's not even just tied to education. It's something so much more. One of the specific questions that I had asked specifically is what did your

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

relationship look like in your family and in your community? If there were people specifically that had a strong impact on your journey to psychology, your journey to education, which you could talk a little bit more about that, but you haven't talked specifically about maybe your love of study, which I think you've kind of hinted to, but it's something that I think you've weaved it really well when you talk about the impact of education. But like

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

one of the questions I specifically wanted to talk to you about was how your community and your family prepared you for the journey that you went down in ways that institutions don't really understand. There's the hidden curriculum of the academy, but I think there's also the curriculum that our communities teach us that prepare you to be able to be a different kind of student. That was one of the questions that I had is if there were people in your family and your community that kind of

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

taught you these lessons that had a profound impact on you.

BEVERLY GREENE:

Well, in terms of study, certainly I think, something in my narrative that I hope comes across is that the value of learning goes back relatively far in my family, that there was a very clear and unambiguous value of learning. My father used to

BEVERLY GREENE:

tell stories about how when my grandfather got home from work very, very late at night he'd go over their homework. If it seemed amiss he would get them up and review it and they would have to do it. He had a chalkboard that he kept over the fireplace and he would drill them in arithmetic and spelling and all of these kinds of things that

BEVERLY GREENE:

no one is very clear about how he learned them, because in his time he wouldn't have gone to school, at least not formally. If he did, he probably couldn't openly acknowledge that, and so my father was a person who loved learning. There were always books in our house. One of my treasured childhood memories is one day a woman who was a

BEVERLY GREENE:

member of our family's church, but who also sold encyclopedias, the world book encyclopedias I think, had this mission to get encyclopedias into black homes and get black kids exposed to them. She came and she was meeting with my parents and there was a sort of children's encyclopedia called Childcraft that the World Book Company made that was kind of

BEVERLY GREENE:

the children's version of the World Book Encyclopedia, and one volume had like stories, projects, music, history all kinds of things. I just remember now appreciating how my parents were agonizing about buying this because those books were hellishly expensive. Encyclopedias, people forget, were horribly expensive,

BEVERLY GREENE:

and they got them for us. When we sold a house about six years ago, after two years, when each of my parents passed away, there were still several volumes of that set in the household. And we're talking since maybe 1956 or something, they bought that set of books. They were

BEVERLY GREENE:

not only used by us. They were used by the next generation as well. One of my aunts was telling me, this is on my mother's side, that my grandfather read the paper every day, that he was very interested in current events and politics and had this example of you need to know what's going on in the world.

BEVERLY GREENE:

He used to take she and my mother when they were children down to the depot when Franklin Roosevelt was running for President and was giving these stump speeches on the backs of trains. There is just this tradition of learning in the family that was reinforced by going to an exceedingly good school where we had excellent teachers. There were black

BEVERLY GREENE:

teachers represented in our public schools, which was not necessarily the norm at that time. I think partly in deference to the fact that the classes I was assigned to, the message was, these are the smart kids. We were always encouraged. Academic achievement was always valued.

BEVERLY GREENE:

Learning was always valued. I was chatting with one of my siblings a few days ago about how we used to get a volume of the encyclopedia and read, for recreation. I kind of grew up steeped in what I think was an intellectual tradition, even though it wasn't described that way at the time.

BEVERLY GREENE:

One of my aunts who lived with us was a domestic worker, but she read James Baldwin and Henry Miller and all kinds of authors that she introduced me to. She introduced me to the New York Times. There were all of these influences that valued intellectual work and certainly made it easy if you had any inclination

BEVERLY GREENE:

to see yourself going toward higher education, up until college. However, my ambition was not to be a psychologist. It was to be a physician. In college, I just didn't like the kinds -- I can't say I didn't like them, they were interesting, but they weren't powerfully interesting in the way that they would've had to be for me to spend four years in medical school studying at that level.

BEVERLY GREENE:

I also had a chance to examine my gifts and think about the kind of lifestyle I wanted to have by the time I was in college. I thought that medicine wasn't necessarily in my wheelhouse, that I didn't think I could compartmentalize to the degree that I think physicians have to be able to do that and

BEVERLY GREENE:

to move in and out of it quickly. Psychologists have to do it as well, but it's different. I also wanted to have a more predictable lifestyle in terms of regular hours and not that I could be called any time in emergencies and such. That can sound trivial, but I think the reality is you can want to do a certain kind of work, but

BEVERLY GREENE:

you have to think about what does that mean in terms of the kind of lifestyle you're gonna have. Do you wanna do that? At that stage, I knew that wasn't peeling, and initially psychology wasn't all that appealing until I took abnormal psychology. That was very interesting. Comparative psychology was interesting. I was also taking some sociology courses. In terms of analyzing my gifts, I came to

BEVERLY GREENE:

understand that I was somebody that a lot of my friends and people came to talk to about things they didn't talk to other people about. I sort of had this capacity to provide some sense of safety to people who were doing that, and that I could be compassionate, interested, but not overwhelmed by it. Those were important aspects of being a psychologist. If you were gonna be a therapist,

BEVERLY GREENE:

it never occurred to me to be an academic, even after graduate school. That was the anti-plan, if anything. I didn't see academia as a place that was gonna be welcoming to my blackness, my femaleness, my queerness. It was just kind of like, they're not gonna wanna hear what you have to say. As much as I thought clinical training needed to be changed

BEVERLY GREENE:

and that more than one narrative needed to be permitted, and that the field needed to acknowledge the ways in which it was really just reiterating a dominant cultural narrative and not representing people in the way it was making generalizations as if it did represent in that way. I didn't see a place for myself in academia. I was enjoying

BEVERLY GREENE:

working in public mental health in community mental health centers at Kings County Hospital, which is probably where I did the longest stretch of my career outside of academia, the New York City public school system which I did not enjoy. But I was enjoying doing the work of being a psychologist before the idea of

BEVERLY GREENE:

academia ever came up, but that was never part of the plan.

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

Actually one of the questions I had specifically, this will lead down the academy questions I have as well too, but so much of your work has been about societal and equality or really how the individual was impacted by these larger structural problems. Were there moments in your childhood or your dialysis that clued you onto these bigger societal issues

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

and how they impact an individual person's journey and their mental health?

BEVERLY GREENE:

Well, I was socialized by intentional black parents and a family that was intentional in the way that it socialized its children to understand that we were going out into the world as black kids, and that the world has limited views about who we are and what we can be, and

BEVERLY GREENE:

distorted views about who we are and what we can be, and ways of maintaining a certain kind of dominance and subordination that's part of white supremacy. I can think of experiences and encounters that, in retrospect, were certainly racist when I was fairly young, but our parents were very intentional in translating what that meant

BEVERLY GREENE:

and what that says about you, but also what it doesn't say about you. I guess their most powerful message was that there are people who have dumb stuff in their heads about what black people are and that that's some stuff they have in their heads that has nothing to do with the reality of who we are. But often, those people have power and that sometimes you won't be treated fairly

BEVERLY GREENE:

because of what they have in their heads, and because they have the power to act on it, and you may not be able to challenge it, but it's important to understand that people who think that way can make problems for us, but we are not the problem managing the problems they create for us are the problem. It's certainly armed us, I think, to understand how not to succumb to internalizing all the negative messages that get thrown at black kids

BEVERLY GREENE:

and black people about who we are and who we can be and who we can't be. We were certainly taught you have the right to try to do anything you wanna do. Just understand that there are these forces and these people who are gonna resist and are gonna give you the message that you are not supposed to do that, and that sometimes even some black people would buy into that. But that, again, the issue was

BEVERLY GREENE:

you are not defined by what somebody else has in their head about who you are. That was, I think, a beginning. I also spent time, as I said, growing up visiting family in the south. In the south, it's very clear, probably one of my more -- I'm not sure, do you want me to speak more about this?

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

You can keep going.

BEVERLY GREENE:

Okay. Probably one of my more transformative experiences was when I was between 10 and 12 and we made one of those trips south, and sometimes my maternal aunt and her husband drove and would take my cousin and I. I don't think I realized until I was much older that we never stopped anywhere during those trips that they'd drove straight through to Georgia

BEVERLY GREENE:

from Jersey, which is a long drive. But it was because of Jim Crow that none of the places that were offering food or drink or bathrooms or anything, black people couldn't stop there. During this particular trip, we took the train down as we sometimes did out of Newark and

BEVERLY GREENE:

the train developed some mechanical problems. It had to detour through the Jacksonville Florida train station, which is like the equivalent of union station in DC or Chicago, or Penn station in New York. It was completely and rigidly segregated. There were, by signage, white and colored waiting rooms, drinking fountains, restrooms,

BEVERLY GREENE:

none of the shops would sell anything to black folks. They had signs up basically saying "White trade," "Whites only." I think in most of them, it wasn't even like there was a backdoor that we could go to and I just remember getting absolutely furious. I think it was probably the first time I was in a space where I had to be in a place all day, where that

BEVERLY GREENE:

was the case, and it was very much separate and unequal in terms of facilities. I just sort of ranted and raved about it. I think I wanted my mother to do something. I said to her at some point I think in order to provoke her to do something that store has a sign that says Coke is a dime and I have a dime and I'm gonna go buy a Coke.

BEVERLY GREENE:

It also said, "Niggers will not be served," and I could certainly read that, but I was damned if I was going to respect it. She said, "Well, we can't do that." I said, "Yes, we can, because if Coke is a dime and I have a dime, I can go in there and buy a Coke, just like anybody else." She said, "Well, they're not gonna serve us. And if we try to insist on being served, those people will hurt us if we

BEVERLY GREENE:

go in there." I just erupted with every response of hers, "How can they do that? That's not right." I think I asked her, "Are we still in America?" Like, what the hell is this? She said, "Yeah, but this is how people do things down here and we're not gonna go get hurt just to buy a Coke." I thought, of course, in my naivete, well,

BEVERLY GREENE:

if they try to hurt us, we'll call the police. Before I could completely get that statement out, she said, "We can't call the police because the police will not be on our side. The police will hurt us too." I just kept going on and on and on. I think I vowed at that moment. I'd never set foot in the south again. I didn't for the next 28 years. In fact, it was not until APA had its first convention

BEVERLY GREENE:

in Atlanta in 1988 that I thought, okay, what are you gonna do? How are you going to carry this on? I thought, I don't want any state down there to get my money, and Atlanta may be more progressive and all that, but Atlanta's still in Georgia and to hell with the south, adopting my father's stance, not necessarily appreciating that, that's what I had done.

BEVERLY GREENE:

But I thought, I'll be damned if I'm gonna let this stop me from going to a convention of an organization that's my professional home. But I also started thinking about that earlier incident. I asked, I had a conversation with my mother and I said, "Do you remember that trip where we were stuck in Jacksonville all day and

BEVERLY GREENE:

I was making quite a fuss?" She sort of gave me that look that mothers give you, that knowing look of, "Do I remember? Well, of course, I remember."

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

Well, great. The reason I had asked you specifically about these foundational moments in your childhood is I gathered from your pre-interview and from how you had spoken that you had a very strong sense of self,

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

and maybe this is something that maybe was told with you as a child, a self-possessed child, precocious, a lot of these words that they like to throw, particularly at women of color who are successful. But I feel very similarly, where my family raised me to have a strong sense of self so that when I saw injustice I didn't blame myself for it or when there was struggle, I didn't think that it was a problem with me.

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

And that's approval to have a family in a community that raises you that way. I recognize that when I met other people in college and in life that didn't have that strong sense of self that was really impressed upon them by their family and their community. Knowing that you had that strong sense of self at what point in your life did you recognize

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

that you loved women and was that something that in any way made you question who you were or who you thought you were?

BEVERLY GREENE:

Well, just to sort of finish the thought about my family in a sense of self there, they were people of faith, but not of doctrine but of compassion

BEVERLY GREENE:

and theirs was a message that you know, there are these challenges that we face as black people, but other people have challenges too. That it's important, even when you struggle to recognize that there are others who struggle and others who may struggle more and to help people when you can, that you should be this notion of being a part of helpful movements of progressive movements.

BEVERLY GREENE:

I certainly, probably, by the time I was five or six, recognized that there was something different. I had a sense that you probably shouldn't tell anybody this just yet. Because they're not likely to wanna go out and throw a party. I'm not sure why or how I knew that, but a sense of

BEVERLY GREENE:

giving myself time to figure out what that meant to me before I was gonna hand it over to somebody else who might wanna mess with it. Maybe it was something that I was gonna be okay with about myself. I didn't have a name for it. Even by the time I did, of course, as a child in latency, I read a lot. At some point,

BEVERLY GREENE:

I read much of the stuff that does not paint a very positive picture of what life would be like, but I wasn't into trusting of that. I think what the early grounding in my family gave me was this sense of what I now understand as the dominant culture tells a lot of lies about people. I was very familiar with the lies they told about black people and a sense that if they're lying

BEVERLY GREENE:

about black folks, they could be lying about other folks too, and maybe all this stuff that said about gay people is a lie. Just because some black people believe that too well, some black people believe lies that are told about black people. I think what was perhaps one of the blessings of my family was an early sense of

BEVERLY GREENE:

having a critical intelligence that you don't just believe stuff just because somebody who claims or is an authority figure said so, that there's a sense of, well, why, and who said, and kind of who died and made you king? That the way that people go about becoming authorities, especially authorities on other people who are not like them, is questionable and has more to do

BEVERLY GREENE:

with they're having power than knowing anything about what they're talking about or anything about those people and just wanting to be in power. That was somehow, that was a fairly early lesson that you have to protect yourself from people who are in power and who have a need to control anything that's not like them. Sometimes that means

BEVERLY GREENE:

by just not giving people certain kinds of information. I just decided that wasn't information that I was gonna share until I sort of had decided, again, what it meant to me and where I wanted to go with it. And probably by the time I was in high school,

BEVERLY GREENE:

it was clear to me that this is a part of you. This is not something that's gonna change. It's probably still not safe to tell people about it, but you don't have to relinquish it. In terms of sharing that information, I think I decided to wait until I was financially independent to share it with my family.

BEVERLY GREENE:

I mean, I didn't think they'd behave like fools. I certainly didn't think I'd get thrown out of the family, in part because I was a parental child and nobody throws parental children out of the family because there are ways that they need you too much, but I don't know if they're gonna just go nuts with me about this and if they do, which I feel like

BEVERLY GREENE:

you're considering coming out to your family, you never necessarily know exactly what people are gonna do. That if I were financially independent, it would just be easier to say, "I'm not doing some crazy shtick with you, kind of get with the program or don't, but it's not gonna change what I do, and I'm not gonna tolerate any abuse from anybody about it either."

BEVERLY GREENE:

That was kind of what led up to that. I'm not sure if I'm answering your question.

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

Yeah, you are. It was really interesting when you talked about specifically your kind of intellectual journey of understanding that people said things about black people, therefore, they probably said things about other people too. Pauli Murray writes about this a lot. She specifically talks about how

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

the reason she was able to understand sexism, homophobia was because she had navigated it through the lens of being a black person. As in she quite literally wouldn't understand homophobia were it not for her blackness. I think I was curious if your journey was that way as well too. I also wanted to ask you specifically what it was like to come to terms with being

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

a black queer person, and if it felt different than what you had read about queerness about lesbian identity. When you finally were trying to name it, did you feel connection to the word lesbian? Did you feel that you were a bit different and maybe you didn't find an identity that fit or did you kind of quickly come to terms with the identity and who you were?

BEVERLY GREENE:

Well, it depends on the age.

BEVERLY GREENE:

I don't think I thought about identity. I just had my experience of the world and that was the name the world used for it. I think it's fair to say a being black prepared me for being a queer person, and James Baldwin talks about this when he says if you're black, by the time you realize that you're gay

BEVERLY GREENE:

you are so used to being menaced about being black that it's kind of like your relationship to society isn't one in which you ever thought you were, these are not his words, but yet seen as acceptable, accepted or part of the dominant group. It's not a fall from dominance, as he says, it is

BEVERLY GREENE:

for white gay folks for whom they grow up with a sense of being protected by something, their whiteness. And then all of a sudden they become this thing in which there's a falling out of grace. It's kind of like, oh, all that stuff you took for granted about the world and the systems we live in, isn't true for you. You have to rework your sense of what the world is. I didn't

BEVERLY GREENE:

have to rework my sense of what the world was. This was just as Baldwin says, oh, another thing, but I felt like as a black person, you're already in a disadvantaged physician and it wasn't like, well, somehow that means I have a different identity. It means my challenges are different. I don't know that

BEVERLY GREENE:

I saw that as a different identity per se, but that I had different challenges.

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

A lot of scholars recently have been talking about black queerness, specifically, like one word black queerness and talking about navigating the world as a black queer person and not as being black and queer, but that connection of being a black queer person, which I think is in many ways what Pauli Murray

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

and Baldwin were talking about, quite literally, that it's not one or the other, but rather what it means to navigate the world as a black queer person and that unique way of living in the world.

BEVERLY GREENE:

That's the essence of intersectional paradigms, that parts of our being are not in silos that they develop in dynamic interaction with one another all the time that they're

BEVERLY GREENE:

part of you all the time. While some are more or less visible, they're all there at once. It's not like you leave one some place and assume the other.

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

Absolutely. What you were saying specifically about losing power and losing protection from white supremacy, I have questions a little further down the line about that specifically, about what it means to kind of be faced

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

with the fear of not being protected by society, because you've been afforded that.

BEVERLY GREENE:

I'm saying you never have that if you're black. It's not an issue. It's oh, now what do I do with something else? But a lot of the skills that you learn about navigating life as a black person

BEVERLY GREENE:

are applicable skills for navigating homophobia and heterosexism.

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

Would you say that because of that, the coming out journey is different?

BEVERLY GREENE:

I think it depends on how aware you are of having those skills. It depends on what your racial socialization have been like. I think for me, that helped.

BEVERLY GREENE:

I had intentional parents. I can't think of a better way to describe them. A loving and supportive milieu that I grew up in. Now, if one doesn't have that, then I think you can't draw an equivalence necessarily. I was aware of negotiating race,

BEVERLY GREENE:

that that was just part of what life was gonna be like. I'm sure there are certainly black folks who are not aware, negotiating it all the time, but are not aware of it. I've seen patients for whom they wonder why they're tired and when they start becoming more aware of all of the negotiations that they have to make on a daily basis, it's like do you understand

BEVERLY GREENE:

all of what you're having to do just to get through the day? Not everybody is consciously aware of that. I think that that makes a difference. It's not just being black alone doesn't necessarily tell you that someone's going to know how to transfer those tools or even know that they have them and that they're using them.

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

At what point did you decide that you wanted to navigate the world this way, that you wanted to live your life openly as a queer person. Was there a moment when you told your family and your community? Were you met with support?

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

Was there hostility? Did some part of your life change drastically because of it?

BEVERLY GREENE:

Well, some part of my life had changed drastically that prompted me to be out to my parents. I knew that that was what I wanted by the time I was in high school, but it didn't seem safe to do that at the time. When I had more autonomy, there was

BEVERLY GREENE:

a greater sense of opportunity to do that. My parents were always very hospitable and welcoming to anyone that I was in a relationship with, so I never thought that they would be unkind to someone, again, that somehow they were gonna disown me. But I knew that it was something they'd have to adjust to. In my first year of graduate school,

BEVERLY GREENE:

I was diagnosed with a first of what became four brain tumors. In the course of that experience, you know, when you're 24 and you think you may not see 25, if you're paying attention, it has a way of drawing things into a kind of crystal clear reality, in terms of what you want your life to be like,

BEVERLY GREENE:

who and what you want in it, who and what you don't, what you're willing to put up with, what you're not willing to put up with. The night before that first surgery in those wee hours in the morning, when you're contemplating, like, am I gonna be around this time tomorrow? If not, what would I do over again? I resolved that one of the things I would do

BEVERLY GREENE:

would be to tell my parents, and I always felt like they knew, but I had never actually said the words to them. I thought it was important to say the words to them and sort of negotiate that bridge. I didn't expect they'd be about it even though I felt like they already knew. But I didn't think it would be catastrophic in any way, and it wasn't. That following year,

BEVERLY GREENE:

I told them I wanted to talk to them about something and I gave my father, because my father raised a family of readers and he reads, I think George Weinberg's book Society and the Healthy Homosexual. I said, "I'd like you to read this before we all have this conversation."

BEVERLY GREENE:

When I told them my mother looked shocked and befuddled in a way that surprised me because I assumed that she knew and I said to her, well, "I'm surprised you look surprised because I just assumed you knew." My mother was a good little hysteric, she said, "Well, I knew, but I didn't have to

BEVERLY GREENE:

think about it. And now you're telling me, so I'm gonna have to think about it." I looked at my father who hadn't said anything throughout this. But was a very stoic, but also sensitive man. I said, "Well, dad, you haven't said anything. Did you know?" He said, "Yeah, I knew." I said, "Were you ever gonna ask me about it or maybe try to talk about it?"

BEVERLY GREENE:

He said, "No, I decided if this was something you wanted me to know that you'd tell me, so I just left it at that." I said, "Well, what are you thinking?" He said, "I'm thinking you don't have any idea what you're doing." I said, "Well, dad, I think I probably have more of an idea than you do." He said, "No, first of all, you're black,"

BEVERLY GREENE:

and I didn't readily see what that had to do with anything, and when I was about to say so, he said, "And you're a woman." I thought I'd lighten up the heaviness in the room, and I said, "Well, yeah, dad, that's the point." It didn't work. I was not prepared for what he said next, which was, "And you're really, really smart.

BEVERLY GREENE:

Those three things in this world, people hate, people really hate what he was saying as smart black women. And now you're gonna add this on top. You can't possibly know what you're doing, because people are gonna try to hurt you in ways that you can't even imagine." I said, "Well, as long as my parents aren't trying to hurt me in ways that I can't even imagine other people are gonna have to do

BEVERLY GREENE:

what other people have to do, but I'm gonna do what I have to do." He asked me if I'd ever thought about treatment. I said, "You mean to get rid of this?" He said, "Yeah, treatment." I said, "First of all, the things that they do that they call treatment don't really get rid of this in people, and I don't wanna get rid of it. There's nothing broken here that needs to be fixed." And

BEVERLY GREENE:

he just couldn't understand that. I said, "I've been in therapy, but I'm studying to be a therapist, that's part of something that you do, but I'm not going into therapy to get rid of this part of me that nothing's wrong with, except after other people just don't like it." He said, "But what about your profession? You're spending all of this time and this money,

BEVERLY GREENE:

what good can come of this?" I just said, "Whatever goes on in my profession, it'll have to be with who I am." "And not something wholly fictitious again, just for the benefit of other people who are not even important to me. That's just not an option." He said, "But wouldn't it be so much easier? Wouldn't your life just be easier

BEVERLY GREENE:

if you did?" I said, "Do you think that your life has been harder as a black man than if you'd been white?" He said, "Yeah, in all kinds of ways." I said, "So, if somebody was offering a pill that was free that would make you white and would make all us the same, would you take it? And would you want us to take it?" To his credit, he said, "Absolutely not. We're not the problem.

BEVERLY GREENE:

They're the problem. We didn't ask to come here, but we are here and we're not going anywhere. We have a right to all of the same opportunities as anybody else." I said, "Then, dad, you understand exactly how I feel about this?" And he just sort of looked at me and said, "Well, I don't understand what good

BEVERLY GREENE:

can come of this? I don't think you understand how much you're gonna be hurt and that people are gonna try to hurt you." I just sort of reiterated that people would have to do what people had to do, but I had just sort of been through an experience in my life that said, life is short, do you wanna spend it wasted catering to the bigotry and small mindedness of other people, or do you wanna claim your life?

BEVERLY GREENE:

I said, I chose to claim my life. I'd always made that choice, but I choose it even more affirmatively at this point. That's just that. I experienced him as being a little distant for about a year. But that result itself at some point.

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

I love that story and it also doesn't surprise me based on what you've told me that you were able to navigate and that you didn't feel that conversion therapy was actually an option.

BEVERLY GREENE:

Never.

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

I think it's really interesting because when I hear the narratives of people that did wanna go through conversion therapy, I think

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

a lot of them just didn't really have that strong sense of self. Like they were very impressed upon by other people and the opinions of other people, but it didn't surprise me to hear that you immediately rejected conversion therapy, not even just as a psychologist, but as a person.

BEVERLY GREENE:

Well, I had thought about it as a younger person, and then I thought, 'but why would you do that? This doesn't bother you, this bothers other people, and

BEVERLY GREENE:

for reason that are stupid. So why would you go and change some core part of yourself that there's nothing wrong with just because other people are being stupid?' The prospect of that made me angry, because it was very much like racism.

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

I'm trying to place you where you're in graduate school,

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

as a student and as you are surviving these surgeries and also having these really heavy conversations, did you start to see, or perhaps immediately, your interest and what was important to you influencing the type of work that you wanted to be doing, and when you saw that psychology needed to be talking about.

BEVERLY GREENE:

Well, I was aware in my training that psychology was not talking about a lot of

BEVERLY GREENE:

those things. What it was saying was a lot of crap. That psychology was basically harping the dominant cultural narrative as this were some objective fact of science, and not acknowledging the way it was subjectively embedded in the dominant culture. I was very well aware of that. I had a number of peers, black peers, in graduate school who were as well.

BEVERLY GREENE:

We could talk about those things and how the field needed to change. Ultimately, I think my work training psychologist was about saying, there have to be other narratives here, there isn't just one narrative that is the narrative or the superior narrative. If you wanna understand people and if therapy is something you wanna do, well and not be destructive, then you need to be

BEVERLY GREENE:

looking at the mainstream paradigms differently and understand what influence those paradigms and what about them may be true, and what about them is not true?

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

Did your work come across as a threat to people?

BEVERLY GREENE:

There may have been some people who, not just my work, but at that time

BEVERLY GREENE:

challenging dominant paradigms was not something you were supposed to do. People had invested their faith in them, and like religious faith, was often blind faith. Talking about the need to talk about race and therapy with a person of color was something that got push back, and still does. What is incredibly alarming

BEVERLY GREENE:

is that I still get those responses, I and my peers, when we're talking about the importance of explicitly considering the impact of race on people of color and how they live in the kinds of day to day negotiations that they have to make in terms of the ways that for some people, it erodes their spirit and not this sort of decontextualized nonsense

BEVERLY GREENE:

where everybody is the same.Everybody's not the same. If you don't understand that people live in, then you just don't understand them, and you're not really in a position to be very helpful to them. There was always a tendency to pathologize black people. When what they're really doing is responding to social pathology and some people can do that better than others.

BEVERLY GREENE:

Some people have other shaping influences in their lives that help them to deconstruct those things, some people don't. But ultimately, that's what they're responding to. When you're forcing people to respond to pathology, that's often what you see, and some people are more damaged by it than others, depending on what

BEVERLY GREENE:

other resources they have.

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

Psychology has specifically been oftentimes weaponized against black people, against queer people. What potential did you see in psychology being able to do good?

BEVERLY GREENE:

Well, my early work came out of some work I was doing in the association for Women in Psychology, which is a feminist

BEVERLY GREENE:

psychology group. Feminist psychology was the first theoretical paradigm that I came across that basically said you have to explicitly consider social marginalization in your understanding of a patient, or you're not really doing good work. It was organized around understanding how the marginalization of women, that their subordinate social status was often

BEVERLY GREENE:

a cause of mental health problems, and to try to separate those things was just not appropriate. That's where a lot of my work, my first few articles emerged and we just kind of built on that. I never thought that it could or couldn't, in terms of what psychology was going to do. I just kind of felt like once you are

BEVERLY GREENE:

writing and contributing to the psychological literature, it's part of the state of the art and it's there, and it's seen. People who are looking at mainstream paradigms and thinking, well, that doesn't look right. Am I crazy? It's like, no, you're not crazy. It was an important antidote to a lot of the gaslighting that students of color would often get

BEVERLY GREENE:

in graduate programs, particularly around their care or assessment of patients in which they understood that race is playing a role here, and when they say that they're told, well, you're just over identifying with the patient or some other nonsense that literature gave them some standing, and that was important.

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

They definitely still say that as they also

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

say that to those of us that are educators. I think what's really interesting about naming things structurally or beyond the individual is that it threatens the system. It threatens the narrative of goodness that whiteness sells.

BEVERLY GREENE:

It fundamentally challenges the sort of

BEVERLY GREENE:

whitewash of history that we've been fed. It's about maintaining power and dominance. If you can get people to believe there's something inherently defective in them, and that's why they're on the lower rungs of the social hierarchy. Well, then you don't need chains because if people really believe that, they're gonna behave in ways that prevent them from self-actualizing socially anyway,

BEVERLY GREENE:

and in some cases behave self destructively. That's what it's for, and it's not accidental. There's a saying, as long as the hunter writes history, the lion will never be the hero.

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

Was there a moment

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

in your career that made you realize that you were making a difference or that you were in the right profession?

BEVERLY GREENE:

I enjoyed my work in public mental health, and I worked in child adolescent psychiatry, and I could see that little interventions in children's lives go a long, long way, and that you may only see them briefly, but in that

BEVERLY GREENE:

period of time, you have an opportunity to communicate a great deal. Therapy can be very important in that sense. I don't know that. One thinks about one's contribution, I think I was doing work that first of all, I enjoy doing, but also that I had an opportunity to -- It's kind of, we all just kind of do what we do

BEVERLY GREENE:

and that it's made a contribution. That's very satisfying, but it wasn't like that was driving it. It was about saying there's another conversation to be had here, and this is a part of the conversation. That there is a state of the art, there is a body of knowledge and other things need to be included in that body of knowledge and that those things need to be

BEVERLY GREENE:

included in the training of psychologists so that they don't continue to do damage to patients by gaslighting them, by blaming victims for their misfortune and so forth, by continuing to make the systems that oppress people, something invisible that we don't talk about.

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

Oftentimes people think

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

of activism and protests, I think particularly around the LGBTQ movement has something to do with marches or with litigation. Have you ever seen your work as a form of protests or a form of activism?

BEVERLY GREENE:

Yeah. I mean, the short answer is, again, when people contribute to the state of the art, it changes the state of the art. It changes

BEVERLY GREENE:

the conversation. It says, no, that's not the only way to talk about this. This is another way to talk about it. That's not the only way to see that person or that group of people. This is another way that they can be seen, and so, by definition, it moves the conversation forward, and sometimes it's at a glacial pace and sometimes it's a little faster. Did I answer your question?

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

Yes. Yes, you did. Well, I think it's kind of getting at this whole, again, because I study social movements specifically, and I think a lot of people have a misunderstanding of what social movements are, one. And, two, what is protest? I think that this whole idea that a tipping point looks a certain way or that activism looks a certain way is actually just betraying the narrative of what activism looks like because it's across the streets. It's not something that's exactly linear and

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

transforming the narrative of an industry, of a school of thought, is activism. It might not be something that makes it on the front page of the New York Times, but it can transform a conversation and impact the lives of people but not be seen as "protest" because it's not something that fits within that paradigm. But that was basically the question I was asking. In that same vein of,

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

now that the LGBT movement has evolved a lot, and in many ways, we're living in a very different world. We have marriage equality, and openly queer people in public office. But things, of course, are far from great for a lot of people, particularly black queer people. Do you feel that the LGBTQ movement should be doing more or are there ways that

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

the movement maybe has kind of lost its way as it's become more mainstream?

BEVERLY GREENE:

Well, when you say more, more what?

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

More for everyone, but white gay people, frankly, but more as in like, has the movement in many ways, because it's become mainstream, has it not been advocating for everybody in our community, in other how has like maybe white feminism or like the white mainstream movement not really been advocating for

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

queer liberation?

BEVERLY GREENE:

Well, it has never been advocating for everybody in our community. One just understands this as a function of your shared identity with people of one type can be a point of connection for some things, but there is still the reality of white privilege.

BEVERLY GREENE:

There is a way that the dominant culture has of positioning marginalized people against each other. Everybody's busy fighting about who's getting more of the crumbs that are being dropped from the table rather than who's getting an equal seat at the table.

BEVERLY GREENE:

I also don't think of a movement, but movements; that there are different groups of activists who can pursue different agendas, it's not that there is just one agenda. And also to be where the reconstruction period in this country was one where there were more black people in Congress and the Senate than there have ever been since. That drove a wave of backlash that we are still combating

BEVERLY GREENE:

and the same as true of LGBTQ gains. As fast as you make gains in terms of progressive movements, in terms of marginalized groups, there are always forces that are constantly resisting them. Angela Davis once said "Freedom is a constant struggle." I am thinking of the words of a song

BEVERLY GREENE:

by Bernice Johnson Reagon, "Those who believe in freedom cannot rest." That there is always a period of progress and then resistance and backlash. Everybody thought Roe V. Wade was given, well, it's not marriage equality is not a given.

BEVERLY GREENE:

We are still arguing about bathrooms and those things are being weaponized in many ways. I'm not so sure that some of the backlash that we see on the right isn't also a function of, if you look at the last decade of television, particularly the last maybe five to eight years, there is an

BEVERLY GREENE:

unprecedented number of interracial couples, gay and lesbian couples as characters in standard mainstream sitcoms, dramas, and other things that would make you think that society is much more open and fluid than in fact it is. But I think those images for people who see that as

BEVERLY GREENE:

these people are taking over stimulate some of that backlash that we see, that sort of authoritarian -- I think of it as wearing a mask violates your personal rights, but telling people whether or not they can have an abortion or telling same sex people whether or not they can get married, or if the local baker

BEVERLY GREENE:

has to serve them just as they serve other parts of the community, that there isn't even a willingness to acknowledge the inherent contradiction in what people who are putting forth those kinds of notions are saying, it's not about what to do in the moment, but it's about preparing to always be engaged on some level

BEVERLY GREENE:

towards progressive movement, toward freedom inequality of all people that is always meeting resistance.

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

And I think a big thing too, with the movement is who's leading it. What are the goals?

BEVERLY GREENE:

And who gets to decide?

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

Yeah. Then you would think, because if we're talking about the entire LGBTQ,

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

then obviously the movement would also be a movement for racial justice, a movement for gender equality, a movement for religious freedom. But the movement hasn't always been led that way. Actually, it's never really been led that way, at least not actually in action. Maybe the words, but not in action. What would you say to young people that are part of the LGBTQ community, particularly

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

black people in the community who are considering entering the field of psychology?

BEVERLY GREENE:

Well, what I would say to anyone considering entering the field of psychology I have never regretted becoming a psychologist. I've enjoyed the war work tremendously. It is very satisfying to help people in some ways,

BEVERLY GREENE:

if you wanna think of therapy. I mean, there are many different parts of psychology, but in therapy, it's not unlike, perhaps, the satisfaction some people get as parents because you get to watch people discover parts of themselves that they never knew there. That there can be joy in that for them. There can be agency and a sense of power for them, and that you've

BEVERLY GREENE:

helped accompany them on that journey. That psychotherapy is very much a healing profession and contributing to the literature writing about what we do and how it's done contributes to the greater understanding of human beings who are complicated and are not singly defined by one group membership

BEVERLY GREENE:

over the other, and who are just damned interesting when you see people from many different kinds of backgrounds and adjustments engage in similar trajectories. Then you can see many people from similar backgrounds have very different trajectories. The unfolding of a human being is just exceedingly interesting,

BEVERLY GREENE:

how we become who we are and how we heal and repair, which everybody needs at some point in time, and on some level. It's about better understanding our humanity, our collective humanity.

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

Okay. If you could tell your 15 year old self anything, what would you tell her?

BEVERLY GREENE:

It'll get better?

BEVERLY GREENE:

I suppose I would tell her what my very elder aunts who I lost last year had said to me many times, again, when I would ask them, "How did you stand that nonsense that you had to grow up in?"

BEVERLY GREENE:

Just the idea of, but we're doing it again. Having to march and beseech a country to allow you to vote when you're -- I'm thinking of black veterans can go and die for a country that would not let them vote when they came back from war, how could you not be in a constant rage

BEVERLY GREENE:

around those things? They would say, because things change and one of them said to me, "I never thought I'd be voting for a black president ever, or that I would live during the administration of a black president. And then that I'd have the opportunity to vote for a woman who was running for president." But she said, "You can't stop progress. You can slow it down,

BEVERLY GREENE:

but there is going to be change and things are going to happen and you just have to keep moving forward."

ANDREA PINO-SILVA: Why do you think it's important to share your story and what is the value in organizations like OUTWORDS to share your stories?

BEVERLY GREENE:

Well, I think for many of us, if you're part of marginalized groups, our stories don't get told

BEVERLY GREENE:

and our narratives are as important and as valuable as the dominant cultural narrative. I also think it's important for young people who despair to understand there's something that came before you that was worse than this. To use Cory Booker's words, "I drink deeply from wells I never had to dig." And that

BEVERLY GREENE:

all of us, by the grace of the work of somebody else, have certain opportunities. It's not always clear how that transpires that people see people successful in some particular way, but they don't see where that started and how exactly it ended up at this end point. It's often not linear and it's

BEVERLY GREENE:

not necessarily planned, but it's a series of opportunities and taking advantage of opportunities and giving things a chance and moving through them in that fashion that I think is important for young people to understand that it doesn't just happen, like, oh, you just make this decision and things just kind of roll out on the heels of inevitability. That's not how it happens.

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

Is there anything else that you'd like to share?

BEVERLY GREENE:

Well, I guess particularly in the craziness of the times that we live in, that again I am always, it's deeply respectful of a sense of this ain't new. We've been here before,

BEVERLY GREENE:

and worse, and with fewer opportunities and fewer protections. Things could get worse, you never lose sight of that. Anything that you've gained could be taken away. But that as my aunt would say, you gotta keep moving forward, that everything we do, you can't ignore the past.

BEVERLY GREENE:

James Baldwin once said, "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed if it isn't faced." I think it was either Hemingway or Faulkner who said "The past is not dead, it isn't even past." It's important to understand the past so that you understand not to do the same dumb things over and over again; what worked

BEVERLY GREENE:

and what didn't. But the point in time that we're in, a lot of the things that are happening that people are sort of treating as if all of this craziness is new. No, it's photographed and videoed, but it's not new. How did people manage this before? Because people had to manage these things before. What does that say about the present? It says that

BEVERLY GREENE:

everything we do or fail to do in the present matters in terms of shaping the future, but that the future hasn't been written and the last word hasn't been said, and that's why everything we do in the present is important.

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

I love that. I will say that I think I'm not very old, but I've lived in the world long enough to know that you have to remind young people

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

that it does get better and that these things that happened before that I remember what it's like to be a 17 year old girl and only know the world that I see. I think particularly when stories are told people don't have that connection. They don't know that this has happened before, that someone else has been through it. They feel very alone. That's precisely what system wants. They want you to feel that what you're experiencing is your fault.

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

It's not something that's happened before, or that there isn't a toolkit, or at least an ancestor who can help you feel a little less alone. Yeah. Well, these are all the questions. I have for you, I hope you've enjoyed your experience. I'm sorry for the technical issues.

BEVERLY GREENE:

It's a fact of life.

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

Yeah. You weave the narrative

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

so beautifully when I had seen your prep review, I really liked the story that you were talking about your sense of self. I say that because so many of the narratives around black people, but I think particularly black queer people, are these narratives of damage, of surviving in spite of terrible things, and not about

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

black ways of teaching black communities can prepare black children to be successful, to be powerful not in spite of, but because of their blackness. That was something that I really hoped would come through in the interview because I think it's something that we need more of, frankly. I hope you felt that you were able to share that. I think that that was something that I wanted to make sure to capture

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

in the interview.

BEVERLY GREENE:

Well, I hope you were able to do that. I mean, I hope I was able to convey the importance of people understanding their history and their personal history and their nation's history and understanding how we get to wherever it is we are. Where you started, it is important. I guess

BEVERLY GREENE:

the idea that black folks could not be where we are if other people's ideas of us were true. It's not surprising to me. I think that's why it's important for those narratives to be present, but we are not inevitable psychological cripples but we possess both vulnerability

BEVERLY GREENE:

and resilience. Some of that resilience is born of what happens when that vulnerability is engaged, because I don't wanna minimize the suffering that's brought about by racism and racist ideologies, but that people keep moving, people keep prevailing. Cornel West would say black people keep on keeping on and

BEVERLY GREENE:

people can't do that if they are not engaged and connected to themselves and connected to each other in ways that are positive, that why there are any of us surviving would be a relevant question, not why is it that some people are harmed, but why aren't there more people harmed given that you have 400 years of this passage

BEVERLY GREENE:

of subordination? What is it that people are doing to survive, that enables them to survive? Why is it that many people in fact thrive, which doesn't mean that they're unaltered or affected by racism, but that somehow they manage to thrive despite it, and as psychologists, I think we need to be asking more of those kinds of questions,

BEVERLY GREENE:

rather than the pathology oriented questions. Not that to ignore them, but what is the thing that black people have that I think Cornel West put so eloquently when he was asked and just in the aftermath of 9/11 when people were feeling particularly devastated and distraught and taken by surprise, he was asked, what words

BEVERLY GREENE:

would you give to sort of encourage people? And he, well, in these attacks, America has been niggerized and when he was asked, well, what does that mean? He said to be niggerized in America is to be hated, unsafe and unprotected, and these attacks have made America feel like that, and that

BEVERLY GREENE:

they could learn something from black people who have been hated, unsafe and unprotected for the 400 years that they've been here, but have managed to keep on keeping on. I would say that as well, that there are some important secrets to survival from people who actually have survived some terrible things.

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

In my own work, I've been doing a lot of research specifically

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

on that, on black diasporic community care particularly because my work is around gender-based violence, and we know that the criminal punishment system does not work and we know that replicating it doesn't work, what has allowed people who have experienced violence to continue living to exist beyond the violence? If these systems created by white supremacy are

ANDREA PINO-SILVA:

only replicating harm, then we need to invest our scholarship and actually be able to study and learn from those systems of care that have helped, that have cared for people after violence. But I do think that a reason why there isn't more investment in that is I think it threatens the power that white supremacy and its institutions currently has, just enacting punishment and nothing else. That's all it knows, of course, is to continue a cycle of punishment.