The Psychedelics Movement Must Shift Toward Radical Empathy and Collective Healing

In our final installment of the Decolonizing Psychedelics series for 2024, Preeti Simran Sethi speaks with psychedelic advocate and founder of the Psychedelic Liberation Training, Charlotte Duerr James. Her approach invites us to expand the aperture on decolonization to address lateral oppression and a recognition that deep healing and liberation require us to support and care for all. In our conversation, we explore what the embodiment of a decolonization practice can look like, how cannabis can be an entry point to honoring plant wisdom, and ways we can move toward collective liberation in the field of psychedelics and beyond.

How do you name yourself, what is your identity, and what is your engagement with the world?

My name is Charlotte Duerr James. My middle name is my mother’s maiden name and I want to pay homage to the Germanic lineage that I carry, as well. I am a decolonization educator and a medicine woman in my community, and I take two approaches to the work: one from the more academic, theory side of liberation work, and the other on how we engage within ourselves and our communities through healing work and building relationships with expanded states of consciousness.

That is a whole ecosystem. How did you come to medicine?

I am also a first-generation Jamaican on my dad’s side. My dad was, for some time in his youth, a practicing Rastafari, and my mom came of age in the sixties and seventies in the hippy love/revolution space. They were both avid cannabis users. Not in front of me, but it was not a conversation that was hidden. So when I turned 14, and somebody offered me cannabis for the first time, it was a full-bodied “yes” for me. I started having this relationship with plants that kept my mind open. When I was 15 or 16, I saw a documentary about iboga and one about Kambo and its use in hunting communities in the Amazon. And then my first college roommate was a burner. She introduced me to the rave scene and to using psychedelics in those spaces. There were so few people of color there—so few Black folks—and I was always like, “I don’t get it, because it is such a beautiful experience to be able to tap into bliss and ecstatic states.”

Then I moved to Bolivia. I lived in communal housing where we were exploring LSD, going on epic hikes, and starting to see the interconnection of nature and psychedelics in a place where there was a lot of Indigenous culture and use of ayahuasca. All these breadcrumbs were [dropping] while I was going through my own exploration. In Baltimore, I worked in harm reduction and saw a lot of different ways of interacting with substances and also disparity, as in drugs were okay in the party scene because white kids were doing it but in Black Baltimore an intravenous heroin user [was considered] sick or a bad person. In 2018, someone that I was sharing a workspace with procured [magic] mushrooms, and that entered into my life. Because I was in communities of Black and Brown people who had not necessarily tried these things, they were like, “Well, Charlotte knows.” So I would take friends into nature and teach them how to smoke. In 2019, I had my first ceremony and then connected to kambo and bufo, and a whole other world opened up from there. 

You use the word medicine. Is that the term you prefer? 

Sometimes I feel conflicted because there is something powerful in making a statement like, “I love drugs.” I was a party kid, and I liked doing drugs. They are very fun, in addition to being therapeutic, healing, and helping with reconnecting to ancestry. 

For me, “psychedelics” is [a term] we use in a clinical setting, and “sacred medicine” brings it into the ceremonial space. I talk about journeying with medicine to bring greater intention to my language, but the reality is it started because I like drugs and it shifted because I eventually had a problematic relationship with some substances. I had to take a big break and then come back to it from a different vantage point. People don’t necessarily expect that from me, but that is [my] origin point.

I am drawn to words you have shared publicly that “decolonization work is really reclamation work. It’s not just an academic study or a political movement; it’s an embodied practice that we have the responsibility to engage with.” 

The current genocide in Palestine has brought [the reality of colonization] back to the forefront. In the West, we get to engage with a certain amount of privilege and distance, yet it is also somewhat of an illusion that we have distance. We are not feeling the physically violent effects of [colonization] in the same way as places that are [currently dealing] with genocide, but we definitely have state-sanctioned violence. In the U.S., it seems to happen in an individual way, in these cases, that blow up of Black folks murdered by the police. But we don’t see it at a collective level — the erasure of physical bodies in the way that we are seeing in Palestine, Congo, or Sudan. 

The experience of colonization does manifest differently, but every Global South person holds it, whether it manifests as disease, historical trauma, or bombs overhead.

When people think about heart disease being a leading killer in the U.S., they don’t go to that next level of exploring what the intersecting identities are of people who disproportionately experience heart disease, diabetes, or high blood pressure, [of asking] what is the lineage that those people come from, and how colonization is connected to that? We have a certain disconnection from our own experience of colonization in the West because it happens in quieter ways.  

But back to the idea of decolonization work being reclamation work. For some, the word they would use instead of decolonization is “re-Indigenizing” because it decenters coloniality from the process. I think this work is about reclaiming the lessons that our ancestors left us… in seeing what we have forgotten that we need to remember. What will bring us back into greater harmony and balance in ourselves, with others, and with the earth? It is not about being able to list theories or liberation movement authors. It is about asking [yourself] how you are actually living the practice of decolonization.

Let me back up and ask how you define decolonization generally and in the realm of psychedelics?

I have been shifting my own definition of decolonization back to an idea of reclamation, moving beyond the politicized and the academic into the embodied. I have been studying non-duality and the complexity of holding that truth, and carry that into my approach to liberation work. For me, decolonization is the expansion beyond the polarity of war and peace, right or wrong, good and bad. Have you ever heard that Rumi poem? “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” 

It’s the middle passage from the poem “A Great Wagon.” That transcendence is powerful. 

I am going to now return to polarity and a question I have been asking of others: Can decolonization occur within capitalized or medicalized models of medicine work?

Like healing, decolonization is not a destination that we will arrive to; it is not an absolute. There are clinicians who participate in the Psychedelic Liberation Training who find ways to subvert the system and bring a decolonized framework — spirit, ancestors, and ceremony — into their clinical work. It looks different than [traditional practices], but they find ways to do it. That is important because there are some people who will arrive to psychedelics through the clinical space. Folks of the Global South may arrive to do it in that way, potentially, because of where they are in their own journeys of decolonization, still buying into the idea that a doctor knows more than an underground person. Maybe they need to be introduced to the work in that way [versus] someone who says, “I am on a path of decolonization, and would never sit in the clinic. I would only sit in ceremony.”

To the question of, is it possible? I do not know if there is a yes or no. They are going to be doing the work inside a system that still replicates oppression. But are there clinicians who have the capacity to contribute to decolonization work through their clinical work? Absolutely. 

That creates more pathways for people to find their way to decolonization. So what do you identify as a decolonized medicine practice? How does it look and feel?

That is such an interesting question. I run a training, but I am not necessarily training people within a model that I have developed. Depending on where people are coming to the work from, a decolonized practice will look different. What I would say is that it [includes] honoring the differences of each individual and having the capacity to meet people where they are, which comes from harm reduction. And asking, what is it to be well-versed or aware of some of the considerations of working with Black and Brown folks, queer folks, neurodivergent folks? What resources and tools [does a facilitator] have in place to support those different types of people?

Then, there is a commitment to their own process. You can’t lead anybody through a process in which you have not engaged with yourself and are not continuing to engage. That, plus a willingness to be transparent and accountable within the work.

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There are also some challenging aspects around — to use language I don’t love — the therapeutic “provider” and “client” relationships. They do not leave space for dual or multi-level relationships that inevitably exist when we try to do this work through a community approach. If we look at how our ancestors lived in community, the medicine man, for example, was also your uncle and the herbalist was also your neighbor and cousin. You had to figure out ways to not just say, “In this space, I am this person, and in this space I am this person.” Being able to fully separate your identities in different spaces is a very compartmentalized and white supremacist way of viewing oneself.

That you and I can even have this conversation is a great example [of this]. We started with you coming to integration circles that I was facilitating. I am not a therapist, but taking that framework, if we were in some type of traditional therapeutic relationship, then we would not be able to have many of the other interactions that we have had, potentially [including] this conversation. Doing healing in community as an act of decolonization starts to break down some of those barriers of separation that are created in relationships within a medicalized context with capitalists relating to each other.

What I am hearing is that decolonization is resonant with inclusion: We are not leaving anybody behind. But as important as caring for neurodivergent folks, for example, is that care an expression of decolonization? Because colonization and its impacts are specific, tethered to the subjugation of specific peoples and places. 

I would say a lot of what is off with our world—and a lot of the reason that we have the separation, violence, and trauma that we have—is because people feel a lack of belonging or fear around their sense of belonging. 

If we are talking about collective liberation, we are talking about liberation for all peoples. We can’t bring in exclusion. So, for example, maybe a white man who is neurodivergent or on the spectrum is aggressive, disconnected, or lacking empathy because, as a person who experiences the world differently, that [belonging] has never been shown to him? What happens when we extend care and love to that person, as well? That, to me, is also decolonization work. I don’t feel [our focus] should be limited based on the identity of the person that’s receiving it.

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If we look at what is happening in Palestine, I would say a lot of that is because Israeli people who identify with Zionism have not done the work to untangle the internalized violence of the Holocaust and are now replicating that on other people. Obviously, there are many more complexities but part of what is at play is that when you do not heal the generational trauma of genocide, there is the possibility of then feeling entitled to enact that on others. 

Speaking very personally, the Partition of India and Pakistan—one of the largest and most violent mass migrations in human history that resulted in the deaths of 2 million people — was rooted in British imperialism and is resonant with the Balfour Declaration in Palestine: A white British man drew a map and said, “Muslims live here, and Hindus live here.” My father and his family had to leave everything behind and flee Pakistan for India. So, I understand the idea that in order to achieve collective liberation, we have to foster belonging and care for all people, but I am not clear on how, say, supporting our example of a neurodivergent white man is an expression of decolonization. 

For me, it ties to that internalized piece. I am not saying that you or I need to support said neurodivergent white man. But what I am saying is that, in masking his neurodivergence because of what is socially acceptable, that man is also oppressed by the ideals of white supremacy [because] what is socially acceptable is largely defined by white supremacy. Is the singular act of supporting that person [the full expression of] decolonization? No. But, for me, if that neurodivergent white man is still oppressing himself, it is part of the process.

The starting point for me is interrogating power and understanding how I participate in my own oppression because those are the ways in which I am projecting oppression into the world. If that neurodivergent white man is masking himself because his authentic self is not welcome within the existing system, structure, and socially accepted ways of being that are defined by white supremacy, supporting that person to liberate from that form of oppression does contribute to the collective liberation that decolonization is working towards.

That is so helpful. Thank you.

That is not going to land, maybe, for many folks, or maybe I need to refine how I’m sharing, but that is collective liberation. Although they probably do not call it that, white people are controlling and oppressing themselves. They are not experiencing structural or systemic discrimination or violence based on their identity, but I would say [they] are the most oppressed of people, internally, in terms of how they have to move in the world. And I am saying this as a biracial person who grew up in predominantly white spaces. The rigidity, conservatism, and judgment of others exist because they do it to themselves so intensely. But they do not even recognize it because of the language we use about [colonization]. 

We are not calling [them] into this conversation of collective liberation, but when we really look at it, all people were indigenous to some place at some time and were practicing animism in some way. Germanic tribes were not monotheistic. They were eating mushrooms in what we call Europe. They had indigenous practices that were [eradicated] first. The practice run of colonization happened in Europe before it spread out into the world.

It is our collective responsibility to engage in this work because we have all, throughout history, been impacted by colonization. We have different contemporary relations to it and how much it impacts our daily lives, but it is trauma. All people have experienced trauma. It is not something reserved for Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities.

In your training there is a module on centering Blackness. How do Indigenous, Latinx folks, Asians, other heavily colonized peoples, fit into this? 

When people talk about centering Blackness, it is really about exploring the roots of racism and colonization. If we look at global racism, we could say that the foundation of it is anti-Blackness and, in that, I would say, all people of the Global South are [subject to] that [racism], and are included in that Blackness. 

When we talk about centering Blackness, we are talking about understanding the foundation of colonization and racism as anti-Black, as anti-African. I see this in the psychedelic space a lot where there is this really interesting narrative and rhetoric around iboga as being the wildest, most intense, and darkest of the medicines. I do not have that much experience with it, but that has not been my experience. I would say a more challenging or intense medicine would be 5-MeO-DMT. But because of the conditioning we have [against] Blackness and Africanness, iboga is seen as the hardest medicine.

Language reveals a lot. I’m glad you shared that observation. Is there anything else you want to add?

The language of decolonization is useful, but we need to take it far beyond the dichotomy of colonization and decolonization. Smashing people into categories does not honor the fullness of their humanity or experience. It contributes to what Paolo Freire talks about in Pedagogy of the Oppressed as horizontal oppression.

What Freire describes as internalized oppression we project onto people who hold similar social identities … 

Yes. Where, because of the illusion the [colonialized] system created about who I am and who my group is, I am in a state of delusion and am now going to participate in the oppression of other groups I actually have far more in common with than not. What happens when more people recognize their connection and roots to Blackness, whether [their lens is] the American framing of Black and white, or the idea of global anti-Blackness where, in the eyes of a binary system, all people of the Global South are Black. What is it to actually claim that and to move from that place of solidarity? To collectively agree to unplug from [oppressive] agreements and really see each other?

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Preeti Simran Sethi is a writer, educator, mental well-being coach, and psychedelic integration support who advocates for culturally attuned care in psychedelics. Find more on her work here. This interview is made possible with editing support from Andrea Lomanto and the Ferriss-UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism Fellowship. It has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

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