Who Taught You That? — A 1804 Renaissance Podcast

Who Taught You That? Episode 8: The Body We Were Taught to HateWhen did you first learn that something about your body needed to change?Maybe nobody ever said it directly. Maybe you simply noticed which people were praised and which were mocked, whose features filled the advertisements, which child was called beautiful, which hair was described as "good." And slowly, without anyone handing you an official document, you learned that some bodies were treated as more valuable than others.But standards are made by people. So the question underneath this episode is: who had the power to make their appearance seem neutral, and who taught you to look at your own body as if it were an enemy?In this episode, Yvener Duroseau examines how colonial and racial hierarchies shaped ideas about skin tone, hair texture, facial features, and body size. He walks through colorism and the way skin-tone hierarchies get reproduced inside communities that were themselves harmed by them, the politics of hair and respectability, the pressure to postpone your life until your body meets a standard that keeps moving, and why representation without dignity is just another form of consumption.This is not an episode about what anyone should look like. It is about why some appearances were treated as the default, and what it means to reclaim your body without borrowing someone else's judgment.The episode ends with a reflection exercise: six questions to sit with this week, beginning with "When did I first hear this message?" and ending with "What is one belief I am ready to question?"- Who taught you to see your body as a problem? - Who gets to define beauty? - Colorism and inherited skin-tone hierarchies - Hair, respectability, and control - The body and the demand to be acceptable - Representation and the mirror - Reclaiming the body: choice versus shame - A reflection exercise to carry into the weekYour body is not a waiting room. Your skin is not a mistake. Your hair is not a threat. And your worth is not waiting at a smaller size, a lighter shade, or a straighter texture.Start the episode with the question in the title: before accepting the idea that your body is a problem, who taught you that?Continue the conversation: get the first two chapters of The Colonization of the Mind for free at https://book.yvenerduroseau.com/first-two-chapters or text COLONIZATION to +1 318-667-8226.Join The Unlearning Room, the community where we question what we were taught, together.

Can we honor our ancestors without repeating their mistakes?Every family passes down more than heirlooms. We inherit patterns of silence, fear, anger, sacrifice, and shame that were often created as protection in an earlier era, and carried forward long after the danger passed.In this solo episode of Who Taught You That?, Yvener Duroseau turns the question of inheritance toward ourselves. What does it actually mean to honor our ancestors, and where is the line between remembrance and imitation?He explores:• Why the strategies that once kept a family alive can become traps in a new era • How pain gets passed down without intention, and why that is not about blame • The difference between gratitude ("I see what you gave me") and imitation ("I will become exactly what you were") • The inherited house: how to sort what is life-giving from what must be repaired or released • The courage it takes to break a pattern, and why doing so is not betrayal but the deepest kind of honorThe episode closes with a six-question reflection exercise you can use this week to examine one pattern in your own family or community, and to choose consciously what you carry forward.Honoring your ancestors does not mean repeating everything they believed. Sometimes honoring them means completing what they could not finish.Before accepting an idea as truth, who taught you that?Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5QTb1S7jYsReceive the first two chapters of The Colonization of the Mind for free. Visit yvenerduroseau.com or text COLONIZATION to +1 318-667-8226.Next week: "The Body We Were Taught to Hate."

Who wrote the history you were taught?Haiti's revolution made heroes. Then much of the writing about it made them disappear.This episode follows how history actually gets authored: who is named in the record, who is edited out of it, and what a nation inherits when its own founders go missing from the books. We look at how an earlier generation of historians wrote Haitian revolutionary figures to the margins of their own revolution, and how a new generation of scholars is putting them back at the center where they belong.We also sit with a disagreement that is still live among scholars. Some read the early record one way, others read it another. We do not settle it for you. We show you where the argument stands, because knowing that historians disagree is part of understanding how history gets made in the first place.And then we turn it on you. Which stories were you handed as settled? Whose names did you learn in school, and whose were never mentioned at all? If the people who freed themselves are absent from the telling, the question worth asking is not whether the silence was an accident. It is who benefited from it.Remembering is not nostalgia. It is a claim about who gets to exist in the record.What we sit with in this one - How earlier historians wrote Haitian heroes out of their own revolution - The scholars putting them back: Marlene Daut, Julia Gaffield, Laurent Dubois, Carolyn Fick - Why an open scholarly dispute tells us more than a settled myth - What it costs a people when their own history is told by someone elseA question to carry with you Who taught you which names were worth remembering?New here? This is a good place to start.Receive the first two chapters of The Colonization of the Mind free. Visit book.yvenerduroseau.com or text COLONIZATION to +1 318-667-8226.Who Taught You That? A 1804 Renaissance Podcast

Who decided what counts as knowledge?You were taught that some things are facts and other things are folklore. Some ways of knowing are rigorous. Others are "cultural." Some books are textbooks. Others are tradition.But those categories weren't discovered. They were assigned: by schools, by churches, by universities, by whoever controlled the printing press and the curriculum.In this episode, we look at how education became one of the most effective tools of colonial power, and how the classroom quietly taught obedience while calling it learning. We ask what happens when ancestral wisdom is renamed as superstition, when oral history is treated as unreliable, and when a people are told their knowledge doesn't count until an institution outside their community validates it.And we ask a harder question: what did you learn to stop trusting about your own people's way of understanding the world?Because the classroom didn't just teach you subjects. It taught you whose thinking was worth citing.New here? This is a good place to start.Receive the first two chapters of The Colonization of the Mind free. Visit yvenerduroseau.com or text COLONIZATION to +1 318-667-8226.Who Taught You That?

The Language We Were Taught to Be Ashamed Of

When did you first learn that the way you speak was a problem?

We inherit the answer long before we can question it. A language ranked above another. An accent corrected in a classroom. A tongue called "broken" by people who never learned it. None of that is accidental damage. It was designed, and it did its work quietly, until we started repeating it to ourselves.

This episode follows language from power to shame and back to memory. How colonial systems used language as a measure of intelligence, respectability and worth. What gets lost when a child is taught to distrust the first words they ever spoke. And why reclaiming a language is never only about vocabulary. It is about dignity, memory, and identity.

Because language is not just a tool of communication. It is a vessel of memory, of culture, of identity.

What we sit with in this one

• How language became a ranking system, and who the ranking serves
• Shame as an inheritance: how it passes from school to home to self
• The difference between fluency and belonging
• What it costs to abandon a language, and what returns when you take it back

A question to carry with you
Who taught you that your language was worth less than someone else's?

Receive the first two chapters free. Visit yvenerduroseau.com or text COLONIZATION to +1 318-667-8226.

The show
Who Taught You That? is a thoughtful, honest conversation about identity, faith, language, history and mental liberation, asking one question before we accept any idea as truth: who taught you that?

Have you ever asked an honest question about faith, and immediately felt guilty for asking it? 🙏🏾

Episode 3 takes on the most sensitive subject in this entire conversation: faith, religion, and what happens when belief is used to control people instead of setting them free.

We draw a clear line between faith and religion. How one can be deeply personal while the other is institutional, and how a person can hold real faith while questioning the institution that claims to speak for it. We look at how colonial power used religion to convince people to abandon their languages, traditions, names and ancestors, and we ask the hardest question of all: what do our inherited beliefs actually produce? Dignity and compassion, or fear and obedience? 🕯️

And we sit with the fear so many of us carry. That asking means losing what we love. But questioning doesn't always destroy faith. Sometimes it removes the fear from it. Sometimes it removes the shame. Sometimes it removes assumptions that were never ours to begin with, and what's left is something we actually chose. 🔥

This is not an attack on faith. It's an invitation to take your own conscience seriously.

🎧 New episodes of Who Taught You That? every week.
📖 Read the first two chapters of The Colonization of the Mind free: https://book.yvenerduroseau.com/first-two-chapters
📱 Or text COLONIZATION to +1 318-667-8226
▶️ Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/WYJNs301OpQ

Next week: the language we were taught to be ashamed of.

Are all of your thoughts truly your own?

In this episode of Who Taught You That?, Yvener Duroseau examines how beliefs about intelligence, language, culture, identity, success, beauty, faith, and human worth can be shaped by family, schools, religious institutions, media, and colonial history.

This is not a conversation about blaming our families or rejecting every tradition. It is an invitation to become more conscious of what we carry.

Yvener introduces a simple five-question “thought audit” to help listeners examine one belief they have about themselves and ask where it came from, who benefits from it, and whether it helps them become more free.

What if the beliefs you inherited were never truly your own?

In the first episode of Who Taught You That?, Yvener Duroseau shares the personal journey that led him to question inherited ideas about faith, identity, history, culture, and freedom.

This episode begins Season 1’s exploration of decolonization of the mind—and the courage it takes to examine the stories that shaped us.

Listen, reflect, and ask yourself: Who taught you that?

Get the first two chapters of The Colonization of the Mind free at yvenerduroseau.com