DaVinchi is not a gangster. Nor does he cosign the lifestyle. Although he plays Terry “Southwest T” Flenory, one of the culture’s most astute drug dealers on Starz’s BMF, the actor, born Abraham D. Juste, wants to rewire inner-city kids to be more in touch with their feelings and less in tune with thug life.
DaVinchi, son to Haitian parents, had a front-row experience on how violence short-circuits humans. His cousin and older brother were two peas in the pod. Said cousin was shot in the head four times. His brother spiraled and turned to the streets for comfort and answers. An inability to cope, DaVinchi reasons, is a hood epidemic. Travel to Any Hood U.S.A., and count how many liquor stores you come across.
DaVinchi believes he can arm kids and young adults with the necessary tools to manage depression and other mental health disabilities through his traveling HBCU program.
On a summer afternoon, DaVinchi sat with LEVEL to go deep on mental health. He delivered clinical analysis the way Earn Your Leisure breaks down finance. He’s long-winded yet very impactful—especially when he zooms in on the damaging effects of social media. That’s gangsta.
LEVEL: What was the first sign that you were struggling with your mental health?
DaVinchi: My first sign was understanding where I come from. A lot of times we take [growing up in] the hood as “you earned your stripes.” We don't realize how much it destroys our mental health. I've watched what it did to my brothers, my cousins, my friends. Bro, this is not cool.
Many of us don't understand how deep it is. I got arrested when I was 13, was a juvenile delinquent, and went through the Scared Straight program and things of that nature. I didn't realize that it was my environment that was making me a menace to society. You don't understand how deep it is until you're fortunate enough to be in a different environment. I moved in with my father and his second family, and I went to a predominantly white high school. And in that, I started understanding, okay, there's certain things from where I come from, that doesn't cross over.
It stems from slavery. And poverty—not just financial, but in a mental and spiritual sense. Where we come from, environments that are so poor, our way of thinking, our self-talk, our diet, our spiritual diet, what we hear, what we see is just terrible.
How are you going to fix a broken bone if you don't even know a bone is broken in the first place? And then when you talk about it, it's like, "Yo, you're being weak." You're misdiagnosing yourself and treating a broken bone as if it's a mosquito bite. It's just like, Dude, don't put cortisone on a bone. That's not going to do anything.
How do you go about repairing the broken bone when there is such a stigma associated with mental health? How are you able to reach these kids on your HBCU tour?
I break things down from a fundamental level. Anything you're doing at any given moment, you got to understand you're physically modifying your brain to become better at it. So your brain is constantly undergoing neuroplasticity due to change, environmental factors, and epigenetics. And it's just changing on a neurological level.
So if you're constantly scrolling through Instagram, or social media, different things like that, you're training your brain that every six seconds, I need to be onto the next thing.
One minute you'll see two girls fighting, next thing you see a video of the elephant doing something, then you'll see a man doing some wild stuff. And then you'll see some political stuff. Then something else, random images. So your brain is like, Okay, let's modify ourself to be the best ADHD person in the world.
That's what you're telling yourself. And your brain is like, I'm going to give my master whatever it wants. So it doesn't decipher what's good or bad. Subconsciously, it's just taking it in.
So depending on how you're wiring your brain, your brain is going to suit you in that and however you're wiring it. So I break it down to people like: “What you doing right now? Is this something you want to be good at or something you want to get rid of?"
How can we actually dial back social media? That’s not easy for many of us.
Honestly, I wouldn't even say just stop going on social media, because social media has become such a requirement in our life, unfortunately. As human beings, we're just in one of the strangest evolutions. We are in an interesting period of life, where our brains have never had the ability to understand electronic devices and social media the way that we're forced to.
So it's definitely causing a lot of depression, due to the fact that your cells and your body's innate intelligence has nothing to draw from. The beauty about being a human being and having genetics is that you can draw from experiences your cells have experienced from your forefathers. Because you're just a consequence of a bunch of human beings that have lived. So you don't have to learn how to walk anymore. Your body understood that from millions and millions and millions of human beings. You don't need to learn how to chew and swallow.
But because smartphones and social media is something that no human being before has ever dealt with, we're dealing with it in real time. That's why it's causing a lot of anxiety, a lot of depression, because arguably, some would say this is just as important as reality, because it yields the same result.
I'm not on social media entertaining fans. The days of aimlessly scrolling through it, I try my hardest to never get caught doing that. I literally delete the app after I'm done posting.
Or on the weekends be like, I'm not going to do this. And then have a couple friends to hold you accountable. You guys can have a little pack. There's strength in numbers. We're creatures that need other human beings. You can't do anything in this world by yourself.
You spent some time studying Tupac. What did you learn?
Tupac was a good kid, man. He was a drama kid, theater kid, good sweetheart. The world turned him cold. One of my favorite books is Outwitting the Devil. There's a part in it where [author] Napoleon Hill says nature forces upon the minds of men the influences of their environment. Him being the kid he was, his environment changed. He started drinking more, smoking more, going out, being in environments that influenced him. Eventually, that led to his demise.
But I learned when he was in prison, [Tupac] started becoming a voracious reader. He was just attacking books. I took that and put myself in my own little incarceration. I was like, “You know what? Pac started reading. I look up to this guy. Let me pick up a book.”
I heard if you want to hide something from a Black man, you gotta put it in a book. I just started attacking books and understanding how powerful my environment is, and how I shouldn't take it lightly. I need to understand that based off what I'm surrounded by, it will affect me and I will become that. So I would say that's probably the greatest thing I learned.
In a previous interview you pulled a quote out: “Poverty is the mother of crime.”
Right. Andrew Franklin.
Break that down.
The reason poverty births crime is because capitalism changed the game. The way the world was intended, nobody should ever be hungry, because within every fruit, within every vegetable, there's a seed that you can plant your own thing and you can eat.
With that system and that set up, it's impossible for anyone to go hungry. But when you are hungry and your stomach is touching your back, what are you going to do? You're going to revert to crime. You're going to start taking things that don't belong to you in order to eat. Every crime that I've done, that me and my brother, and people that I've known close to me, it's always to get food or to fit into our environment, because we're getting made fun of.
Because of the system and the structure that we're under, you can't just go hungry and just die. And I can't plant my own tree in the backyard. Because if you live in an apartment complex, you're in the projects, and how the hell are you going to do that?
You personally saw how the death of your cousin affected your brother. Have you and your brother sat down and had a conversation around mental health?
Yeah, we have. But they don't really listen to me. It's tough. Everybody grows and changes at their own rate, at their own time. And sometimes it's different when it's coming from a close relative, especially it being a younger brother.
But we have [talked]. And some people can't even process you trying to get through to them. Some listen and they change, and some are still stuck in a certain state of mind. Only God could save them at that point.
There’s no conflict with playing the character you play and your real-life beliefs.
Yeah. As an artist, as an actor, you're telling stories. This one particularly—this being a true story—you're seeing and witnessing firsthand a story of two brothers that were a byproduct of one of the largest, most successful human trafficking around the world, which is slave trade.
You were brought to this land. Then you have to work for hundreds of years. And then you have to go out in the world and find a job. You really can't do that. And you call back the slave master, you start working and you get minimum wage. And the job is just enough to keep your head above water but you can't really do anything with that. Right?
That's what these two brothers are a byproduct of. And then you watch how they come together, create an idea, and this organization, and help thousands of people along the way. It was so impressive what they did, that about 20 years later, there's a whole show, and there's movies, there's documentaries people are still eating off of and making money off of.
And honestly, it speaks to mental health and having access. Had they had better access to different things, who knows, they could have been like the Wright Brothers. They could have been like Steve Jobs.
But that boldness, that courage that they had to do what they did, and the line of work that they were in, you got to have a lot of balls. You got to be very brave. So picture if they had access to a different opportunity, with that same level of boldness and that thinking. Who knows what they would've become?