Michael Thomas
Who Raised You?, a podcast series created by social worker Jia Lian and poet and educator Treasure Shields Redmond, brings the stories of people of color in the
St. Louis region to the forefront. For both Jia and Redmond, audio became a key interest after a protest at The Muny in which singing played a key role.
“The podcast was a way for us to create new sound contradicting the mainstream media narrative that was portraying the [Ferguson] uprising in just one very flat, shallow way,” says Jia. “So much of the media focused on property destruction, bricks, fire, and chaos—without any sort of sense of why a community is out here.”
Jia and Redmond are up--front about the podcast’s progressive lens, talking openly about race, identity, activism, and liberation politics. By showcasing underrepresented voices, the podcast highlights a range of residents doing inventive, socially conscious work.
Damon Davis, the artist, activist, and filmmaker behind Whose Streets?, the acclaimed documentary on Ferguson, recently partnered with another nationally recognized St. Louis artist, Basil Kincaid, to launch The Black Bag Award. The project gives young black artists in St. Louis and East St. Louis microgrants to purchase art supplies and gain experience applying for professional opportunities.
Davis and Kincaid both pooled their money alongside private donors to offer grants of $500 each to six artists in three age groups. The duo intentionally kept the age group on the younger side to encourage artistic exploration, help kids process their lived experiences, and present a pathway to a possible future career.
“We know young black kids from a certain socioeconomic class are up against a different set of obstacles,” Davis says. “If we can do just a little bit to give someone another option so they can fulfill a purpose they didn’t even know they had, if we can help resuscitate the creativity in young people—I think that would make society much better as a whole.”
courtesy of Brittany Ferrell
Activist Brittany Ferrell has made the experiences of black women in health care her chief focus since the protests in Ferguson. She’s now in the process of shooting her debut documentary, You Lucky You Got a Mama.
A former high-risk labor-and-delivery nurse and an Olin Fellow at Washington University, she says, “I would listen to the stories that black people would share with me—sometimes they were beautiful, and sometimes they were absolutely horrific. I began to think about how their stories and experiences were impacted by structural racism, systemic racism, and other barriers.”
The documentary will shed light on the challenges that some African-American women, trans women, and nonbinary patients face while securing sufficient prenatal and delivery medical care, as well as navigating health care as a whole. The filmmaker’s strategy is to attach faces, stories, and experiences to recent research and data about reproductive justice and maternal mortality rates.
Alongside the documentary, Ferrell plans to produce a related photographic memoir. She hopes that the documentary and related book will be used to share firsthand stories from African-American mothers and pregnant people and to educate viewers about the history of race in the medical field and its impact on modern patient care.
