Before the start of TEDx Gateway Arch on Friday at the Blanche M. Touhill Performing Arts Center, the event’s executive director Steve Sommers asked attendees not just to listen the speakers but also to look around at the audience.
“Our mission is to create an inclusive and equitable community in St. Louis with thought leadership,” said Sommers. “As you enjoy tonight, please pay attention to the makeup of the audience; it’s been very intentional. We are based on inclusiveness.”
Get a fresh take on the day’s top news
Subscribe to the St. Louis Daily newsletter for a smart, succinct guide to local news from award-winning journalists Sarah Fenske and Ryan Krull.
Each of the presenters had a connection to St. Louis, and it was evident they had taken note of the recent local focus on racial and economic inequalities. And they offered different ideas as to how people in the diverse audience might be able to address the issues that divide St. Louis.
For example, Theresa Coble, a professor of experiential and family education at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, suggested that people visit national memorials for events such as 9/11 or visit landmarks such as the Old Courthouse downtown, where slaves were bought and sold.
“Trace the ripple effect of past events into the present,” said Coble, who was one of 14 speakers at the fifth annual TEDx Gateway Arch. “Do this because only if we own societal grief, can we heal and reconcile the difficult history of America.”
While the event largely stayed away from politics—that field, religion, and “junk science” are no-gos at TED talks, Sommers said—speakers did refer to Michael Brown and Anthony Lamar Smith, the two black men whose deaths in police shootings sparked local protests.
De Andrea Nichols, an artist and social justice activist, spoke about her journey from small-town Mississippi, where the black and white communities were separated by railroad tracks, to her first protest in Ferguson, where she saw police in riot gear and for the first time “felt threatened.” She decided to respond to her fear through community art work, such as creating a casket made of mirrors.
Nichols, who is now director of Civic Creatives, a nonprofit that tries to find innovative ways to solve issues like food insecurity, displayed a statistic about the number of people killed by “police brutality” and suggested that people could continue to build such caskets and place them at the sites of those incidents. That way, she said, “the community continues to question and see themselves in this fate.”
Ness Sandoval, a St. Louis University professor of sociology and anthropology (featured in SLM‘s newest issue), also displayed statistics and graphics during his presentation about how geospatial technology and mapping revealed inequalities among the African-American, Latino, and white communities. He has conducted research that showed that “having access to a car not only improved quality of life but also reduced day-to-day stress.”
He would like to provide data and maps to various neighborhoods around St. Louis, so that they have information “that reflects the way they see their lives on a day-to-day basis.”
“We need to give them the resources to envision the future that they want, a future where everyone has the opportunity to live a dignified life,” said Sandoval.
Jade Harrell’s approach to affecting positive social change dealt in language rather than numbers. The media producer spoke about how combining words—she described it as “word-smerching”—is “imaginative and freeing. It literally transports you right out of your comfort zone.”
Since starting the practice, she said, she is now “inhiberated.”
She spoke about how a couple of years ago, she had visited a local school to welcome back students after summer break. She encountered a tall teen wearing headphones who saw her “and probably wanted to take another route.”
“But I laid it on him, ‘Good, glorious morning, you magnorific, awesomaceous, sensational, young man!’”
They talked about his plans for senior year and aspirations for college, then took a photo. During her TED talk, she then showed the photo: It was her and Michael Brown, wearing a big grin.
“We can’t know or always see how we may impact the lives of the people that we encounter, but we can see what a difference one moment can make if we show up inhiberated,” Harrell said. “We can create and construct a new way of being by speaking in terms that liberate our language as well as our lives.”
