Let’s Talk Race and Racism (December)

The St. Louis Section of the American Chemical Society's Committee on Minority Affairs (CMA) has launched a new podcast listening series “Let’s Talk Race and Racism.” The series is designed to engage ACS members and the broader St. Louis community at large around fostering togetherness, developing shared language, and building comfort and courage to better discuss race and racism. The goal is to help people understand how to take personal action to build their own race consciousness and to move toward a more diverse and inclusive local section in response to many national conversations such as #BlackoutSTEM and in response to the cries for justice for the loss of unarmed Black lives.

This month we will return to the We Live Here podcast with a new exciting theme of how St. Louis came to be as segregated as it is today. In early 2015, the St. Louis region was reeling from the killing of Michael Brown, shot dead by a Ferguson police officer. The St. Louis Public Radio newsroom, like other local media outlets, covered the story. But the news organization decided it needed to do more. They tasked two people — reporters Tim Lloyd and Emauele Berry — with coming up with a project that would examine race in St. Louis. The result was the We Live Here Podcast. Destroying the myth of de-facto segregation, this episode listening session will help unpack the policies and laws that left us “divided by design.” We ask all members and the community to come prepared to listen, learn, engage, be uncomfortable, and possibly abandon their own ideas for new ones as they hear vulnerable conversations from primarily people of color.