Go Back and Get It: A Sankofa Story | Vanessa Wright | TEDxColumbiaCollegeChicago скачать в хорошем качестве

Go Back and Get It: A Sankofa Story | Vanessa Wright | TEDxColumbiaCollegeChicago

Growing up in a home filled with cultures and stories from around the world, filmmaker and educator Vanessa Wright believed every family had a table where identity was celebrated. But one day, a cross was burned in her yard — and the silence that followed stayed with her. In this talk, Vanessa explores how silence within families, classrooms, and textbooks often erases the very history meant to shape us. Drawing from her own childhood, her role as a mother of two, and her award-winning PBS documentaries, she unpacks the legacy of generational silence and the West African concept of Sankofa — the call to go back and retrieve what was lost. Through storytelling, she shows how we can begin unweaving that silence and creating space for truth, healing, and belonging. Because when we don’t tell the full story, we don’t just forget — we pass down confusion, disconnection, and sometimes, shame. Vanessa Wright is a former talent agent turned documentary filmmaker, educator, and founder of Tellers Untold LLC, a media company dedicated to amplifying untold stories from Black and brown communities. She attended The Ohio State University and is a two-time alum of Columbia College Chicago, where she teaches in the Business & Entrepreneurship Department. The first film in her award-winning Sankofa Chicago documentary series — focused on Black history, race, education, and generational truth-telling — has been featured on PBS, Amazon Prime, Tubi, and other major platforms. Inspired by the Ghanaian concept of Sankofa, which means “to go back and retrieve what was forgotten,” Vanessa uses film, social experiments, and intergenerational dialogue to spark conversations about identity, justice, and the stories too often left out of history. She believes that when unheard voices are given the mic, transformation follows. Substack This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx