Extraction or Repair
The Choice is Yours, a TEDxAsheville Talk by Sekou Coleman
What if the biggest force shaping your city is the one you were never taught to see?
In this talk, Sekou Coleman shows how Black neighborhoods are made invisible through extraction, displacement, and disinvestment, and why repairing harm begins with telling the truth about what was lost and shifting power to the people living with the consequences.
Through the story of Southside in Asheville, NC, he reveals what becomes possible when residents lead. Sekou Coleman is a cultural strategist, organizer, and lifelong storyteller whose work is rooted in the ancestral traditions of the Mandé djeli, keepers of story, memory, lineage, and truth.
With more than 30 years in nonprofit leadership, creative placemaking, and grassroots organizing, Sekou helps communities hold memory and decision-making power by turning lived experience into strategy, strategy into systems, and systems into stories that preserve authorship and strengthen community ownership.
Across coalitions, cultural initiatives, public processes, and story-based communications, his work centers marginalized voices, strengthens belonging, and builds long-term community power. His TEDx talk is an extension of that calling: using story to make hidden histories visible, elevate resident wisdom, and show what becomes possible when communities lead their own repair.
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.
