Dale Hansen at WFAA Television Illustrated American Media’s Usually Unfulfilled Potential — with His Wise Comment about How to React to Racism — Why Aren’t There More Like Him?

© 2015 Peter Free

 

27 February 2015

 

 

Three days ago, television’s Dale Hansen demonstrated the power of wise elders and intelligent media in one stroke

 

Responding to a school incident in which basketball watching students held up two signs saying “white power” — he said (among other things):

 

 

Kids have to be taught to hate, and it's our parents and grandparents (and our teachers and coaches, too) who teach us to hate. Kids become the product of that environment.

 

I was. And they are.

 

The kids who hold the signs and chant their racist slurs — and it's not all of them; it never is — but their ignorance perpetuates the stereotype of all of us in Texas as a racist, ignorant people.

 

But that ignorance will be replaced someday by the wisdom they learn when they live in the real world; when they meet the people who don't look like them, didn't grow up the way they did.

 

The people who make this life worth living.

 

They will change. Not all of them; it never is. But they will change. I did, a long time ago. They can, too. But not if we try to defend what you can not defend.

 

And not if we stay silent, and think taking their signs away is doing enough.

 

© 2015 Dale Hansen, Hansen Unplugged: Signs of change, WFAA.com (24 February 2015) (transcript with embedded 3:04 minute video clip)

 

Watch the video for an example of what ethics-oriented leadership looks like in a media setting.

 

 

The moral? — When we have access to influence, we should (arguably) use it with intelligently forceful grace

 

This spiritually based duty is more often ignored than honored. Exceptions, like Mr. Hansen’s, glow.