Last week, students at a high school basketball game in Texas held up signs that displayed the words “White Power,” words seemingly directed towards the opposing team’s black players. The sign stayed up for about 30 seconds before school officials rushed over and demanded they pull it down. Later, some parents tried to rationalize the incident, saying it was just a mistake and a coincidence that two students just so happened to hold up those two signs side-by-side.
Dale Hansen, a sportscaster for ABC News in Dallas, whom you may remember from his report last February where he defended Michael Sam, is having none of that.
Hansen admittedly comes from a racist upbringing where his father would regularly refer to the lone black family from the town he grew up in as “good people,” while using the N-word to refer to any black person he didn’t know on a personal level. Long ago, he realized the fault in that logic.
“The one black family [my dad] knew were good people; all the others he didn’t know, they were the bad people. The ignorance in that reasoning if you think about it long enough will twist your mind, and it twisted mine. 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.”
Hansen went on to say that he’s confident ignorance can and will change, and he is walking proof of that. But not if we continue to defend what cannot be defended.
Well said, Dale.
