First Person: Keith Woods

Hope Dawns by Keith Woods

Every day, it seems, the massive fault lines that underlie race relations in this nation quake. A radio host or convention speaker or politician will say something, the talk shows on radio and cable television will explode in indignation, and the modern networks of digital miscommunication will buzz, click and beep their cacophonous dissonance.

These days, as an executive at a national news organization, I am party to the petty and the profound of what now passes for conversations across race. And I wonder whether optimism is a rational thing.

It's not idle musing.

Like many people I know, I've given a fair part of my adult life to working on straightening out what is bent and distorted across our differences. In times like these, when a malevolent blogger can con a nation into believing a civil rights hero is bigot, I can get mired in doubt.

There's now a thriving, prosperous industry built around fomenting anger, distrust, racial estrangement, hatred. The leaders of this industry are insincere, political, lacking of a soul, and, thus, immune to logic or conversion. They prey upon the weak-minded, the intellectually lazy, the aggressively ignorant, who so fully blend in with unapologetic racists as to form one indistinguishable whole whose seams and folds form a solid illusion, like the many threads that become a sheet.

They are abetted by a mass media that has never been especially good at nuance when it comes to handling this most fragile topic. I work in that space, returning to it in earnest lately on the bet that there is still an appetite for thoughtful exploration, even as many gorge themselves on the empty rhetoric of fast-food punditry.

In the end, it must be said that this work of mine called "diversity" is a job and it pays the bills - better sometimes than others. It's what I know and, frankly, what I'm good at, too, so it's a reasonable thing to point out that whether you're a blow-hard talking head on the radio or a soft-spoken employee of NPR, racial dysfunction can be a profit center.

I'd argue, though, that my investment goes deeper. It's no exaggeration to say that I started this work the first day I read a newspaper - while I tossed the New Orleans Times-Picayune on doorsteps as a 13-year-old paperboy. Since then, I have focused some part of my brain on understanding race.

And it's merely true, if not profound, that I have spent the last two decades trying to change the media. At the least, I want to cause journalists to cease being part of the problem; to pull this powerful thread that is the legitimate media out of the fabric of our dysfunctional discourse.

At best, I want to whisper into the dissonance a new way of thinking, listening, talking. I want to turn up the volume on the sounds of reason, truth, honest disagreement. When I re-center; when I remember that ambition, the doubt dissipates, sanity returns, and on the horizon up ahead, hope dawns.