Race is not always a crisis

   Eric Deggans, author of Race Baiter, spoke this morning, first thing, and he totally changed how I felt coming into this conference.
   Based on the amusing but ultimately confusing talk at last night's reception, I was steeled for a day of fill-the-page-quick "ideas" about a list inspired by readers' online submissions of their childhood memories of the first day of school, that sort of thing.
   But Deggans has been through a refining fire since I first met him many years ago at TCA. Back then, he was the guy in the auditorium who had counted the black characters in the new shows and wanted to know why the networks had invested in so narrow a representation of the cultural diversity of our great nation. He had a point, every time. And it was the same point, every time.
  In 2008, Bill O'Reilly called him the biggest race-baiter in the country. I imagine that being singled out as anything untoward by someone like O'Reilly must be like surviving an infestation of bedbugs. You'd learn a lot. Deggans has become a relaxed and formidable advocate, and his talk this morning was smart, funny and persuasive.
   For example, "We tend to cover subjects like race and poverty the way we cover disasters," he said. But race is often a real part of the everyday, not-disaster stories we cover. Deggans says we should put the racial element in the story in an everyday manner. Could be easy, if all it requires is calling up some other member of the crowd who isn't white, or with more difficulty — noting the racial profile of a neighborhood in a noncrime report.
   For instance, I wondered, a restaurant review? And then I realized that Jenn and Eric have dealt with that very issue, and done it gracefully, only I didn't pay attention because I didn't think it was significant.
   Egad. My shallowness just never ends.
   Would adding observations about racial context be race baiting? Deggans says no.
   Would readers see it as race baiting? He says yes they would.
   He also empathized with newsrooms that can't very well hire for diversity when they're busy firing the staff. But it's worth noting that I, for example, sit in a mostly white and English-only newsroom in a state with a rapidly growing Hispanic population.
   At the very least, if I am ever able to acquire a masters degree, it ought to be in Spanish language.