good news

I fell behind on my podcasts of KC Currents. Remind me to never do that again. For the past several days I've been listening to shows dating back to early March thinking, How can I afford to miss this stuff?

Allie and I are good friends with the show's producer. So maybe you ought to ignore my praise. But still. The show kicks ass.

Highlights:

• UMKC's new provost unwittingly (?) reveals that he doesn't even understand the meaning of "institutional racism."
  
• There are Bollywood movies in JoCo.
  
• Lewis Diuguid and Glenn Rice talking about the N-word.
  
• A provocative interview with an author who started a black-and-white-member book club.
  
• Cool "taking it to the streets" interviews about race, immigration and money.
  
• Great coverage of the immigration controversy (including a tough interview of Dennis Moore).
  
• Michelle Singletary!
  
• An interesting story (for a change) about Buck O'Neil.
  
• Good perspective on the Boys and Girls Club racism lawsuit.
  
• A terrific personal essay about race and the movies by host Delores Jones.
  

All of these are great fodder for blog entries. And I'll probably tee off on a couple of them at some point. But for now I just want to express my general appreciation.

What I like is how they have enough time and space to give these stories, issues and ideas the room they need in order to be developed and understood. I can't think of any other news source in town that's doing that right now. Maybe Kraske's show does. But I can't find a podcast of it, so it's hard for me to be a regular listener. At any rate, this is something Kansas City really needs.

And since I'm friends with the host, I know she wouldn't truly appreciate the praise without a little criticism mixed in. So...

I'd like to see hear them offer a little more reporting on whiteness. Definitely tough to get at, though I think they got it in their segment about race and film, in which they interviewed an unusually aware white film critic, and the piece about the guy and the mixed-race book club -- he was white and honest about whiteness.

The show would be a true maverick nationally if it were to plunge fearlessly into the Heart of Whiteness from time to time. It's definitely the elephant in the room, um, of diversity. (And, yeah, it's actually kind of pink, so I think the metaphor works -- until the room part.)