{"id":815,"date":"2008-06-05T08:55:50","date_gmt":"2008-06-05T12:55:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/?p=815"},"modified":"2008-06-05T08:56:26","modified_gmt":"2008-06-05T12:56:26","slug":"white-as-the-salt-flats-race-in-utah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/?p=815","title":{"rendered":"White as the Salt Flats: Race in Utah"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"White<\/a><\/p>\n

“This baby is black. It’s a dark, ugly thing.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Utah State Senator Chris Buttars was talkng about a pending bill when, in February, he uttered those words<\/a> on the statehouse floor.<\/p>\n

In the uproar that followed, he called the NAACP-led protest against his remarks a “hate lynch mob,” adding “How do I know what words I’m supposed to use in front of those people?”<\/p>\n

So it states in this compelling Washington Post<\/em> examination<\/a> of white and non-white relations in the great state of Utah. Black people make up less than 1% of the population\u2014indeed, some residents say there are still parts where white pepole have never seen a Black person.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, in the ultra-powerful Mormon church, based in Salt Lake City, the capitol, Black people were deemed “cursed,” by religious decree, as recently as 1978.<\/p>\n

Repeatedly, in the piece, those living there speak of Utahn “naivete” as something with the oft-sharp slap of racism, but arising out of, another word used often, “innocence”; a racial clumsiness not coming, perhaps, from hostility, but from a lack of familiarity about how to interact with Black people.<\/p>\n

Like, for example, the experience of Tania Paxton, “a TV camerawoman who arrived from back East in 1992 and found in the clear mountain air contrasts of a brightness usually seen in cartoons.”<\/p>\n

She recalls how, “‘My first week here, one of the camera operators who was training me was asking me to teach him how to talk jive.'”<\/p>\n

There were also the trials of Tamu Smith, a hairdresser. She remembers being<\/p>\n

in cosmetology class when she felt a hand on her head. A classmate was handling her hair.<\/p>\n

“And I said, ‘Don’t ever touch my hair without asking me,’ ” Smith said. “And she was like, ‘Well, I can touch your hair.’ And I was like, ‘What?’ And she was like, ‘I can touch your hair because I’ve never touched black people’s hair before.’ ”<\/p>\n

It was after a supervisor was summoned that, as Smith recalls, the classmate whined a question that, a decade later, still strikes at the poignant and suddenly timely essence of being black in Utah: “If I don’t get to touch Tamu’s hair, then what black person’s hair am I ever going to touch?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Keep in mid, however, that according to the most recent 2005 census, Utah is a veritable Mississippi\u2014the Blackest state\u2014compared to some others; it’s only the 8th whitest state in the U.S. (White people dominate the populations of all U.S. states except Hawai’i.)<\/p>\n

It is less white than, in ascending order of whiteness, Wyoming, Iowa, West Virginia, Idaho, New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont. So go for yours.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“This baby is black. It’s a dark, ugly thing.” Utah State Senator Chris Buttars was talkng about a pending bill when, in February, he uttered those words on the statehouse floor. In the uproar that followed, he called the NAACP-led protest against his remarks a “hate lynch mob,” adding “How do I know what words […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[46,33,31,20],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=815"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8052,"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815\/revisions\/8052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}