A Different State of Race Relations

[flashl]

With Few Blacks Living There, Utah Is Feeling Its Way

SALT LAKE CITY -- Earlier this year, a state senator stood on the statehouse floor here and spoke disparagingly of a pending bill. "This baby is black," said Sen. Chris Buttars, a Republican, adding, "It's a dark, ugly thing."

Weary of talking about race? Come to the Beehive State, where race relations is a topic of bracing freshness.

Here, basic issues of sensitivity -- what is spoken of aloud and what is best left unsaid, assumptions good and bad, all the delicate matters that in so many parts of the country have been burnished to exquisite subtleties by worry and constant attention -- are still very basic indeed.

Take what happened to Tamu Smith.

Smith was in cosmetology class when she felt a hand on her head. A classmate was handling her hair.

"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.' "

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?"

Washington Post

[noamnety]

1. k&r

more people probably need to read this.

[Name removed]

2. Deleted message

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