A Different State of Race Relations

Utah state Sen. Chris Buttars came under fire for saying of a bill: "This baby is black. . . . It's a dark, ugly thing." (By Scott G. Winterton -- Deseret Morning News)

"A lot of times people tell me -- like it's a big revelation -- that I'm the only black person they know," she said. "And it's a lot of pressure. I have to be on my best behavior. I don't want their one experience to be a bad one."

"We all have to come with our 'A' game," said Tamu Smith, who was raised in Southern California as a niece of Black Panthers, joined the Mormon church as a teenager and moved to Provo in 1996. "We don't have room to let things penetrate and offend us. If I'm speaking somewhere, I have to be twice as prepared as the white person."

Indeed, black people here have learned to regard themselves as ambassador-pioneers: every man a Sidney Poitier, every woman a Diahann Carroll.

Cameos occur: When Griffin was voted secretary of the Utah Correctional Association, the 300 people casting ballots did not lay eyes on him until he rose, expecting the applause showered on every other winner asked to stand. What greeted him instead was "exactly" the silence Cleavon Little encounters in "Blazing Saddles," when his character, the black sheriff, enters a small Western town.

"I've had so many weird experiences like that," said Griffin. "I went to San Francisco, and people didn't stare at me. And it made me very uncomfortable, because everyone always stares at me."

Arriving in the same city, Doriena Lee, 59, phoned her mother. "Guess what," she said, "there are lots of us here!" Raised in Salt Lake, a city with so few, "I didn't think there were very many black people in the world."

The underside of such seclusion is evident not only in Buttars's "dark, ugly" remark in February, but also in his responses to the ensuing uproar. He complained of being persecuted by a "hate lynch mob" and finally asked, "How do I know what words I'm supposed to use in front of those people?"

"You can find racism anywhere in the United States, but it really is sort of magnified in a place like Utah, where it's been nurtured in relative isolation," said Alex LeMay, director of "Desert Bayou," a documentary on the abrupt arrival of 600 Hurricane Katrina evacuees at a Utah military base in 2005.

"The governor asked me to do on-the-spot cultural competency," said Styles, who briefed white officials on what to expect when the evacuees came and summoned as many local black people as he could find. "It was important that African Americans were the first faces they saw, to take some of the edge off."

After being patted down, the evacuees were showered with an outpouring of aid, including jobs that were better, said several African Americans who grew up in Salt Lake, than what they expected to see open to blacks.

"They were well-received initially," the Rev. Davis said. "But after a while, people began complaining of being stared at."

Most eventually returned East. But a couple hundred remain in Utah.