In Utah, blacks feel the race sting

Cite ignorance and innocence

SALT LAKE CITY - Earlier this year, a state senator stood on the State House floor and spoke disparagingly of a pending bill. "This baby is black," said Senator 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?"

While Buttars's cutting remark about an offending piece of legislation was, the Rev. France A. Davis said, "the kind of thing you'd see when I was growing up in Georgia," the controversy was finally put to rest when the senator apologized before Davis's mostly black congregation at Calvary Baptist Church, which knew a teaching moment when it saw one.

"There is kind of a time warp," said Darius Gray, an African-American and producer of the documentary "Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons." "We are a bit slow on the uptake here."

Indeed, with race an inescapable part of the presidential campaign, blacks in Utah say their experiences serve as a reminder of the awkward times that most of the nation has moved beyond.

"We do ourselves a disservice if we only just look forward," Gray said, "because then we fail to recognize the distance traveled."

Yesterday, the Associated Press reported that a Utah company offering online a sock monkey named for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said it didn't mean to anger anyone with a "cute and cuddly" toy that some are calling racist.

"We simply made a casual and affectionate observation one night, and a charming association between a candidate and a toy we had when we were little," according to a statement issued yesterday by Sock Obama LLC.

Jeanetta Williams, president of the Salt Lake City chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, called the toy "pure racism at its extreme."

Less than 1 percent of the state's 2.6 million people are African-American, including several hundred Hurricane Katrina evacuees who arrived by chartered jet and were frisked upon landing.

Consider also that, until 1978, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints preached that black skin was the mark of Cain - a curse.

But also recognize, black residents say, the mix of ignorance, presumption, and often an almost touching innocence that animate their stories about living in a place where most white people appear to be well intentioned but simply do not know very many black people, and are not sure how to act.