I wrote this back in July. At the time I hadn't thought that I'd ever want to go back to Utah. Since then, I've had a change of heart at least as far as going back there for school. I still wouldn't ever raise my family there. But it's not that bad when you have friends and family. They help you overlook some of the worst parts. I think that the companionship is the important part. We're social creatures, as primates, after all. And so, while I might be returning to the Y to finish my Masters, I still probably won't live there unless BYU offers me a teaching position.
It’s cloudy out, but I can feel the sun. People say that we don’t have sun in Seattle. I love this city. The clouds really do suck sometimes, but you get used to it. I’m grateful that I grew up in this place. Of all the areas in this country, I think that this was the friendliest place I could have possibly grown up. My parents, in contrast, grew up in both a very different place, and a very different time. I felt some of that time when I went to Utah for school. In Seattle, race and ethnicity stare us in the face every time we leave the house. It’s a multi-cultural, multi-racial city, a true melting pot—I love it. I was far from the only mixed race child in any of my classes. Because it was so normal, because everyone looked different, it wasn’t necessarily something that divided any of us growing up. My best friends in elementary school, Michael and David, were both white kids. I’m still friends with them now. I don’t think that the topic of race as ever come up between us, whether positive or negative. Maybe I was just being naive, but I never had to deal with any of that. In high school, we just asked kids what they were, and it was pretty cool to find out everyone’s differing heritage. Even going from Seattle to the more affluent suburb of Bellevue, I didn’t really notice the difference. People were just people. It didn’t matter if they were black or white. I didn’t see color. This is part of what makes Seattle so beautiful to me. It doesn’t matter who I marry, I am pretty sure that my children won’t experience the stark, harsh realities of racism and discrimination until they are old enough to deal with it.
Unfortunately, I found out that I was different for the first time when I was about six years old. At my grandmother’s house, one of the places where you’d figure a young boy would be safest. My mom had just gotten married to my step dad, Mark (who was a white man, but honestly, it’s never even something I’ve thought about). I was playing in my grandma’s woodpile with my cousin, Ryan. He was a few years older than me, about eight or nine. We were playing knights. We would take the sticks that looked the most like swords, and duel with them until we got called to eat meals in the evening. These meals were usually pretty good, except for when my cousin Kelly was making her famous (or infamous) macaroni-ramen. I was the only person who couldn’t stand it. It’s probably a good thing, since a serving of this culinary chimera contained about two week’s worth of sodium. It was just after one such meal, and we were playing down in the woodpile, engaged in a furious display of juvenile swordplay, when the neighbor boy from the trailer down the road approached, his dirty clothes and greasy blonde hair were a stark contrast to both Ryan and I, who were dressed in clean new clothes despite the fresh dusting of Idaho dirt that covered the both of us.
“Hey, Ryan!” He called out in a country drawl. “Come play!”
Ryan groaned. He had never liked this boy. One of the Barney kids. They were bad news. He called back at him “I can’t, I’m playing already.”
He looked at me, and made a face. “Why you playing with a nigger?”
It didn’t really sink in exactly what he was saying, at least, not to me. Ryan knew exactly what he was saying, and he was pretty deeply offended on my behalf. “He’s my cousin,” he said. I heard the anger in his voice, but I was only six at the time, and I hadn’t quite connected the anger in his voice with what the other boy had said.
The boy made another face, his dirty, freckly nose crinkling. “You got a nigger for a cousin?”
I heard it that time. I hadn’t heard that word in real life before. I’d heard it on TV. I knew that it meant something bad. I knew he was calling me something bad because my skin was browner than his. I didn’t even really understand the implications. All I knew at the time was that he was calling me a name. I didn’t like it. I felt my eyes tearing up, and my lip quivered. I didn’t want to cry, I just knew that boy was being mean.
“Shut up!” Ryan yelled at the other boy. The other boy looked mad. He noticed that I had started crying.
“Hey, the nigger is crying!”
Something snapped inside me. I picked up my stick, and I ran toward him. I swung it as hard as I could, and my stick connected solidly with his nose and mouth. The boy fell backward onto his rump in the dust. I dropped my stick and ran toward my grandparents’ house. I could hear him scrambling after me as I bounded up the steps two at a time. Ryan yelled frantically at the other boy to leave me alone. I tore through the door and the first person I saw was Mark. I threw myself around his waist and started crying. He asked what was wrong. I told him what the other boy had said. His face clouded over and he looked at the other boy, whose face was framed in the screen door. The boy shrunk back from the anger in that gaze. Mark walked outside and began yelling at the other boy in my defense. This experience taught me quite a few things. I was different than a lot of people, and some people would be mean to me because of it. It had also taught me that some people don’t see differences at all and are willing to look after you just the same.
I was a lot older before it made a difference again. This time, I was in Utah, at Brigham Young University. I remember driving through the gates of the university, having no idea what to expect. I definitely wasn’t expecting my roommates to be inordinately excited to have a black roommate. Until this time, I hadn’t really thought that much about how race is part of self definition, particularly for black men. If I’d lived my entire life in Seattle, I’m sure that I would have experienced some different treatment with regards to race. After all, this is America, and if recent political events have taught us anything, the race question is inseparably entwined with the culture of this country. Even in a place that’s seemingly as colorblind as Seattle, it becomes an issue. This issue is probably magnified by my religion. I’m a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints—also known as Mormons, a religion with a history fraught with racial conflict and inequality. Despite this, it’s the only church where I feel comfortable with the backbone of the doctrines. That is why I am a member. There isn’t a logical explanation. Logic kept me away from the church for five years. Against all the logic, it’s the only place that I’ve really felt happy. That said, the Mormons that I know back home in Seattle are far different from the ones that I met in Utah.
I don’t like Utah. I think it's boring. I think that Provo is only a fun place for those people who can't bring themselves to grow up. I think it’s ugly, brown, and full of self righteous conservative idiots. This is not to say that every person that’s a conservative is an idiot. Quite to the contrary, I know several conservatives that are probably more intelligent than I am. I also know many liberals that live in Utah, who are also more intelligent than me. However, I do know that there is a large number of people who I find disagreeable. I got called the infamous “N-word” a lot more when I was in Utah than any time since. My freshman year, I hung out with a group of students who weren’t very good people, simply because they were the “cool” group to hang with. We did a lot of stupid things, including driving around with a megaphone hollering at cute girls. I’m pretty certain that a lot of the people that I know now wouldn’t have been friends with me back then. One of the things that led to me leaving this “crew” was the fact that so many of my “friends” would make racist jokes simply to see my reaction. I have a good sense of humor, but the jokes grew more and more mean spirited, and the words used more and more offensive. These boys regularly made it clear that they only found white women attractive, and held white people in higher esteem than other ethnicities. To be fair, not all of these boys were from Utah, but they also weren’t from the place that I call home. That doesn’t help how I feel about the place.
To be fair, I met a lot of really good people there too. My track teammates were all awesome people, as well as my coaches. And the friends that I met after my freshman year and lots of the guys from my ward that I got closer to later in the year were great as well. Even so, if I had known what Utah was going to be like, I probably wouldn’t have gone. That’s probably good that I didn’t know, because I do have a lot of good friends that I met down there, people who changed my life positively, as well as people who changed my life negatively.
Some of these people who changed my life positively were my fellow Black students at the Y. Despite the small number of black students at BYU, the few of us that lived there tended to bond together. We formed a tight knit community in order to escape the discrimination and ostracizing of our peers. Several of my closest friends, whom I consider family, I met in Utah. Although I have made some of my greatest friends there (black, white and many other ethnicities), I would never want to put my children through the racist environment that I encountered. Give me Seattle, Washington, and more people like my friends that I grew up with, of all colors and hues, than the homogenous environment of Utah, with its intolerance and bigotry any day. To get away from this, I would gladly take the rain. Am I bitter? Yes, I would say that I am. But that’s all right. I would rather be bitter at a state and an idea of the type of person that I don’t like, than to be prejudiced against all the people that are different from me. Utah can be a good place, and I’m sure that some people had better experiences than I had. But, I wouldn’t want to bank my kids’ happiness on it.
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