I watched with horror over the summer as angry shouts and tiki torches filled the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia. I mourned the death of Heather Heyer, murdered by a hateful man motivated by fear and loathing of people not enough like him.
I watched with horror, but not surprise.
This was the same country, after all, that spent years questioning the legitimacy of the nation’s first black president. This was the same country that had just elevated the leader of this clan of “birthers” to the highest office in the land.
From the day the first African slave was forced to set foot in America, this country’s culture has questioned whether black people were really Americans. That argument launched a 2016 presidential campaign and, ultimately gave us our current president. So what happened in Charlottesville was ugly and despicable, but it didn’t come from nowhere.
The chants of the tiki-Nazis were racist, but racism doesn’t always march in the streets. It is still rearing its immoral head all around the country. Today, racism often looks like the Facebook comments of an uninformed partisan.
Thanks to the work of the Alliance for a Better Utah, past statements of Sandy City Councilmember Steve Smith have come to light. Among other comments disparaging an entire race of Americans, Smith claims that black people don’t want to get jobs or be productive members of society. According to him, those things are only associated with white people.
When ABU asked him to remove the statements and apologize for their content, Mr. Smith doubled down. He insisted that he was right in what he said, and added for good measure that black people are fully to blame for racial inequality and anti-black police brutality.
Never mind the long history of Jim Crow, lynching, voter intimidation, and redlining that created deep and enduring racial inequality that still exists today.
Never mind the official government reports finding racism in the practices of the police forces of Chicago, Baltimore, and Ferguson.
Never mind the facts. Mr. Smith just “knows” that black people are to blame for our current situation.
When our culture takes more offense at the word racism than at actual racism, it’s time for us to make a stand. And I can think of no better person to make that stand, right now in Utah, than the only African American to ever hold federal office from our great state.
So, with that in mind, I call on Rep. Mia Love to condemn the racism of Councilmember Steve Smith.
Now, I realize some people might say Mr. Smith’s comments are not racist. Hopefully most will see them for what they are. Let’s be clear: Saying that black people don’t have the same ambitions to realize the American dream as their white neighbors is racist. My lifetime of experience as a black woman in America has shown me racism is real. It is not and will never be simply “in the eye of the beholder.” The insidious laziness of moral relativism must not be applied to racism.
Representative Love, please pick a side.
Darlene McDonald is running for Congress in Utah’s 4th District. She works as a technical analyst at a large technology company in Lehi, Utah. She and her husband have seven children and live in Millcreek.