Two Racist Incidents Reported in Beginning of U’s Fall 2022 Semester
University of Utah Campus in Salt Lake on Oct. 11, 2020. (Photo by Jake Stranzl | The Daily Utah Chronicle)
September 4, 2022
Nearly a week before the start of the University of Utah’s Fall 2022 Semester, a white male completing a delivery on campus threatened and verbally attacked a Black professor with racial slurs while he was waiting for public transportation. On the weekend after the first week of classes, a resident of campus housing reported another student for saying sexual things to female residents and yelling a racial slur.
Earlier this year, the Black Cultural Center was targeted by a bomb threat when a crisis center in California received a call from a 17-year-old boy who “claimed to have planted bombs at several buildings at colleges and universities around the country, including the BCC.” Other incidents of bias and their statuses can be found on the One U Thriving website, with guidance from the U to “be vigilant and speak up.”
Interim Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs Martell Teasley, Vice President for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Mary Ann Villarreal, Vice President for Student Affairs Lori McDonald and Chief Safety Officer Keith Squires released a joint statement about the two incidents in August on Sept. 2.
“Until members of our Black community can work, and study, and live at the University of Utah without the threat of outsiders or insiders assaulting them with words and actions, it will remain unacceptable,” the statement read.
The statement also included different policy changes that have been made in response to similar incidents — they strengthened their code of conduct, escalated student consequences for prejudice and bias-motivated behaviors and increased awareness about the Racist and Bias Incident Response Team through marketing campaigns.
“We updated our changes to ensure that the use of racial epithets will not be tolerated,” Teasley said. “We want it to be known that microaggressions and racial epithets would not be tolerated. So that was much more defined in our student code of conduct.”
Teasley said the individual who was threatened by the delivery person was stricken and afraid. The incident has now been labeled a hate crime.
“[This] actually lends itself to other people who may be afraid of such activities on campus, which is why we released a statement and basically stated that … such incidents will not be tolerated and we will promote a safe campus as possible for our students, faculty and staff,” Teasley said.
According to Teasley, the U wanted to be as transparent as possible as soon as possible with the community.
“I can assure you that the university will continue its investigation process and take appropriate action,” Teasley said.
For the campus community, and specifically students and faculty of color, Teasley wants to assure them that the U will do its best to create safe environments for students to go to class and engage in activities without being threatened.
“If such activities happen, we will take swift and immediate action to cease and desist such action, and maybe even remove such individuals from campus who are perpetrating such activities,” Teasley said.
In the specific description of the Aug. 16 hate crime, the U stated their commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion, saying this incident “is rooted in the hateful act of striking fear among our community members.”
“These targeted acts leave our Black students, staff and faculty feeling overwhelmed, exhausted, angry, and continuously on edge,” the description read. “While we work to ensure that they can find a place of safety and belonging as a part of our campus community, we know that is not enough.”
In the description for the Aug. 28 incident, bystander intervention was noted as a way to combat such harm.
The statement made by U leadership highlighted that while the U is launching investigations and working with law enforcement to pursue penalties against perpetrators, “it falls to each of us to rebuild the lost support, security and sense of belonging that comes each time these incidents occur.”
“We affirm that the U community includes the Black community and other impacted communities, and we will continue to work to strengthen the protective power of inclusion, acceptance and appreciation within our collective until each of us feels welcome, whether we are professors, students, health care workers or others,” the statement concluded.
Individuals can report an incident involving racism and/or bias via this public form.
John Hedberg • Sep 5, 2022 at 7:41 am
I’m not black, but I feel for you. I’ve been ugly and poor most of my life, a combination I don’t recommend, even among people who look and speak like you, because you’ll get bullies and bigots even from your own “community” if you “look funny” to people, and they tend to come for you in groups when you’re alone, being cowards and unsure of their convictions.
You’re not going to like this, but you just have to let people’s words roll off your back like water. “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” may be your grandma’s old saying, but hurt feelings are part of life, and after a while, you can actually start to find your accusers funny for attacking you because of how you look: they’re so superficial! It really is kind of funny how dumb and child-like they act in the midst of all this supposed “enlightenment” and “education” and “mindfulness”. Even while they consider themselves advanced, they still find time to throw bad language and aspersions at you, to harass and make your life harder, because that’s how true advancement and progress present and show themselves: infantile insensitive behavior! 😋
Just FYI, but when I moved on campus, the discrimination and harassment started right away, since I’m “funny-looking” and ugly to most people. Just like this black professor, I had hateful language launched my way many times at dining hall (Peterson) by students, where twice, other students anonymously called the cops on me just for quietly eating my dinner, and the cops refused to reveal the harassers. Two school employees deliberately harassed me for months, while I tried to get them to see me as human by talking and joking around with them, to ‘no avail’. One Chartwells employee started charging me a different rate at dining hall than everyone else, and when I finally said something to HRE about it, without looking at any evidence besides how ugly I look, they pronounced me the “aggressor”, barred me from dining hall for a semester, and put a block on my next-semester registration if I didn’t comply with their punishment protocol, punishment for being the target of discrimination and actually trusting that they’d give a sh**. 😊
Incidentally, I was also physically assaulted twice at Peterson, and when I reported it to the head of HRE Social Justice, she actually told me, “It’s good when it happens to someone like you; now you know how it feels”. As if I haven’t been beaten up and harassed for being poor and ugly since earliest grade school. My Mom’s an addict, and we (my sibs) did not grow up in a dainty way, so my wardrobe was scarce, patched, holey, and often not terribly clean. Much like me! I was a “free school breakfast and lunch” kid, often had 1 haircut per year, and for some reason I got in fights all the time – other people of all colors and identities looked down on me for some reason – for being poor & ugly, an easy target.
From the week I moved into HRE housing, the U was no different. Plenty of negative comments and harassment, and zero backup from HRE or anyone in the administration. Zero backup among other students, who like many people see something they don’t like or understand, find they’re afraid, then paint their fear onto you like you’re to blame for their feelings, like your existence is somehow to blame for the fact that they have no adult control or self-accountability. And so they dump all their worst feelings onto you, make up justifications for their hatred so they can excuse themselves for being inhuman, and somehow there you stand, a dehumanized living target, having to clean up after all these grown people who never seem to stop telling everyone how virtuous and adult they are, how progressive and enlightened, even while they harass you in groups for their own childish feelings while you’re completely isolated and alone.
So, I feel for the black folks on campus who’ve had bad language thrown at them, and who got a scary phone call. I’ve had to endure the same, from “people of color” just as much as from others, from “people in responsible positions” just as much as from students, all of whom say they know better than to be bigots, while they take out their base insecurities on me because they decide they don’t like how I make them feel (the feelings they don’t like are always, always your responsibility, never their own, as equal adults).
Unfortunately, “ugly & poor” isn’t an official protected group, there are no safe spaces, the negative comments come from people who should know better, but who sometimes figure it’s “their turn”, and so people who are ugly and poor end up leaving school, or they commit suicide. The University’s Code of Conduct isn’t written to hold the university accountable to students, quite the opposite, so essentially as a student under constant bombardment, you have zero power even to hold the school to account to protect you or provide justice: they just don’t seem to look at students as valuable human beings, and so the code is not written for our protection, or even for our better interests as human beings, as long as we continue to provide blood (important funding) to the institution which feeds on us~! 😂
Anyway, we’re all brothers and sisters, children of the same Infinite Love, all equally valuable in our individual diversities, fallible yet forgivable, as children are, full of error and promise, always lovable if we’re willing to look with Love at one another and, as Atticus Finch said, “walk in each other’s shoes” for a while, just to taste each other’s humanity for a moment, and identify with each other.
Love is not a feeling which happens to you, but a choice in how we look at others, and how we choose to act for their well-being and better interests, for their happiness. It does not ‘come easy’, especially when you’re under fire!, but I find it always leaves me feeling like I was true to myself, for providing for others what I wished so often others had provided for me, when I was struggling. I feel complete somehow when I show people the mercy I often didn’t get, often at the times they didn’t expect it themselves. That can change you on the inside, even as it changes others in that same positive way!
Love one another!
Or whine and complain and hate other people, in the same way you complain they whine and hate toward you, and that circle leads right down the drain, no one ever getting any happier, healthier, or wiser before everything implodes, as it always does (the 20th Century is littered with examples of Marxist and Fascist identity politics resulting in the needless deaths of innocent neighbors and family members, by the tens of millions! We know better, having read history~)
Have the Best Time You Can, with Love, always
J Hedberg