SALT LAKE CITY — Reflecting on three fans making racist and lewd comments to the family of Memphis Grizzlies star Ja Morant, Dr. Darius Bost, who teaches ethnic studies at the University of Utah, asked a question a lot of Utahns are likely asking: Why is it that anger about the game often turns into racial animus?
Some Utahns are surely also asking ”Why here?”
To Bost, the racist language is a sign we need to talk about race issues, and the burden shouldn’t be on members of minority groups.
"When are we going to have a conversation about when black athletes being valued for their athletic prowess, but also still devalued because of their identities?” he said.
Watch the entire conversation between Dr. Darius Bost and Max Roth below
Utah’s black community is small enough that even when the U.S. Census Bureau gets 78,000 Americans to respond to their “Household Pulse Survey,” not enough of them are Black in Utah to get reliable statistics.
But there are enough members of racial and ethnic minorities overall, and their responses to questions about depression and anxiety illuminate difficult experiences in Utah.
The following charts represent responses to four questions, two related to depression and two to anxiety.
NOTE: The percentage shows the difference between the odds a member of Utah’s white majority would answer "yes" to the question compared to white Americans overall. Likewise, we show the difference in the odds a member of a racial or ethnic minority in Utah is to answer yes compared to members of those groups overall nationwide. We chose this metric in order to show the gap between the “Utah experience” and that of people nationwide. An example of what this means: 56% of Americans in minority communities answered yes and 59% of Utahns in those communities answered yes. Of course 59 is three more than 56, but it’s 5% more because if you have a group of 59 people, 3 represents 5 percent of the group, and is a better way to understand the difference in the numbers in the real world
