Remember the John Mayer controversy? This seems like that. Kind of a clueless white guy with little experience with the pain of black racial history trying to be “more than average” in being close to black players. It was clear he and Shah were texting back and forth about it until he texted the recruit instead.
I don’t think a guy who grew up in the country club area of Salt Lake has any real reason to be viewed as a malevolent secret hater of black people–not exactly white sheets and stars and bars territory. A lot of casual Utah racism is just because a lot of people didn’t grow up around black people, so their information and assumptions are a grab bag of stereotypes and pop culture junk food with little real world experience to navigate what it is like to be African American in America. Some African Americans I know from the South like Utah for the same reason African Americans also settled in Seattle. They get to establish relationships on their own terms. When I was at the U a long time ago, I volunteered at the local NAACP. There were like 3,000 black people in Utah. This is before Katrina or the Somali and Sudanese refuges settlements. Utah has changed a lot but it is still kind of trying to wake up from its sleepy ignorance. BYU integrated its teams after the SEC for hells sakes. I don’t think it’s because the LDS Church hates black people more than Southern Whites, I just think there weren’t enough black people around the church to make the leadership think of it as a problem until they realized most of their members in Brazil is black under the historical American “one drop” idea. Even though West Coast schools were boycotting and a Molotov c**ktail was thrown on a basketball court over a failure to modify racist policies imposed by Brigham Young, I guess the leadership filed it in the “persecution” drawer until it realized its members needed it to change. Now the Church puts a ton of effort into outreach to change that perception. Salt Lake hosted the NAACP convention in part because LDS leadership is trying to move church perception to a better place, and it needs church members to make that shift too. My guess is Scalley is humiliated now and thought he was trying to be close to the people he is now being reported as having called slurs.
If anything folks in Utah can take from this, it’s don’t use the N word with an A as well as an R, even if a good friend of yours who happens to be black uses it with you. If you say it, it will always come out of your white face, and it as a result always has the historical meaning to it. Your intention might be “harmless” but you don’t control the impact. You don’t get a benefit, and you probably get penalized. It’s not like it’s something one would want to say anyway.
This whole situation is screwed up but it’s also totally predictable, and from a long time ago.
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