Utah gears up for forum on prejudice

Community leaders posed a host of ethical questions about prejudice, race and hate on Thursday in preparation for an international conference on prejudice to be held in Salt Lake City next month.

A luncheon meeting at the Utah Cultural Celebration Center featured Utah first lady Mary Kaye Huntsman; Michael Styles, director of the state Office of Black Affairs; Leticia Medina, director of Utah Issues; and Sherry Zemlick, a member of the Utah Psychological Association Task Force exploring the state's religious divide.

Their "Perspectives on Prejudice" was meant to serve as a springboard for a conference by the same name, to be held Dec. 1-4 and featuring a wide variety of papers, panels, workshops, film and small group discussion sessions. Several internationally known psychologists and researchers from top universities and a United Nations staffer will present during the four-day event at the Little America Hotel downtown.

During the luncheon, Huntsman told a group of nearly 150 people that her recent billboard campaign — which featured one-word epithets like "looser," "lazy," "terrorist" and "ghetto" — came out of discussions with a group of local teen ambassadors who represent various ethic, religious, geographic and disability groups. The labels were meant to create questions among observers about why such negative labels are prevalent in daily conversation, particularly among teens at school.

When the billboards were taken down, she said it represented a symbolic "tearing down" of the tolerance Utahns have for the hate generated by such words. "We received calls thanking us for challenging people to remove them" from daily speech, she said.

Huntsman told of one young man named Andrew, who had been labeled at his former school and spent one summer building his self-esteem so he could start fresh in a new place. But the verbal taunting began the very first day, and he was subsequently thrown into a garbage can, rolled into a locker room and forced to the ground on the football field, where he was made to repeat all the labels that others had attached to him.

When he walked home that day, he e-mailed a friend this short line: "They say 'Rest in Peace' " at the cemetery. "I hope I will."

Labeling doesn't come naturally to children, but it does begin somewhere, whether at home or at school. One local Muslim girl told Huntsman she was initially taunted for wearing a head scarf to school in reverence for her faith, but after 9/11, the persecution reached a fever pitch.