Back to the BYU Cougars Newsfeed

Rolly: How my childhood encounter with a group of minority kids taught me that you can trust those who look different from you

Ethnicity has become a thorny issue in the era of Donald Trump, with the president zeroing in on certain minority groups as “the others” you can’t trust.

His calls for building a wall to keep out the “murderers” and “rapists” from Mexico and his proposed bans on Muslim immigrants and refugees have energized ugly elements in society that helped elect him.

I’ve heard stories about emboldened bigots yelling at people of color to “get out of our country” and “go back to where you came from.”

That happened to my neighbor, a Ute tribal member who has lived in Utah all his life but was told to go back to Mexico by a woman driving past him in a grocery store parking lot.