Salt Lake City, Utah, is not known for being racially diverse.
As a Black athlete playing in the city, former Utah Jazz basketball player Donovan Mitchell talked about his “draining” experience with racism in Salt Lake City in an exclusive interview with Andscape.
After spending his first five seasons in the National Basketball Association (NBA) with the Jazz, Mitchell was traded to the Cleveland Cavaliers in the offseason. He went from playing in a predominantly white city to a mostly Black one, but the change was a welcomed one for the All-Star guard.
“It’s a little comforting for me, 100%. I’m not going to lie about that. It’s no secret there’s a lot of stuff that I dealt with being in Utah off the floor. If I’m being honest with you, I never really said this, but it was draining. It was just draining on
my energy just because you can’t sit in your room and cheer for me and then do all these different things. I’m not saying specifically every fan, but I just feel like it was a lot of things,” Mitchell said.“A [Utah] state senator [Stuart Adams] saying I need to get educated on my own Black history. Seeing Black kids getting bullied because of their skin color. Seeing a little girl [Isabella Tichenor] hang herself because she’s being bullied.”
Mitchell went into detail about his experience being pulled over by a police officer as a Black man, although he knew that his status as the Jazz’s star afforded him the opportunity to get out of situations that the average Black person in Utah could not.
“But as far as Utah, it became a lot to have to deal with on a nightly basis,” he said. “I got pulled over once. I got an attitude from a cop until I gave him my ID. And that forever made me wonder what happens to the young Black kid in Utah that doesn’t have that power to just be like, ‘This is who I am.’ And that was one of the things for me that I took to heart.”
Mitchell played against Utah on Monday. The Cavaliers won 120 to 99.