Thread by @iamdarlenemcd

Let’s talk about this. Cari Bartholomew is a District 13 Republican State Board of Education candidate. It's speculated that she, along with husband ‘podcaster’ Adam  Bartholomew, play a large role in the recent “Furries” faux-rage in order to bolster her campaign. #utpol #USBE

Full Disclosure: I have a history with Cari. It’s safe to say that I do not hold her in high regards. Cari is bi-racial (black and white). Her social and political views toward Black people, culture and history are deeply troubling and align with those of the recently ousted right-wing love child Candace Owens. In fact, Cari once bragged about writing Owens' anti-CRT script. She and Owens exhibit extreme internalized racism that’s harmful and exploited by organizations like Utah Parents United and Turning Point USA and people like Natalie Cline and Charlie Kirk.

People incorrectly believe that I have a problem with African Americans who are Republicans. I do not. I can say that there are a few Black Republicans that I hold in high esteem. I call them friends. There is a very key difference between them and Ms. Cari and even @BurgessOwens.

The allegiance with your political party shouldn’t be dependent upon your embrace of white supremacy and anti-blackness. I am very critical of and hard on Black people who exhibit anti-black racism. I make no apologies for that. None. I call them out without resorting to the usual derogatory name-calling of so-called ‘sell-outs.’ I do not agree with that. We are not monolithic voters. At the same time, an allegiance to a political party shouldn’t be at the expense of those that happen to look like you, while you claim you are not them; you are ‘better.’

History shows us this never ends well.

I’m a student of history. I love history. So naturally, Ms. Cari’s comment here would be fingernails across a chalkboard to someone like me. Let’s be clear, knowing, understanding, embracing, appreciating, and educating about the Black experience in America is not racist nor is it holding onto, “victimhood.” People WERE and ARE victims of race-based atrocities.

The story of America is one that includes America’s relationship with race. There is NO WAY to eradicate that experience from our consciousness. It is coiled into the thread used to sew this country together. Not wanting to see race because it’s HARD doesn’t make this experience go away. It just gives you permission to ignore it. #eracism

We can’t ignore it.

When I first read this comment, of course major <eyeroll> . Followed by pejoratives of which I will spare you the detail. But, you get the picture.

So, in pure Darlene’s fashion because I’m a writer and writers do what…write.

A 🧵

A quick history on diversity in Utah’s public schools.

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In a 1984 interview, a Salt Lake City resident recalled that Black people were considered “ignorant and lazy and shiftless and dirty and unkempt.” There were many accounts of teachers in Utah displaying racial prejudice against their Black students. One school girl recalled that a teachers would call her “the colored child.” Another student retold the story of her teacher giving all of the white students valentine cards at Valentine’s Day, but gave none to the Black kids in the class.

Bigotry and racism was prevalent in Utah and a part of the #Utahway. So much so, local African American residents called the state “the eleventh Southern state.” (I've not found how that nickname came about nor who started it. For educational purposes, the Confederate States of America was made up by the 11 seceding states of South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina)

In 1972, a music instructor at West High School, was heard unabashedly calling two Black students “nig-ers.” Rather than fire the teacher, the Salt Lake School District suspended him and agreed to hire black teachers.

That’s how Ms. Alberta Henry became the first Black person hired by Salt Lake City School District.

However, Ms. Henry was not hired as a teacher. She was hired to be a liaison between the Salt Lake School District and the Black communities.

In May 1977, Ms. Henry took part in a study that was released by the U.S Commission on Civil Rights entitled School Desegregation in Ogden, Utah (Found here: ).

(More about Ms. Alberta Henry: )www2.law.umaryland.edu/marshall/usccr…
magazine.utah.edu/issues/summer-…

Ms. Henry was charged to recruit more Black teachers and she helped add Black history to the state’s social studies curriculum. Her addition to the school district wasn’t embraced by the primarily white staff.

Before Ms. Henry was hired by the school district, Black students made up about 2% of the student body with an 80% dropout rate. When Ms. Henry left a decade later, the dropout rate had decreased to 11%.

‼️ PROOF that Rep. Katy Hall, James Evans, and Sen. John Johnson claimed didn’t exist‼️

In a 1975 interview with the Salt Lake Tribune, Ms. Henry told the paper, “My primary concern is seeing that anyone, any color, gets an education if he or she wants one.”

DIVERSITY MEANS ALL

Cari Bartholomew, Burgess Owens, Candance Owens, and even Katy Hall, Candice Pierucci, and Kira Birkeland are all walking, living, breathing poster children for the successes gained by civil rights workers and DEI-initiatives. Knowing that and admitted it doesn't make either of them, 'victims' or holding onto relics of the past. It makes them honest story-tellers of American history.

But, let's go back to this statement and break it down in context of the person saying it.

Pull up a chair 🪑, this might be awhile.

As previous mentioned Cari Bartholomew is a bi-racial (Black/White) woman who likes to remind anyone willing to listen that while she’s ‘Black’ she's not one of those Blacks.==> Yes, that’s a thing.

She, incorrectly, believes that we (the ‘others’), don't like her because she’s different from us. Although she relishes that thought, that’s not it. It’s like telling someone waving the Confederate Flag that they are many things, but an American Patriot isn’t one of them.

So, let’s break this down.

Cari is...

a bi-racial (American history tells us that a sexual relationship between a Black man and white woman was punishable by death for Black man, banishment and/financial penalty for the white woman) woman

This interracial coupling conceived a mixed-race (Black/white) child (one drop rule means you’re Black. Census record these children as Mulatto. Derogatory term used was half-breed. This was the term I heard growing up. Education is why I don't use, today. I hope that people using 'illegal alien' rather than 'undocumented' migrants or immigrants would take note of that we can choose to not be stuck on stupid).

married to a white man (miscegenation laws banned her marriage in 30 out of the then 48 states including Utah until 1967).

In August 1980 Joseph Paul Franklin shot and killed 20-year-old Theodore (Terry) Fields and 18-year-old David Martin as they jogged through Liberty Park with two white women.

Franklin, who was previously associated with the KKK, also admitted to killing other black people, because he couldn’t tolerate interracial couples

...a bi-racial woman married to a white man, with whom she has at least one mixed-race child. (The ‘one drop rule’ dictates her child is black and would have been subjected to nation’s segregation laws unless he chose, as hundreds of thousands of fair-skinned Black people chose (including some in my own family)) to escape Jim Crow by ‘passing’ for white. They accomplish this by disowning their darker-skinned relatives.

This oftentimes saw mothers disowning children and vice versa, lest they’d be ‘found out’.

...a bi-racial woman married to a white man with a mixed-race child seeking the delegate votes at the Utah County Convention.

This likely would not have happened thanks to the marchers that crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965.

Robert Harris, a Democrat from Ogden, Utah, was the first African American elected to the Utah House of Representatives in November 1976 and served one term before losing reelection in 1978.

In November 14, 1979, conducted a solo protest against the Ku Klux Klan at the Utah State Capitol.  Harris protested the legislature’s lack of response and acknowledgement of the growing presence of the Ku Klux Klan in the state and the hate group’s efforts to recruit and spread their message of hate throughout the state. The legislature would not respond to a request made by Salt Lake’s NAACP that civic and religious organizations and government officials join in denouncing the hate group.

Yet the Legislature passed #HB261 #HB257 and tried to pass #HB451 last year based on less. You may rest assured that if Cari is a school board member, she would also choose to do nothing. #utleg

The prevalence of hate groups and white supremacy groups continues in Utah. The Southern Poverty Law Center was tracking 18 hate and anti-government groups in Utah.

Salt Lake City’s Calvary Baptist Church, one of the major Black churches in Salt Lake City receives a continuous stream of hate mail. A more recent letter was sent to Rev. France Davis, now Pastor Emeritus, saying, “you fu-king Obama luvin’ nig-er.”

Rest assured that Cari would never stand with the likes of those Obama loving....

...a bi-racial woman married to a white man with a mixed-race child seeking the delegate votes in Utah County.

In 1939, white residents signed a petition to restrict black residents to housing in just one area of Salt Lake City. The NAACP organized college students to march and lobby for a ban on racial discrimination.

Students told lawmakers they couldn’t find housing because landlords in Salt Lake City would not rent to black residents.

In 1957, University of Utah students and professors helped draft HB87, which would have made it “an offense to exclude a person from public places because of his color or national origin.”

The bill failed.

(More information found here: )

By 1963, Utah was the only state outside of the South that still didn’t have civil rights legislation.

Per Cari, we must keep these insidious things, like D.E. I, out! #DEIhuduser.gov/portal/sites/d…

Why did I take the time to write this post?

A lot of people are drawn to the things Cari says about Black people. This is evident by the election and reelections of Burgess Owens. They are two peas in a pod. They say the same things about Black people and racists white people love to hear the things they say. Their words validate them and their views.

This is NOT the way forward.

It would be a mistake to underestimate Cari Bartholomew’s candidacy.

It would be an even bigger mistake for Utah and the children in Utah’s public schools for voters to elect Cari Bartholomew to Utah’s State Board of Education. #uted #DEI #eracism #history #utpol
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