Throughout a women’s volleyball match at BYU, Duke University’s only Black player was repeatedly harassed with racial slurs and physical threats. Dozens of spectators were close enough to hear and identify the offender.
Not one intervened.
It is not enough to blithely say, “Oh, he wasn’t even a student.” It is not enough to ban the perpetrator from future events. It is not good enough to assume that BYU’s apology, however sincere, will or should be the end of it.
Brigham Young University is a highly visible face of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Like it or not, outsiders will judge the church and the people of Utah by what happens there.
Referring to those who stood by while felonies were committed on campus, then BYU president Jeffrey R. Holland asked, “Was everyone’s education yet so paltry that none had ever heard Edmund Burke’s telling dictum, ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men (or women) to do nothing’?”
That was 40 years ago. In Provo, Elder Holland’s lesson still hasn’t been learned.
Dean Meservy
Sandy, Utah