Mia Love: Utahns care nothing about race
theGRIO REPORT - Mia Love will soon be the first black Republican woman to serve in Congress - but that's not the message she wants you to hear or focus on. In an interview with CNN, Love repeated her boot-strapping refrain...
Mia Love will soon be the first black Republican woman to serve in Congress – but that’s not the message she wants you to hear or focus on.
In an interview with CNN, Love repeated her boot-strapping refrain: That Utahns only care about “electing individuals based on honesty, integrity and the values we hold dear.”
Love has focused not on race but on her story of individual grit and determination. Her parents fled Haiti’s dictatorship in the 1970s and arrived in the United States with just $10 to their names. Now, they are comfortably in the middle class after years of hard work.
Love’s focus on individualism and work ethic is a politically smart choice in Utah, a state that still suffers from latent racial bias in its voters according to two surveys, one in 2012 and one in 2014, by Brigham Young University’s Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy.
Long-term studies have also shown that Utahns have little tolerance for affirmative action and that 49% of Utahns polled do not believe that “generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class.”
Utah is overwhelmingly white, with an African-American population of only 1.5%, but Mia Love assured the Salt Lake Tribune that she has never been a victim of racism.
In the 2012 election, Love lost to incumbent Jim Matheson by only 768 votes. This year’s election saw her win by a 3% margin.
