SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (Dakota News Now) – A day after Martin Luther King Day, a white Lyft driver slung racial slurs — yes, including the “N” word — and spewed stereotypes at a black passenger.
“Black people are on welfare, we steal, and all this other stuff, and I was like, ‘why did you accept my ride, then, if you don’t like black people,” said De’Andre Andrews, the passenger.
He called the police but did not press charges. Lyft condemned the driver in a statement and fired him permanently.
But the incident, which Andrews filmed on his phone, is proof that racism is very much alive, and sometimes in your face.
Andrews grew up in Oakland and has lived in South Dakota for 21 years. He said racism is more common here.
”South Dakota’s a great place to live and raise kids,” Andrews said. “It’s just that you’re going to have a few sour grapes here and there.”
Vaney Hariri moved to Sioux Falls from Buffalo 30 years ago. The local business owner, musical producer, and civic activist describes being black in South Dakota this way:
”It is evolving, and not fast enough.”
Hariri, who said he lives a wonderful life and enjoys most people in Sioux Falls, has been through incidents like the one Andrews experienced. But it’s the more subtle moments that get to Hariri, and it happens monthly, he said.
“Overt racism, I can deal with, because I know how a person feels about me, and I know where I’m wanted and where I’m not,” Hariri said. “Covert racism is the scarier part. It’s not as obvious.”
So what is “covert racism?”
Julian Beaudoin has experienced it in South Dakota for 16 years. He moved from Louisiana — where there is a much thicker black population but where he also said has far more racial indents.
He and his wife Inkka fell in love with Sioux Falls because of its collective work ethic and the caring nature of most people. And, like Hariri, for the opportunity to be a part of its rapid growth while helping it avoid the dark and deadly mistakes Midwestern metropolises like Chicago and Minneapolis made, and continue to make when it comes to the treatment of minorities as the diverse population grew.
Beaudoin is the manager of the South Dakota African-American History Museum and co-owns Swamp Daddy’s Cajun Kitchen restaurant with Inkka. Like Hariri and thousands of others in the state, he is sometimes the first black person someone has ever met in person.
His day job is a state law enforcement officer. And when in uniform, Beaudoin said “people break their necks to come to talk to me.”
When in regular street clothes, both in city streets and even in his own neighborhood — heck, his own yard — he still experiences people crossing the street the second they see him, likely out of fear he’ll harm them.
Or things like, “getting on an elevator and someone quickly pressing the button or closing the door. Or, if they can’t close the door right away, they’ll say, ‘I’ll catch the next elevator. Those things always happen.’”
On a recent trip to a men’s suit-and-tie store with a friend, one of the employees followed Beaudoin around the store.
“The questions that he asked were geared toward us not being able to afford the clothing in the store, and it made us feel very uncomfortable to the point we walked out,” said Beaudoin, who did tell store managers about the incident but took his business somewhere else.
“Those are institutional biases, institutional parts of racism that we are trying to dismantle.”
How can that be done?
”Having leaders in our community who are courageous enough to say ‘racism is here, and everyone has biases,” Beaudoin said. “Let’s learn from those biases, and change the way we interact with people that are different from us.”
This is why Hariri has been a member of several city-wide boards, like Downtown Sioux Falls, the National Kidney Foundation, Leavitt at The Falls, and the South Dakota African American History Museum.
He feels black people, which compose 6.3 percent of the Sioux Falls population, need at least one seat at all decision-making tables in the city.
And if you have to ask why it is so important that black people are represented, that’s exactly why representation is important, Hariri said.
“We need a better relationship with institutional leaders,” Hariri said. “We have virtually no representation at all in almost any significant position of power in the entire state.”
Until then, having “smarter conversations” about race will help bridge the racial barrier. This is partly why Hariri takes that seat at the table — to provide the black perspective, and it is why he has led several public online forums about racial relations, hoping people of different backgrounds will understand each other better.
What some white people don’t appreciate, he said, is white people are too often the baseline for societal standards in places like Sioux Falls, which are predominantly white.
“It’s not a matter of somebody having malicious intent,” Hariri said, “it just means ‘how am I supposed to dress professionally or how am I supposed to talk? It’s all in the context of white people. Is it professional in what we have seen socially in the last 50 years? Is it appropriate speech based on what we’ve seen socially in the last 50 years? And almost all the reference points that we have are white.”
Hariri said that race should actually not be the start of discussions about inequality in Sioux Falls.
The start, he said, should be where there is “disparity and disproportion” among income and resources in the city. The strands of disparity and disproportion will eventually lead back to the racial barriers. A much higher percentage of black people in Sioux Falls experience poverty and imprisonment and have a more difficult time affording higher education, like most places in America.
Hariri owns Think 3D Solutions, a firm that helps train leaders and develops better cultures in the business world. He said the fact that there are so few black business owners like him in South Dakota is a glaring sign that more needs to be done to foster opportunities for people who look like him.
“We need resources,” Hariri said. “We need access to education. We need access to funding. Things for people to start businesses like ours.”
Both Beaudoin and Hariri were prominent speakers at the George Floyd rally in Sioux Falls in June 2020 — the peaceful protest that was at Van Eps Park then moved to the Minnehaha County Courthouse. Beaudoin spoke next to the statue of Martin Luther King, Jr., at the park.
Shortly after that day, as riots inflamed nationwide and the topic of race relations reached a fever pitch in the national discourse, Hariri conducted multiple public online forums about how all races could understand each other better.
Both Hariri and Beaudoin said that, like Andrews, they experience a happy life and are proud of their growing businesses in a city becoming more diverse and more inclusive of its diversity.
But there is a lot of work to be done to limit both covert and overt racism.
Hariri thinks thoughts like this would could help bring South Dakotans of all skin colors closer together:
Black people make up 2 percent of the state’s population. South Dakotans make up less than one-fifth of 1 percent of America’s population. In other words, being black in S.D. and being a South Dakotan in the U.S. are both extremely rare, but being a South Dakotan in the U.S. is about 100 times rarer.
He’s proud to represent the state when he travels across the country, like most South Dakotans. And he experiences the same bizarre look white South Dakotans get when he tells those from outside of the state that he is from here.
And like most white South Dakotans, he presumes, he sticks up for his state, touting its nice people, Sioux Falls’ booming growth and high quality of life, and all those “best places to live” lists the city and state have been topping or making for the last three decades.
”We can talk about white, black, whatever, but we could also talk about South Dakotans,” Hariri said. “We have a relationship. We have a connection. We have a fraternity, and why wouldn’t you want your fellow South Dakotan of any race, religion, sexual orientation, or whatever, to not be successful, to not be happy and healthy?”
This brings us back to Andrews, the Lyft passenger who experienced the kind of up-front extreme verbal racism that used to be associated only with times gone by, and usually in the South.
Andrews is a father of three children.
“This is something I’m going to have to worry about (for) my kids,” Andrews said, “and I think that’s going to be more hurtful and hard to deal with.”
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