This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

I became a Grantsville police officer in 1978. During my 18 months with the department, I was never accused of racism. There weren't any black people in town. Not a one.

We had a few American Indians and some Latinos. But the other 97.5 percent of the inhabitants were cows, sheep and white people.

In keeping with police qualifications of the time, I hadn't been to the police academy yet. A month before, I'd been an unemployed carpenter before someone gave me a badge and a gun.

One morning, I spotted a large car with Michigan plates driving around as if they were casing the place. I stopped them west of town, in the middle the desert. Only when I pulled in behind them did I notice the occupants were black.

Suddenly, my latent racism kicked in. I wasn't about to walk up on a car full of black people in the middle of nowhere. What if they tried to eat me? I called to the driver to step out of the car.

He was huge, really black, and totally calm. He showed me the palms of hands and said, "What can I do for you, officer?"

My nonexistent tactical police training kicked into overdrive. Could I leap back into the patrol car and drive away, Code 3, without anyone noticing?

Long story short, the driver was a Detroit police officer on vacation with his family. They'd gotten off I-80 for gas and had become lost.

He introduced me to his sons, both of whom looked me in the eye, called me "sir" and shook my hand. The driver and I talked shop. I told him that I couldn't be a cop in such a dangerous place as Detroit. He looked around and said he couldn't be a cop in a place with so many cows and Mormons. We both got a laugh out of that.

My second encounter with police racism occurred a few years later. The town I worked in Utah County had one black person, 30-something Carl, who routinely beat his drug-addled girlfriend.

Carl would run whenever his girlfriend called the police. One night, as he ran through the block and out into the street, Boone hit him with a police car. Scuffed him up a bit, but otherwise he was OK. We took him to jail.

"You #*&@!*% are always messing with the black man," Carl insisted. "You run over me because I'm black. That's a fact."

"You're right," Boone admitted. "Here's another fact. You aren't exactly easy to see in the dark. If you're going to run from us, stay out of the road."

Even Carl had to admit that was funny. He later went to jail for forgery, drug possession, theft and assault. I never saw him again.

In 1984, my parents lived in Ferguson, Mo. We drove out to visit them that summer. I was looking for a career move, so one evening I rode with Ferguson police.

As the officer and I were driving through a housing project, I commented on us being the only two white people among hundreds. He asked how many black people lived in the town where I worked. I told him we had one, but that he'd moved.

He was stunned. Every time we ran into another officer that night he would introduce me by saying, "This here's Bob, a cop from Utah. You know they ain't got any [n-word] where he works?"

The other cops had a hard time imagining such a situation. But they were also all white. Eventually we got around to meeting a black officer. I assumed the white officer would back off the n-word then, but he said the exact same thing.

The black officer leaned around him and stared at me in surprise. "You ain't got no [n-word]? What the #*&@ do you do then?" The n-word to him was just another word for "criminal."

I grappled with this last experience for years, wondering if I had ever truly understood the face of racism. Turns out I hadn't.

There ought to be a clever moral to this column, but I don't have one. I'm still confused about racism, probably because it comes in so many forms — hate, fear, justification, etc. — and in so many colors.

Robert Kirby can be reached at rkirby@sltrib.com or facebook.com/stillnotpatbagley.