Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Civic Engagement
Civic Engagement
Intro to Humanities
Caleb Prusso
11/20/2016
Civic Engagement
I chose to attend a lecture session with Utah Attorney General, Sean
Reyes. The session took place at the SLCC Redwood campus on
Nov 15th. The headline subject of the presentation was human
trafficking but I was pleased to find that Sean Reyes decided to talk a
little bit about his experiences running for Utah Attorney General as a
minority. Sean Reyes father is an immigrant from the Philippines.
His father is of Spanish and Filipino decent. His mother is from
Hawaii and of Japanese decent. During his first run for Utah Attorney
General in 2012 Sean told a story about how he used to meet at the
Saratoga Springs Walmart to go shooting with his friends. They
would meet at the Walmart to carpool together from there in a pickup
because the road to the gun club was not paved. After one of their
shooting trips the group returned to the Walmart to go their separate
ways. Sean removed his rifle from the pickup, loaded it in his car and
began talking on the phone to his campaign manager. After a short
time the police showed up and started calling for him to get out of his
vehicle. At first he had no idea that they were taking to him and so he
just kept talking to his campaign manager. Finally the police said
you on the phone get out of your vehicle and Sean realized the
police were talking to him.
He exited his vehicle and talked with the police. He found out
that someone had called the police to report a menacing brown man
brandishing a weapon in the Walmart parking lot. Sean laughed
about this story and even called the Saratogas mayor at the time,
Mia Love, to let her know that she had the safest Walmart parking
lots in Utah.
Sean also related a story while he was campaigning about how
he was mistaken for Dan the Laptop man on several different
occasions. I really liked that Sean shared these stories with the
group. It helped get just a small glimpse of what it is like for someone
in Utah that is not white.
Sean then started talking about human trafficking. He admitted
that he did not know much about the subject until he started serving