“The negro . . . should serve the seed of Abraham; he should not be a ruler, nor vote for men to rule over me nor my brethren. . . .” –Brigham Young, January 5, 1852
Reading Joanna Brooks’ newly released and coincidentally timed book, Mormonism and White Supremacy, I felt like Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan talking to reporters in June 2016, when then candidate Donald Trump said he thought a judge of Mexican descent should be removed from ruling on a lawsuit against Trump University because Trump was advocating for a wall along the US/Mexico border. Ryan said claiming a person couldn’t do their job because of their race was “the textbook example of a racist comment.”
Brooks’ work documented many examples, from Brigham Young, Eliza R. Snow, Abraham O. Smoot, through modern authorities, Ezra Taft Benson, Harold B. Lee, and Bruce R. McConkie that were textbook examples of racism. She outlined how personal prejudices morphed into claims of divine origin, culminating in proclaimed helplessness to change divine will. If you can get past the title, get ready for the indigestion of the read. Full disclosure, I follow Brooks on social media and we are cyber friends.
I approached the book with both curiosity and dread, like facing a doctor bringing a difficult diagnosis. Brooks said she approached the book as both “a person of faith who loves her community and is grateful for its many strengths even as she feels deeply its shortcomings and stumbling blocks . . . .” She said she worked to straddle both her role as a scholar and a person of faith, and although focusing on the LDS church, she situated white supremacist thought firmly within a framework of American Christian denominations.
In that context, Brooks argued it was important to understand racism not as a character trait, but as a system of advantaging one race over another. To really produce change, she said we needed to look straight into the eye of that system and see how what was then affected what is now. Addressing the motivation for moving from an inclusive black LDS experience (Jane Manning, Elijah Abel) to one of exclusion and white supremacy, she said early LDS whites traded black equality and inclusion for white acceptance and privilege. Then – and this was really the most devastating for me to read as a white Mormon – Brooks described the method used to make the trade.
Brooks exposed the justifications I heard as a child. Knowledge Joseph Smith allowed ordination of black men had been suppressed and even lied about and then transformed by origin stories such as black folk were descended from Cain, were less valiant in the pre-existence, or God had always been restrictive to whom he gave the priesthood. These justifications reminded me of the work of C. Terry Warner and the Arbinger Institute in Leadership and Self-Deception and The Bonds that Make Us Free. These books describe the process of justifying acts against our conscience by changing the often unwitting object of our act into the aggressor or one at fault, rather than the victim. Sound familiar?
As individual prejudice prevailed, LDS leaders found justification in an attribution to biological lineage, even a curse placed by God, thus putting the onus on our black family, rather than on white bias. This process became cemented as the LDS church moved to endowing prophets with an air of infallibility after the manifesto ending polygamy (D&C, Official Declaration 1). Brooks wrote, “To manage the theological incoherence of an anti-Black stance on ordination and temple ordinances with Christian ethics, the Mormon movement developed not only a possessive investment in whiteness but also a possessive investment in rightness that it used to insulate itself against dissent from within the Church and pressure from without.”
Brooks then marched me through racial innocence and white religiosity as a “technology” for engendering feelings of “not my fault,” “not my responsibility to change,” and silent agreements Mormons engaged in to present as wholesome, hardworking, family oriented, good citizens while insisting we didn’t know why God didn’t give Black people the priesthood or temple privileges, but He didn’t, and we couldn’t change that, and we weren’t racist because, wink, wink, we were nice. Using the term “undergrounding,” Brooks said the LDS church used its history of persecution to create a blindspot of innocence and a LDS culture of public vs. private or insider vs. outsider speak.
Just when I was ready to sigh and say, Lord, forgive us the blood and sins of our generation, Brooks pointed out there were always those who stood against LDS white supremacist doctrine and practices. Some were well positioned, like Orson Pratt or the politically accomplished Udall brothers of Arizona, some were scholars like Lowry Nelson and founders and contributors to Dialogue, and some were every day members, like Byron Marchant, who voted against sustaining President Harold B. Lee in the October 1977 General Conference, calling attention to the exclusion of Blacks from the priesthood.
Brooks asks her LDS brothers and sisters to take a bold look, and like facing a diagnosis, take the medicine. She asserted, even with the LDS church disavowing white supremacy and admitting exclusion of blacks from the priesthood had been man’s idea, not God’s (see Gospel Topics, Race and the Priesthood, www.churchofjesuschrist.org), racist systems don’t just magically transform. She wrote white supremacy needed to be “recognized, investigated and intentionally abandoned or dismantled and . . . impacts on communities of color repaired.”
Brooks quoted Stewart Udall’s 1967 open letter to LDS Church President David O. McKay, published in Dialogue, to remind us that while blacks suffer from white supremacist acts and thought, whites are also affected. Udall wrote exclusion of blacks from the priesthood “must be resolved because we are wrong and it is past the time when we should have seen the right. A failure to act here is sure to demean our faith, damage the minds and morals of our youth, and undermine the integrity of our Christian ethic.”
Brooks urges us to face the hard questions. She said by avoiding discomfort, whites choose to maintain silence and solidarity over the experienced discomfort of blacks. She quoted James Baldwin, “They have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it,” he wrote in My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation (1963). “They are in effect still trapped in a history which they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.”
In true Mormon-speak, I’m asking to be released.
And why is Bruce R. McConkie’s statement he made following the 1978 revelation on the priesthood not included in this post?
Lynn — I think you are referring to when Elder McConkie said (paraphrasing) to forget everything said before the 1978 revelation? The author does reference that in the book. It is hard to capture everything in a book in a 1000 word essay. I felt the important point was to look at how the system of white supremacy has affected me prior to 1978, and continues.
I have been interested in reading this! Thanks for the review.