Title: Mormonism and White Supremacy: American Religion and The Problem of Racial Innocence
Author: Joanna Brooks
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Genre: Academic
Year Published: 2020
Number of Pages: 229
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN13: 978-0-19-008176-8
Price: $34.95
Reviewed by Jenny Webb for the Association for Mormon Letters
This book—important, well-written, and thoughtful—also happens to be somewhat impossible to review. It’s like the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy by Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin: throughout the trilogy, Cixin continually subverts expectations so that the overall scope of the narrative expands from the discovery of alien life, to a war for the solar system, to an eventual battle for the life of the universe itself. The stakes are repeatedly raised, and as a result, the reader must continually reassess and reframe their understanding of what the trilogy is actually about.
Joanna Brooks’s Mormonism and White Supremacy has a similar effect. To begin with, there’s the fact that while the majority of the book does, in fact, directly address racial history within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Brooks explicitly notes that she is approaching Mormonism as a type of case study for examining a much larger subject: the trajectory of racism within American Christianity as a whole. Brooks sees American Christianity as a technology for the production of racial innocence—in other words, how American Christianity has continually manufactured sets of circumstances that allow and even encourage white Americans to fail to see the truth of racist events, practices, and cultures, claiming they “did not know” or “weren’t aware.” Mormonism, for Brooks, works well as a case study here simply because the trajectory of its choices to privilege white lives and comfort of conscience over black lives is blatantly obvious when engaging with the historical record at any level. Brooks is clearly focused on Mormonism here, but it is important to keep her larger goal in mind in order to give her work greater grip. If a Mormon reads Brooks and comes away committed to facing a history of racism with Mormonism honestly and working towards cultural repentance within the faith, that is, of course, not a bad thing. But if anyone, Mormon or non-Mormon, reads Brooks here and comes away committed to facing racism within contemporary American culture through an advocacy unafraid to critique American Christianity as a whole, Brooks, I believe, would find that better.
Brooks is balancing on a difficult beam here: the Mormon histories she presents are unapologetically couched in terminology familiar to Church members, and it’s clear she hopes and even expects that a majority of her audience will be Mormon or Mormon-adjacent. On the other hand, the potency of her argument diminishes significantly if her audience remains mostly Mormon. What is a Mormon reader to do? The only response I find viable for a Mormon reader of this book is to evangelize and spread the word: the history of Mormonism is a history marked by a series of conscious, racist decisions on the levels of both institutional leadership and local leadership that privileged white racial innocence over the well-being and nourishment of black members, and this history is one replicated in various ways throughout white American Christianity. In other words, Brooks has written a book to which the only ethical response is to accept and acknowledge Mormonism’s racism to those outside the faith. That’s a bold move, given the number of returned Mormon missionaries (myself included) who used to work out responses to the racism question designed to shift the conversation away from the topic rather than engage, acknowledge, and discuss. We don’t have a great track record as a people of admitting our mistakes to those ready to criticize us, but there’s an argument here that a cultural and institutional move to acknowledge our history with racism can actually be understood in terms of a larger project of both cultural/institutional, as well as national, repentance. When we repent, we name the sin, we ask forgiveness from those we have harmed, we seek to make things as right as we can, and we do all we can to stop sinning that sin. What if Mormons led out in this process? What if there were a path forward in the moral morass that is America’s inheritance of racism, and what if that path could begin with Mormons speaking out and accepting their collective historical sin in full view of others outside the faith? These are the larger questions Brooks’s work raises, and they are vital for the collective moral health and ethical compass of not only Mormonism, but the American experiment as well.
What kind of experience will you have reading Mormonism and White Supremacy? Much depends on where you are coming from. If you are an academic, you’ll notice that the history presented here is not original research—Brooks isn’t breaking new ground, but rather assembling a well-established history and reading it through the lens of contemporary critical race theory. If you’re a historian, you will note that there are some interpretations of events where Brooks could have been more responsible, and where her use of secondary, non-academic sources is problematic—you might wish for more nuance in these cases. If you’re someone already engaged in racial justice activism within the Mormon community, you may wish that Brooks had provided more space to the discussion of suggestions for ways Mormonism might continue to move forward in light of its history with racism. If you are not familiar with the history that Brooks discusses, you might experience genuine shock and even pain at the events discussed.
Does any of this mean that this book is not readable? No. Brooks writes well, able to engage her reader even when presenting complex topics and concepts. Does any of this mean that this book is not important material for anyone invested in conversations on race and Mormonism? Again, no, though with the caveat that there are multiple voices, black and white, academic and non-academic, that are also important here.
Here I am, 1000 words in, and I still feel like this book is impossible for me to review. The problem? I am a white, cis-gendered, educated, middle-class American Mormon woman. My voice is not what counts here, but my listening to and engagement with black Mormon voices does. Brooks, of course, faces the same problem as I, and she acknowledges this up front. There is not a cut and dried solution to this problematic positionality. With that acknowledged, I am going to say yes, read this book—read it, think about it, read it again and think some more. But whatever you do, do not stop there. Start planning what you will say the next time someone asks you about race and the Church, and practice honesty. But more importantly—most importantly—seek out and actively listen to black Mormon voices: in person, online, in your podcast feed, in books, in art—knock/seek/ask and above all listen. We have got work to do, as Brooks passionately argues. You stop reading, I will stop writing, and we can work on this together. Good news indeed.