Review
Title: Mormonism and White Supremacy: American Religion and the Problem of Racial Innocence
Author: Joanna Brooks
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Genre: Scholarship in sociology/religion/history
Year of Publication: 2020
Number of Pages: 229 (notes begin on p. 207)
Binding: Cloth or e-book
ISBN13: 978-0-19-008176-8
eISBN: 978-0-19-008177-5
Price: $34.95 cloth, $18.99 Kindle
Reviewed for the Association of Mormon Letters by Julie J. Nichols
Mormonism and White Supremacy: American Religion and the Problem of Racial Innocence may be the most important book to be published in Mormon letters this year.
A great misunderstanding about the Black Lives Matter movement—a misunderstanding I see expressed commonly by family and neighbors—is that “BLM” equals “violent protest against wrongs perpetrated well over a hundred years ago. I didn’t do it; let’s put down this undeserved stirring-up of Black victimhood that should be relegated to history.”
Joanna Brooks assures us in Mormonism and White Supremacy that none of the above is true. Black lives matter in ways that American history has repeatedly and continuously denied. We all “did it,” and continue to “do it” in myriad conscious and unconscious ways. And we have a moral responsibility to change the long-standing denial of opportunity and equity to some of our citizens based on the color of their skin. Backed up by meticulous research, Brooks asserts that Mormons—like most white Christians in America—perpetuate an undeniable history of systemic, deliberate racism, by means of insidious policy-making, retelling of history, silent agreement, and refusal to speak up. For this we owe reparation, not because people are rioting and looting, but because it is a moral imperative we ignore at our souls’ peril.
As:
“the author or editor of ten books on race, religion, gender, social movements, and American culture, [Brooks] has appeared in global media outlets including the BBC, NPR, the Daily Show, CNN, MSNBC, and the Washington Post. In her day job as Associate Vice President for Faculty Advancement and Student Success at San Diego State University, she leads faculty development and student academic support efforts at a large, public, and research-intensive Hispanic Serving Institution of higher education. She has also worked as a volunteer, activist, and organizer in the labor, feminist, anti-racist, LGBT equality, and migrant rights movements. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Los Angeles, and is a proud fourth-generation Southern Californian” (from http://joannabrooks.org/about/).
A 2012 Washington Post interview with Brooks concludes that she’s not your mother’s Mormon—she may not even be your Mormon. But nationally-respected Mormon scholar she is indeed, and Mormonism and White Supremacy, based on a lifetime of scholarship, persuades me that we, along with most white Christians in America, are white supremacists by history and by habit. We have much to do to change the false, self-satisfied story that we’re right—we have been all along—and we’re blameless.
White supremacy is white privilege. Examining individual and community claims to white privilege is the antiracist work Brooks calls for: “American Christianity has effectively furnished our national language for judging value, worthiness, guilt and innocence and for establishing moral priorities to guide the allocation of resources and the application of power,” (3)[1]. White power derives:
from the fact that it does not name or acknowledge itself but rather assumes an unnamed role as an organizing principle of social relations and a driver of value. Whiteness thus serves as its own alibi. It excuses itself; it refuses to speak its own name … (4)
Mormonism and White Supremacy details how white Christianity—including Mormonism—agrees to this role, provides this organizing principle, and drives this value.
In the first six chapters, Brooks recounts moves in early Mormonism both for and against racial equality, moves to which documents clearly attest. Blacks were among the earliest Mormons, but their place in our history was elided and denied in deliberate ways by early leaders. Brooks gives full credit throughout to those who have sought to restore that history.
Chapters 3 and 4 describe the institutionalization of white supremacy both in the nation and in Mormonism from the 1880s to the 1940s, and the production of national racial innocence in the ‘50s and ‘60s, which Mormonism bought into at all costs. Chapter 6 generously cites the efforts of members who dissented from within the Church through the ‘80s. While the mostly-little-known protests and arguments circulated by members from that time are brilliantly persuasive, it’s disheartening to see the void from which leadership responded.
Chapter 6 unflinchingly reports the persistence of white supremacy beyond “desegregation” (the 1978 lifting of the priesthood ban)—all the ways leadership, celebrities, and the rank-and-file marginalized, whispered about, and refused to fully value people of color even when “all worthy males” could officially hold the priesthood.
Brooks’s final chapter points to necessary changes required to dismantle white supremacy and racial innocence within the Church. Brooks pulls no punches, but her tone is carefully regulated. Raised a “true-believing white Mormon girl” in late-twentieth-century southern California, where most people carefully overlooked the absence of people of color in the pews at church and no one talked about the priesthood ban, Brooks willingly embraces her membership in the LDS faith community and acknowledges the blindness it instilled in her. Early in the book, however, she outlines the process by which she began “to get a grip on the dynamics of white racism and white supremacy in the Mormon context” (10) as she matured. First—as she suggests all of us must—she “had to develop an understanding of racism not just as an individual character flaw but as a system of ideas, beliefs, and practices that divides people and gives some people better life chances based on their skin color and ancestry” (10). By this definition, we are all racist. To insist on innocence is factually inaccurate and morally wrong.
Brooks explains that she then had to come to terms with “the history of Mormonism’s specifically anti-Black racism, studying an archive of independent scholarly…unfamiliar to if not openly disregarded by virtually everyone in the conservative Southern California Mormon communities where [she] grew up” (10) (and, of course, nearly all Mormon communities where most of us grew up)–a history “managed carefully in LDS institutional settings with a combination of avoidance, denial, selective truth telling, determined silence, and opportunistic redirection” (12).
These allegations are meticulously documented, not only to clarify the facts, but “to assess how systems of inequality take shape through everyday conduct and choices, policies, laws, and theologies, so that we have a better sense of how to dismantle them…”
Citing letters, newspaper articles, legal documents, scholarly historical analyses, policy statements, interviews (Barbara Walters with the Osmonds, for example), books and privately circulated position statements and correspondences, Brooks walks readers through almost two hundred years of evidence that “the ban [against Blacks holding the priesthood] began sometime between 1847 and 1852, that it originated with Brigham Young and was institutionalized [and perpetuated] over the course of [the century and more] following, and that revelation had nothing to do with it” (181). As many members of the Church have known but only a few (cited generously in Chapter 5) have dared to assert publicly, the ban had everything to do with normalization, the desire for citizenship and safe haven in white America, and nothing to do with a loving God.
Brooks’s chapters are highly readable and darkly persuasive. She shows that leadership has continuously waffled, stuttered, refused to speak up or speak out; she shows how Black members have been edged out, ignored, and used in anti-gay campaigns. She copiously cites the efforts of Black people in and out of the church to call attention to the need for fairness and honesty. The essay on Blacks and Mormonism on the church’s website constitutes an admirable first move, she says, but because it is rarely if ever cited, never a point of study in official study guides, never referred to from the pulpit, it is barely a beginning:
The official shift from a categorical defense of the ban as the will of God from time immemorial to an acknowledgment that the ban was a policy put in place by Brigham Young (under the influence of white American racism) represents an enormous step forward in the telling of the Mormon story. [However, the] larger lessons of what this shift suggests about the Mormon practice of continuing revelation, the infallibility of LDS Church leaders, the “rightness” of the LDS Church, and what collective repentance might look like have scarcely been considered (middle of Chapter 6).
Thus Mormonism and White Supremacy calls for soul-searching about the very foundations of the Mormon community’s story of self. This story has allowed Mormons to “excuse, cover for, and render innocent the white supremacist choices of Mormon individuals and institutions” (end of Chapter 3). Change, Brooks emphasizes, must take place “not only in the content of the official Mormon story but also in the way that story is absorbed and what it teaches” (Ch 6)—and I, for one, am eager to see how that will play out. To me it looks like a different mother church, one many of us have been seeking for a long time, a church striving not to be “white and right” but to “understand itself and find its next steps toward holiness” (Ch 5).
The Black Lives Matter movement does not instigate violent protest and indiscriminate destruction. It acknowledges the systemic, inaccurate and morally wrong belief that skin color determines the rightness of opportunity. If you read no other book this year about social justice, the Church, or your responsibilities as a citizen of this country and a member of the Church, read Mormonism and White Supremacy. The information it provides, the logical arguments it presents, and the action it demands may be difficult to swallow for some, but in the end, it’s even more difficult—and the social and moral consequences more inimical—to deny.
Brooks closes the book with these strong words:
The possessive investment in whiteness and the possessive investment in rightness have put Mormons in opposition to efforts by minority peoples worldwide for dignity, autonomy, sovereignty, land, and well-being. They have allied the Mormon people with dominant power structures that allocate life chances by race. They have stood in the way of engagement, productive conflict, and truth seeking …[and] have corroded the theological integrity of Mormonism as a Christian-identified faith. The same can be said of any white American Christianity that has not undertaken its own historical soul-searching and committed collected to reconciliation and reparation for the massive moral wrongs of anti-Black systematic racism in the United States. Because I love my faith community and believe we can do better, I offer our experience to others as a witness and a warning (end of Chapter 7).
For the sake of our individual souls and the future of the American/global Church, we would do well to take that warning and accede to that witness.
[1] All citations are from the Kindle edition