There’s been a lot of conservative uproar against the idea of teaching “critical race theory” in public schools, although there is little agreement over just what CRT is, and it is literally not being “taught in schools.” Critical race theory is a legal theory that, among other things, seeks to put legal cases related to race in the context of other legal cases related to race rather than treating each case tabula rasa, as if the underlying causes and factors don’t exist. The theory explains that there are systemic and historical racism in our society that contribute to the way racism manifests. The only thing that legal theory has in common with the concept of how we teach history in schools is that traditionally, curricula have had a tendency to gloss over the racist roots of our culture rather than providing an accurate depiction of events and impacts to people of color.
Conservatives are misapplying the term from the legal theory to the practice of updating history curricula to be a more accurate, complete picture, one in which America is not always the hero or the shining beacon, one in which we acknowledge the racist systems that have always existed, and the contributions of non-white races, including enslaved people and natives, to the creation of our American melting pot. This is another one of those shadow stories mentioned in one of my recent posts. It’s hiding in plain sight that the US is built on equality* and meritocracy, but also on systemic, intentional inequality and exclusion.
Conservatives assert that teaching what they are calling “critical race theory” would:
“characterize the United States as irredeemably racist or founded on principles of racism (as opposed to principles of equality) or that purport to ascribe character traits, values, privileges, status, or beliefs, or that assign fault, blame, or bias, to a particular race or to an individual because of his or her race.”
“Congress made clear that the purpose of the programs is to advance a traditional understanding of American history, civics, and government. The proposed priorities would do little to advance that goal and, based on the proposal’s support for the ‘1619 Project,’ would endorse teaching factually deficient history. Moreover, the implementation of these priorities will, in practice, lead to racial and ethnic division and indeed more discrimination.”
https://www.indystar.com/story/news/politics/2021/05/19/indiana-ag-todd-rokita-critical-race-theory-schools-state-education/5171054001/
To whit, their assertion is that we should not revise our curriculum to teach history in a way that is recognizable to BIPOC or that explains the current infrastructural barriers and systemic racism which they deny exists.
The attorneys general from Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and West Virginia also signed the letter.
https://www.indystar.com/story/news/politics/2021/05/19/indiana-ag-todd-rokita-critical-race-theory-schools-state-education/5171054001/
Here are some of the claims conservatives who want it out of the curriculum are making:
- It is divisive, pitting races against each other.
- It is anti-patriotic, creating shame for things the US has done in the past.
- It will hold BIPOC students back by encouraging them to act or think like victims rather than pulling themselves up by the bootstraps.
- It will encourage “reverse” racism (against white people, god forbid).
The alternative to teaching critical race theory is to teach a simplistic, white-washed, nationalist narrative that amounts to propoganda, and to a large extent, that is what we have been taught: George Washington chopped down the cherry tree and couldn’t tell a lie, Abraham Lincoln believed deeply in freedom for enslaved people, Christopher Columbus was a bold adventurer, nevermind the genocide, pillaging, and so forth, the white settlers brought a more significant, important culture to this land than had been here before. Worse, specifically banning critical race theory will put teachers in the cross-hairs for students and/or parents who complain about things like being taught about the Trail of Tears, the Civil War, redlining, Jim Crow, and even writings by African Americans as most of these address the problems of racism and slavery directly.
What’s really at heart of this debate are two different understandings of racism: one in which a few “bad apples” (individuals) are racist and should be corrected, and another in which multi-generational systems and infrastructure have been created from a racist perspective that privileges people economically and socially based on the lightness of skin color. Per critical race theory, the roots of racism founded this country in 1619 and those racist structures have remained, never having been fully addressed or acknowledged which is why we are still seeing black people killed by the police as a routine matter and still seeing black people treated differently by health care providers and higher levels of poverty among BIPOC.
Conservatives don’t want to have these conversations because it’s too painful, there’s too much work to do, and it’s much easier to blame “a few bad apples” than to admit the entire orchard is based on a lie. They may have believed the narrative we were taught in school (or at least that I was taught, north of the Mason-Dixon line, in an area with underground railroad sites): that racism was mostly a southern states problem because they relied on slave labor for agriculture unlike the industrious, technology-minded northern states, and once the slaves were freed, everyone had a chance to succeed equally, side by side in public schools and the workforce, thriving according to their merit and effort. Maybe northerners were a little complicit for drinking sugar in their tea, but they were certainly less terrible than the southerners who were on the frontlines of racial oppression. Once the slaves were freed, a few bad apples maybe held people back, but those were bad actors, selfish racists; they were wrong. But black people just need to work in the system, not be lazy, not be a victim, and just overcome the multi-generational oppression through effort and ambition. We were taught to be race-blind, to treat everyone equally, but not to counteract the racial impediments that have always existed. Another way of putting this is that we have to preserve white innocence by whatever means necessary, the innocence to believe in our goodness and hard work and that we deserve the good things we’ve gotten because we achieved them without any extraordinary help; if you didn’t achieve the same, you were the problem. Manifest destiny was manifestly good. White colonists were the good guys, hard-workers fleeing religious oppression, not racist oppressors importing human chattel as free labor. Their colonization efforts transformed a backwater unpromising native people into more adventurous European wannabes.
If you wonder what these ideas have to do with Mormonism, note that the Utah AG signed on to bar updated curriculum, and that the recently reviled Tad Callister article that the Church newsroom published was classicly racist in excluding people of color from the races he listed as having created this country (and understanding the value of families).[1]
Let’s shift to the Book of Mormon. There’s a reason Mormons have a terrible reputation on race issues, even beyond the priesthood and temple ban, and it is all over the Book of Mormon which is a book about a racist pre-Columbian society in the Americas. Whenever people are favored of God in the Book of Mormon, their skin miraculously turns whiter. Dark skin is a moral failing.[2] Those with dark skin are described as filthy, loathesome, blood-thirsty and cursed. The curse isn’t always their direct fault, because the “sins of their fathers” caused the change in skin tone and caused the multi-generational proliferation of bad values and wrong ideas that created bad outcomes for these darker-skinned cultures. That’s the direct interpretation of the text. White people, at least at the beginning, were the good guys. Once Nephi’s brothers separated away from his followers, their skin color got darker, just like he saw their dark, dark souls. The outside matched the inside he imagined them to have for rejecting his authority. Over the Book of Mormon narrative, people who turn to God develop magically lighter skin.
This preference for lighter skin could be related to exposure to the sun. Many racist explanations for skin tone have been based on the idea that cultures with more skin exposure develop more melanin. More skin exposure could be due to a more agrarian existence, wearing less clothing, or the types of dwellings used. The Book of Mormon specifically links these to a cultural moral failure. Either the Book of Mormon is a book about a racist culture, written by racist narrators, or it is a book built on the assumptions of American exeptionalism that have been a staple of American public education for a very long time.
That narrative sounds something like this. White settlers were led by God (after Columbus was also led by God) to a land that was inhabited by unpromising natives who benefited from the benevolence of these white settlers, who brought them Christianity, and who built a much better society on that land than was there before. Anciently, there had been another virtuous white-skinned society that unfortunately died out through civil wars and sin, unfortunately leaving the darker-skinned, more savage remnant to continue on without the providence of moral rectitude that the white settlers would bring them later. These savages were also portrayed as lazy thieves with low morals due to their incorrect beliefs, unlike the correct beliefs of the colonizers. White settlers could help these unpromising savages through colonization and by changing their culture to the white culture they brought from Europe. That’s what American exceptionalism and manifest destiny were all about, and the Book of Mormon defends these actions as morally imperative.
Another myth that is used to denigrate native people is the myth of the lost city. We’ve all doubtless heard about the lost city of El Dorado, an ancient prosperous city of gold. These myths emerged among white settlers to explain the seemingly advanced extensive ruins found in what they had claimed or been taught was peopled by unpromising migrant savages. Or in other words:
Per this line of thinking, it is simply unfathomable that anything of worth could have been created or sustained by the predecessors of the people white settlers conquered and whose lands were colonized. The only explanation for finding these advanced, impressive cities, is that they were built by someone else, anyone else: ancient aliens or adventurous white-skinned Israelites who were promised the land by God.
There are some books out there that discuss the racist ideas of the Book of Mormon and the Church far more completely than I can approach in a short blog post. I recommend two: Joanna Brooks’ Mormonism and White Supremacy: American Religion and the Problem of Racial Innocence, and The Book of Mormon for the Least of These by Fatimah Salleh and Margaret Olsen Hemming.
The Book of Mormon can be read as an indictment of racism or it can be read as a metaphor for the foundation of white supremacy that Joseph Smith was swimming in that still infects our American identity. If the Book of Mormon is historical, it represents a mostly uncontested history about an otherwise unknown people. If it is a work of fiction, it reveals a lot about the mindset of American settlers who dispossessed natives and enslaved Africans and other BIPOC. That doesn’t fill me with self-loathing for being white; it arms me with a sense of purpose about addressing these bad cultural assumptions and the systems that were founded on them. These ideas don’t die without examination and thought. They flourish in the dark. By refusing to acknowledge systemic racism, we create fertile ground for more racists, seeking to understand (through victim blaming and gaslighting) why some people don’t flourish and others do.
- Do you think we should be teaching students about systemic racism like Jim Crow, redlining, etc.?
- How would you teach from the Book of Mormon without furthering white supremacist ideas?
- Have you ever addressed the racism in the BOM in a lesson or talk? Were other members willing to address it? Why or why not?
- Can the Church overcome its white supremacy problem or is this just a pipe dream?
Discuss.
[1] He presents a white-washed list of “colonists” from Arthur Schlesinger:
The colonists understood this. Arthur Schlesinger wrote, “Although colonial life was woven of many strands — English, Scotch-Irish, Dutch, French, German and so on — all the new groups, whatever their ethnic differences, shared the common belief that the family was, in Franklin’s phrase, the ’sacred cement of all societies.’”
https://www.thechurchnews.com/living-faith/2021-05-22/tad-callister-fence-cliff-ambulance-strong-families-213923
[2] No mention of what orange skin means, though.
Wheat & Tares 
This is a complex issue for the country but a pretty simple issue for the Church.
Country: it’s complex because we need to find a way to teach the historical causes of racism in the US (slavery, segregation, etc.) without making race the only lens by which we judge history. The race grievance industry sees everything through race, and the deniers pretend like racism ended after the Civil War. Again, very complex. We need balance and context.
Church: The Church is a product of the country in which it was founded because the BOM is a product of 18th Century America. We need an honest discussion about the meaning of “white skin” and “white and delightsome” and the meaning of the word “cursed”. These are really very simple concepts IF we are willing to be honest.
Racism is one of the twin relics of barbarism that must be stamped out at every turn. It cannot be tolerated in any form.
Sadly, the public schools have largely advocated their responsibility to teach moral values. That includes morally valuing all for their contributions to society, rather than basing value on race or national origin.
Equally as sad is that even some religionists have forgotten that all are children of God, and should be valued as such. If God wanted all his children to look the same, he would have created them that way.
So the answer is: yes, both schools and churches should teach that racism is harmful to individuals and families. This should be done in a way that encourages all to be productive and practice the moral values that strengthen a community.
America fought two world wars to defeat the racism of Kaiser Wilhelm II and Adolf Hitler. We must not squander the sacrifice involved by allowing that thinking to invade our country now.
I issue my strongest possible condemnation to racism of any and every form. It has no place in a civilized society.
“Do you think we should be teaching students about systemic racism like Jim Crow, redlining, etc.?”
Absolutely. My wife’s uncle (LDS, boomer generation) often complains that “those people” just need to bootstrap themselves, get jobs and work hard and the problems of society will solve themselves. I tried (in vain) to explain the generations of systems in society that kept “those people” from owning property, getting education, and otherwise restricted their ability to build generational wealth that most of us take for granted. It’s frustrating indeed, but I try to remember that older Americans grew up on a (literally) white-washed version of history, with American exceptionalism and manifest destiny as it’s cornerstones. Asking them to shift paradigms in their 70s may be a bridge too far.
Many Latter-day Saints, especially older members who remember what Church was like before 1978, are terrified of CRT because it reveals the underlying ugliness of many of their beloved institutions (including the Church), exposing the bigotry and oppression they perpetuated for generations. I imagine the senior leaders of the Church, who are old enough to have been complicit in excluding Black people from priesthood and temple privileges and are aware of the thorny history and BofM racism, are especially fearful of what could happen if widespread adoption of CRT-style approaches to history become mainstream.
If America is ever going to move the needle on racial inequality/inequity, I think it will require both a critical mass of older white people dying off and others willing to be more aware of their own privilege.
It would truly go a long way for the church to come out and say: 1) racism is categorically wrong, 2) church leaders promoted racist ideas in the past, 3) that was wrong and there is not legitimate excuse for it, and 4) the Church today is deeply sorry and issues a sincere apology for this.
Jack Hughes, Your wife’s uncle is nothing like some boomers I know. I wonder what a broader selection and a defensible survey would show as to the size of the group of boomers like your wife’s uncle relative to the group of boomers who learned in the 60s and were appalled then and still by structural racism.
JCS have you given up channeling George Macdonald Fraser’s John Charity Spring, a near “madman” and captain of a slave ship, from his series of Flashman novels? It to me a minute to figure out that “advocated” in your comment probably mean “abdicated.”
Do you think we should be teaching students about systemic racism like Jim Crow, redlining, etc.? Yes
How would you teach from the Book of Mormon without furthering white supremacist ideas?
I think it requires teaching people to read the book as a whole as an indictment of racism or tribalism. That can be done if/when were also willing to approach it without the assumption that every action, philosophical exposition, or statement attributed by a BoM prophet to God was in fact God’s action, thought or reality. Why should BoM prophets, even if historical and accurately translated, be given greater credence that JS or BY or other prophets of the COJCOLDS?
Thanks for this entry.
Add Critical Race Theory to the list of distractions that the War on Christmas and transgender high school athletes have functioned as while hundreds of thousands of poor and ethnic voters are having their voting rights pulled out from under them in Red states across the country. Seriously, the rights of transgender people need to be explored and protected in our evolving society but exactly how many transgender teens in high schools actually want to be athletes? And, of them, how many were born with female bodies and actually could be at a disadvantage in competitive sports? And how many might be competitive in the first place? How can that compare with the steady push toward fascism in this country but it sure is a dandy as a distraction!
But, addressing hawkgrrrl’s excellent post, the only questions, when we teach history, are are we interested in what truly happened, what we can learn from it and how we can move forward stronger based on the past? If those are not the issues we’re investigating, we need to be because we can only successfully build a future based on reality — the ennobling and the ugly as completely as we’re capable of understanding it. Every omission, distortion or misunderstanding can only lead to mistakes and wasted efforts. We have a critically serious problem to unravel with regard to this country’s racial past and we’d best get about it! Time is running out fast and we can see the effects of remaining in the problem with increasing frequency and violence, all of which erode our blessings of liberty and prosperity.
I’ve been a supporter of basic civil rights for everyone since I was in high school in the northeast in the 60s. In my 70s I am only now learning about the Tulsa Massacre and Black Wall Street with 300 lives lost in a 24 hour period. How can that be ignored? How was it ignored my whole life long? How can we ask Black Americans to accept it or forget that it ever happened? Would Tucker Carlson or Paris Hilton or Donald Trump quietly accept if their inherited wealth and influence had been stripped of them 70 years before they were born?
If we don’t teach it in the schools, where would be expect children of privilege to learn about these things? Off the street? At church? I’m certainly not qualified to teach about it (though I want to model by my behavior to my kids that I want equal access for all). So yes, I think we have no choice but to teach it to children at school. And then one day, get out of their way and hope for a better world.
Just finished the book “Caste,” which examines the caste systems in Hindu India, USA, and Nazi Germany (who studied Jim Crow laws and practices in the South as well as US federal laws/practices in developing racist laws against Jews and others).
The problems are deeply ingrained, not simply racial, and much rests on the basic need in caste systems to have some group at tbe bottom to make everybody else feel good about themselves. As well, “everybody else” feels threatened by any attempt of bottom group to move up. Trump and his fellow Repubs brilliantly played on such fears. They will continue to do so until somebody stops them.
There was brief mention in book comparing Mormon exclusion of blacks in the temple before 1978 to exclusion of darker-skinned lower castes in Hindu temples.
The Utah legislature just held a special session. Legislators have been flooded with emails wanting CRT banned from Utah schools. Reportedly several times more emails than have ever been received on a single topic. The governor declined to put it on the agenda.
However, the Republicans put up a resolution to ban CRT in a future law. The legislator who introduced the resolution said 1 – he doesn’t know what CRT is, but a lot of people are concerned, and 2 – as far as he could ascertain, CRT was not being taught in any public school in the state, but a lot of people are concerned.
The resolution contains three statements that most non-racists shouldn’t object to, like “No one race should be promoted as being superior to other races”. None of these statements have anything to do with CRT.
As others have said, anti-CRT is a new rally cry intended to spread fear that whites are going to be harmed in some way (none of which are addressed by CRT).
We just moved next door to a family with two adopted Black children (now young adults living at home). This is the first time my daughter has ever had people like her in the neighborhood. I can’t begin to express the relief and joy she has at knowing that she is near people that “get it – and get her”.
The one thing that will result from states rushing to outlaw CRT – BIPOC will have another way to be othered and marginalized. Its time to put on our big-boy/big-girl pants as a nation and own up to reality.
Great OP. The one on Critical Race Theory by Sam Brunson at the By Common Consent blog wasn’t bad either. I recommend reading it.
The Book of Mormon has racism deeply embedded in it. It clearly teaches that people were cursed with dark skin because their forebears rejected Christianity. (And no please spare me the disingenuous, and just plain mendacious, argument that “skins” in Book of Mormon meant animal hides and didn’t refer to race). But it also teaches that ancestors of the cursed can become light-skinned and included among the whites of they accept Christianity. If you take this view and apply it to the common 1830s mentality of US whites, it was actually more inclusive of those with dark skin than many whites were commonly willing to be. For it allowed for inclusion if the Native Americans converted to Christianity. The first mission that Joseph Smith sent his followers on was to the “mission to the Lamanites” on the US frontier in 1830. He clearly seemed to want to convert Native Americans and include them in his following very early on. The missionaries didn’t make it past Ohio where they came into contact with Sidney Rigdon and his followers.
Racism is deeply embedded in Mormon theology. Their scriptures tell of a God cursing people—thought by Mormons to be ancestors of the Native Americans—with dark skins as a marker to prevent people of lighter skins from interacting with them. The Mormons then banned people of African descent from the priesthood and their temples. Although the Mormons have renounced the justifications for that ban, they still believe that the ban was divinely imposed. The Mormons also believe that they are the chosen ones. This creates an inherent caste system that still operates in the minds and hearts of the Mormons whether they realize it or not. They don’t believe they are racists but CRT exposes their sin. No amount of anti-racist conference talks is going to cure their racism until they root out their racist doctrines and apologize for their leaders wrongly teaching and upholding racist dogma.
Part of why conservatives hate these kind of theories is that they literally want to conserve institutions that critical race theory shows are the perpetuating systematic racism. Part of conservative philosophy as outlined by philosophers like Edmond Burke is that “ approach to human affairs which mistrusts both a priori reasoning and revolution, preferring to put its trust in experience and in the gradual improvement of tried and tested arrangements”.
Showing the foundation of tried and tested arrangements are corrupted by racism and economic policies that favor rich powerful people is a good argument for progressive and radical change.
Plus people want to believe the foundational patriotic myths and showing that the American Dream and those myths have a dark and troubled past is really a hard pill to swallow. The debate between James Baldwin and William Buckley is still relevant and James Baldwin’s emotional and personal argument is as relevant today as it was in the 1960s.
But it is the truth and we should embrace the truth even when it means abandoning the myths of American exceptionalism.
John W’s view of the BoM seems clearly the most common (except as to “ancestors of the cursed” which I think means “descendants of the cursed” — not the first or last time that mistake has been or will be made).
It’s worth noting, however, that Moroni’s (or Mormon’s ?) title page acknowledges “mistakes of men” and doesn’t say which men or which mistakes. If one does not subscribe to infallibility of prophets or of translation, then it seems reasonable to read Nephi’s and others’ attribution of the so-called “skin of blackness” to a divine curse as one of those mistakes of men. Maybe that’s the best reading in view of (a) what John W pointed out, (b) Nephi’s teaching on all, black and white, being alike unto God, (c) a reported time when ” neither were there Lamanites, nor any manner of -ites,” and (d) the disastrous return of Nephites and Lamanites to tribalism, if not racism. Some think reading the BoM as if everything attributed by a prophet to God were actually God’s doing or His reality is akin to attributing everything said by the protagonist in a play to the playwright.
Of course, there are many who have difficulty conceding fallibility of prophets, and among those who do concede it as to current “prophets” and general conference speeches, many who have difficulty reading the words attributed to BoM prophets as a collection of fallible general conference speeches. But the seeming majority status of the racist-BoM view (as opposed to the racist-BoM-prophet(s) view) reminds me of a poster I saw in Europe decades ago. Its caption read (translated here): “Eat sh****, ten million flies cannot be wrong.” Perhaps racism/tribalism was “deeply embedded” in Nephi’s thinking about his brothers and their rejection of his authority. Perhaps his characterizing skin color as a curse from God was his mistake. After all, other than anger at his enemies (his brothers), he doesn’t tell us what his “iniquities” were that grieved his soul. Maybe the best reading of the BoM’s meaning is allowing its characters to be human and sometimes, at least, mistaken in thought, writing, editing, etc. Maybe there is a larger meaning of the book. This approach is not even inconsistent with its being the “most correct” book, if that comment is understood in its context as a reference to principles of getting “nearer to God” rather than an endorsement of near-infallible history or theology.
End of soapbox. 🙂
I wonder what would happen if I expressed these ideas in sacrament meeting or Gospel Doctrine class. Maybe I’ll try it.
Wondering, yes I meant descendants and not ancestors. Whoops.
Bear in mind that the ideas of dark skins as a curse and conversion leading to skin-lightening are recurrent throughout the Book of Mormon. This isn’t just Nephi speaking.
To reiterate my point. What I’m arguing is that Joseph Smith, like most whites in early nineteenth-century upstate New York saw dark-skinned people as inferior, descended from Adam 6,000 years ago, and their skin color to be the result of the curse of Ham. However, Joseph Smith was somewhat more enlightened than other whites of his time in that he sought integration of Native Americans into his religious group, believing their skins would become lighter, rather than exclusion of them. This is evidenced by the Book of Mormon narrative (which I see as solely the product of Joseph Smith’s imagination and not ancients) and his mission to the Lamanites, which he organized in 1830.
Of course he still saw the Native Americans as a sort of “white man’s burden” and never fancied himself adopting Native American cultures. He also cemented a philosophy in Mormonism which made it difficult for the culture to adjust to and adopt more enlightened thinking about race by the time of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. And of course to this day believers such as Ethan Sproat and Kevin Christensen suffer from severe cognitive dissonance over the issue going as far as to claim that the Book of Mormon prophets meant hides and not human epidermis in order to avoid accepting the obvious.
Yes. It’s not just Nephi, though he is reported as having initiated the racism of the Nephites including Mormon and Moroni as abridgers and editors. The message of a book with multiple characters is not necessarily defined by the message of any one or many more of them. The message understood from a book is also often influenced by the worldview of the reader. I think those things are true whether the BoM is a translation of an ancient document created by real people or whether it is wholly a 19th century creation.
Yes. It’s difficult for Mormon culture to adjust. That’s not only attributable to the BoM and the common reading of it as if its prophets were never wrong, but also to the worldviews of many Mormons who read through their own racial prejudices or views of near infallibility of scriptures and prophets. The latter also contributes to extraordinary contortions (like “hides and not human epidermis”) in response to the readings of many non-Mormons who have read the book through their own eagerness to find the book wrong than to find its characters in the wrong or its translation (assuming that’s what it was) wrong.
Capt .Spring, does the other ” twin relic of barbarism” also need to be stamped out? Does that make Joseph Smitha and Brigham Young a promoter of barbarism?
Alice, fearmongering about Critical Race Theory is nothing more than an extension of fearmongering over “cultural Marxism” since the 1980s in reaction to affirmative action. And “cultural Marxism” was just a newfangled iteration of McCarthyist Red Scarism. And Red Scarism and Bircherism drew heavily from anti-immigrant rhetoric, such as Know-Nothingism, before it. It is just a bad excuse to reject other cultures, emphasize whitewashed patriotic myths, and as you say create a distraction to shed light away from voter suppression, right-wing terrorism, and immigrant phobia. Nevermind the fact that this is an instance of the loudest criers about cancel culture and how the left is supposedly anti-free speech committing an act of nothing more than cancel culture and limiting free speech.
Personally, I’m experiencing “Racism Weaponization Fatigue” (RWF). Everywhere one turns – Radio, Television, Digital Media and now Mormon Blogs, it’s racism shoved down everyone’s throat 24/7. Even the word is losing any intrinsic value – except as a bloody bludgeon to beat people into shame, silence and submission.
Lefthandloafer: Yes, I’m sure it’s very fatiguing, as is being discriminated against. Fortunately for you, the “bludgeons” are all rhetorical.
Angela: sometimes you do presume too much. You have no idea of the battles I’ve had to fight: to live, to grow, to survive, to sustain a family. Many of these life events are hardly rhetorical. Personally, I think the Social Justice movement is going to suffer in the long term as a result of the tsunami of racism claims thrown in every direction; with every breath. It’s become a hand grenade which is simply meant to destroy, diminish and pull down as much as possible – with little concern for collateral damage. At some point, people will simply “turn off”, hunker down and protect their own. While I agree that this is a fascinating time to live, and to be (somewhat involuntarily) part of several grand social – anthropological experiments, I think history displays time after time that when the so-called “elites” push the working populace too far, too often, with ever growing pressure…….catastrophe is the outcome.
Lefthandloafer: “At some point, people will simply “turn off”, hunker down and protect their own.” Let me check my calendar, but I believe that was Jan 6th. As to me not knowing your struggles, of course I don’t. You’re the one who said you’re tired of racism being “shoved down everyone’s throat 24/7.” That’s what I’m responding to. There’s been a lot of silence about the racism in this country. Nobody’s blaming you personally for systemic racism. We can either address it or continue to pretend it doesn’t exist. Sounds like you’re tired of it, but not too tired to tell everyone how tired you are of it.
Who’s afraid of Critical Race Theory? Racists…
Lefthandloafer, you’re tired of talking about race, but perhaps you should ask yourself at what point you’ve ever been willing to talk about race. I won’t answer that for you. But I will say that many white conservative and libertarian folks never seemed to have wanted to talk about race, except when it is to criticize Critical Race Theory, multiculturalism, and the so-called “cultural Marxism.” I’m fine with alternative theories about race (well, ones that aren’t racist and suggest that one race is inherently biologically superior to another). Critical Race Theory doesn’t have to be the end-all-be-all of theories. But I fail to see what conservative/libertarian theories of race are. It is like what the conservative plan is to do away with pre-existing conditions that isn’t Obamacare or a something closer to single-payer. A whole lot of nothing. At the end of the day, conservatives/libertarians seem not to care at all about pre-existing conditions. The same goes for racism. They don’t seem to really care. No solutions to the problems that are out there. Just sheer denial that pre-existing conditions or systemic racism are actually problems at all.
One of the prompts: “Can the Church overcome its white supremacy problem?” No, not easily. The best the Church can do — given its own historical doctrines and praactices, as well as the portrayal of race in the Book of Mormon that was outlined in the OP — is to try and distinguish between good racism and bad racism. Good racists do what they do and believe what they believe because God told them to (so all Mormon racism is okay, even a good thing). Bad racists do what they do and believe what they believe for other reasons, so that’s not a good thing.
I’ve never heard an LDS speaker use the terms or concepts good racism versus bad racism, but that’s pretty much how they think about it. Obviously, it’s not the right way to think about it.
I recently attended a Sacrament Meeting in Kampala, Uganda. In the foyer, on the main wall, there are individual pictures (head shots) of the First Presidency and under those 3 there are individual photos of the Quorum of 12. With apologies to Elder Gong, they all look remarkably similar, remarkably white. None of them looked like those in attendance at Sacrament Meeting, except of course for a couple of missionaries. This is a problem. Few of the Q15 have real, first-hand experience with racism. And in the case of Africa, none of them can directly relate to the African experience.
As an aside, I would suggest that the pictures on the wall of African churches highlight the local leadership. One problem, the Mission President probably looks like a younger version of the Q15.
We don’t have CRT in Australia. As far as I can tell it is a term Republicans have invented to make it look like those who want to address racism, are the ones creating the problem.
Like so much they come up with it is a lie.
Geoff-Aus, Critical Race Theory is not an invented term. It is a real theory promoted by left/left-leaning legal academics. Its leading theorists and proponents are people like Kimberle Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, Derrick Bell, and many others. A good textbook to read was written in 1995 entitled Critical Race Theory: Key Writings that Informed the Movement. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic also wrote an introductory textbook in the 1990s to be used in law schools entitled Critical Race Theory. Conservative critics aren’t responding to the leading scholars about Critical Race Theory. They, instead, have created a strawman out of CRT and attach any negative aspects of nationalistic identitarianism in the US to it. If a statue of Lincoln is defaced, that is because of CRT. If a person is wrongly accused of racism and loses their job because of it, that is because of CRT. If a teacher teaches students that blacks have it worse than whites and that whites need to be conscious of that and understand that they enjoy privileges because of their skin color that blacks don’t, well they are teaching CRT (they aren’t actually, they’re just teaching basic truths such as the earth being spherical) and in the mind of conservatives that teacher is subtly instilling the kids to become Marxists and deface statues of Washington and Jefferson and turn the US into Communist China.
In idaho, the legislative session was held up for weeks with debate over a bill that would ban CRT being taught in schools. Republican law makers claimed that they were being barraged with complaints by parents that their kids were being “brainwashed” by CRT. (this sounds similar to what is going on in Utah as described by Been There, and in fact I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the same conservative PAC is behind it). The reality is there is no evidence that CRT is being taught in schools here. No one really knows what it is. It’s just a dog whistle to stir of the far right faux outrage police, and also a smoke screen to cover the fact that Idaho sits near dead last in spending per student.
Do I think it should be taught in schools? If you can explain to me how and 8th grade social studies teacher would integrate a complex legal theory into a curriculum that already requires mastery of at least 3 separate content areas(history, geography, political science) and explain it to 12 year olds, then sign me up. I could see it being used in an 11th or 12th grade AP English class where other theories (ie. feminism, marxism) are being considered for literary interpretation. Other than that, I’m not a fan of legal or social science theories being wedged into the study of History. If the documenrary evidence reveals a pattern of racism and oppression throughout American history (which it does obviously) then let’s examine and interpret that evidence, rather than pigeon hole it into a single theory. History is just a bit more nuanced an messy than that. We can’t simple say: “all the white people were racist,” pat ourselves on the back and move on. History is harder than that and that approach is just intellectually lazy.
Similarly, I think the same nuance needs to be applied to the Book of Mormon, whether one reads it as literature or history. While I agree that the church is sitting on a legacy of racism that it refuses to accept or correct, (and this is wrapped up in the B of M), I don’t think. see it is an irredeemably racist book.
I enjoyed reading the OP, especially the reminders about the racism in the BoM. In the past, when I would read that book of scripture I typically ignored all the racism as I sought other kinds of inspiration. That was a poor solution, one that I often applied to all racism I happened to notice anywhere else, because it was unpleasant, awkward, and didn’t seem to (directly) affect me.
I’ve learned more accurate history about American racism as an adult in the recent past than I ever did in school. Frankly, from what we were taught there, we were all robbed, as the saying goes. But as an adult, I’ve stumbled upon more accurate history, and sometimes I’ve researched on my own something that I want to know more about. It pleased me to see James Baldwin’s name cited in a comment about his old voice from the past still resonating so true. If we succeed in resolving our race problems better, he may yet receive the recognition he deserves as one of the great American writers, alongside people like Twain. If you want to understand past or present racism in America, James Baldwin has a unique gift for eloquent truth bluntly presented. It’s riveting to observe and read.
I can hardly stand to engage the discussion of CRT. The academic wizards arguing the pros or cons of “theory” bleed off anything meaningful that I can connect to. I think the heat in the discussion is an effective distraction that prevents the real change that many of us seek— teaching the factual truth from a verifiable historical record. K-12 schookids and their teachers aren’t interested in teaching and learning dry academic theory, but they are interested in teaching the facts about such things as Tulsa, or the Great Migration, or Jim Crow, or redlining from reconstruction to the civil rights era. Without whitewashing the racial terrorism underlying and driving the narrative of the facts in such histories.
Here’s an example from my experience: i learned about the history of lynching in America from an interactive touch-screen map showing court-recorded lynchings by county, compiled in a database by EJI. I first clicked on southwestern or mountain west counties where I have lived, most with fewer than 5 recorded lynchings. Then I clicked on a few counties in the Deep South, and discovered numbers consistently around 5,000 (or more!) recorded lynchings. Per county. It was a sobering paradigm shift for me, and clearly this isn’t part of our public understanding of history. It was the beginning of clarity for me about this history, that I have the option of avoiding when it gets tiresome and “unbalanced.”
Another paradigm shift:
Learning about Black folks’ extreme wariness of police that many of us lily whites don’t have, and are oblivious to. Like fearing to allow teenagers and young adults to go out in public, in a way that had never occurred to me when my kids were young.
And another: getting pulled over by a cop in my upper-class Paradise Valley neighborhood at dusk, for a burnt out bulb on the back of my car. Feeling annoyed at the interruption of my routine, treating the officer with condescending deference, and being sent along my way with only an admonition to fix the light. As I drove, I mused about how different my experience would be if I was Black. And then I recalled that Sandra Bland was (officially) stopped for the exact same reason. Look up her name, she’s on a list with thousands of cases like hers.
I think the pathway through our present racist minefield is simple — a commitment to truthful history —uncovering the records, publishing “new“ findings, teaching and learning differently from the past, eschewing erasure of unpleasant history, which means facing the discomfort for some that will be part of it. And the fuel for such an undertaking can only be love and compassion for ourselves and our communities. It’s so simple to express the ideal, yet incredibly complicated to execute in reality. We must quit othering the oppressed to tap into that compassion.
But there are people and institutions leading the way. One of the most palatable to White folks Is EJI, Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery AL. (Homework alert) There are many more sources to relearn about this than ever before, and people of good conscience are responding to the ones that work for them. But wite superemacists are pushing back hard with the fearmongering divisiveness to distract us from learning and growing our compassion. CRT is just another code- a signal for stoking those fears, and is slowing our progress.
(Apologies to all for being a latecomer and a windbag. )
“White people [in the BoM], at least at the beginning, were the good guys.”
Yep, that’s the way I was taught. It wasn’t until later that I asked myself “who are these ‘white’ people, and where did they come from?”
I still don’t know where the white and delightsome folk came from. I know that there was a ship filled with olive brown-skinned Israelites who sailed from a near-east Asian land that borders on Africa – the land of their ancestors – to a new world located somewhere in the Americas. But there is nowhere that it mentions in the Book of Mormon that the ship stopped and picked up a load of Scandinavians on their way there. Yet, sure enough, when I look at artistic renditions by LDS artists I see those sandy-haired, blue-eyed, light-skinned surfer dudes and dudesses in most of the portraits. Almost looks like they’re drawing people from Western Europe in what they think 1st century Meso-American costumes would look like, but who would make that silly mistake? You also would think it would show up in the BOM names. For every Laman and Lemuel you’d expect a Sven or Vanya, but they didn’t make it in the book. Where, oh where, is the white folk?
Curious.
Thank you forr this