Nothing in his remarks unsettled the possessive investment in rightness that institutionalized Mormonism’s possessive investment in whiteness. It left the entire infrastructure of anti-Black Mormon racism intact, maintaining rhetorical strategies of containment and deflection that had been used continuously by LDS Church leaders to maintain resistance to outside pressure for change. While his style of presentation may have differed from his predecessors’, in his strategic deflection and evasion Hinckley worked deep in the tradition of LDS Church institutional rhetoric and thus communicated a
...more
