Mormonism and White Supremacy: American Religion and The Problem of Racial Innocence

by Joanna Brooks

Kimball’s announcement did not renounce or apologize for past practice or call for collective repentance. It declared, simply, that “the long-promised day” of equal access to priesthood and temple ordinances had finally come. Systems of ideas, beliefs, and practices privileging white over black that had sustained the ban for more than a hundred years were not eradicated by President Kimball’s announcement. From the 1830s onward systematic racism had become deeply embedded in a host of legal, economic, social, political, and religious practices among the Mormon people and in LDS institutions like Brigham Young University and Deseret Book. An entire genre of doctrinal speculation justifying the ban as the consequence of spiritual deficiencies in the premortal souls of Black folks manifest through their mortal incarnation as dark-skinned descendants of Cain and Ham had not only been spread by word of mouth among LDS people but also effectively canonized in works of systematic theology like