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

by Joanna Brooks

The choice to maintain one’s place in a power structure that rewards silence and solidarity with other whites at the expense of truth is a choice to support white supremacy. Other ways that white Mormons have allowed the “possessive investment in rightness” to block productive conversation around race include correcting people of color who present information, experience, or perspective in forums ranging from Sunday meetings to Facebook; holding to literal interpretations of Old Testament, Book of Mormon, and Pearl of Great Price scriptures on skin color and “racial identities”; and holding to uninformed and unnuanced celebration of LDS historical figures who openly espoused racist sentiments, held slaves, or opposed Black emancipation and equality, including Abraham Smoot, Eliza R. Snow, J. Reuben Clark, Ezra Taft Benson, and others. Underrepresentation of people of color in leadership roles also makes it impossible, Smith writes, to “move beyond the profound distortions brought on by the warp of privilege.”4