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

by Joanna Brooks

Nowhere in the address does Cook mention the Church’s own century-long ban on Black equality. Nowhere does he acknowledge the Church’s own efforts to exclude Blacks from its programs and universities, nor efforts to exclude Blacks from full and equal participation in civic life endorsed by LDS Church leaders. He completely avoids the subject of Mormon anti-Black racism, though its anti-Black racism is the second thing after polygamy most African Americans associate with the LDS faith tradition. Claiming one’s own history of oppression and seeking to use shared oppression as the basis for a relationship to a community of color without taking responsibility for one’s own culpability in the oppression of that community of color is a rhetorical act scholars have called “racing for innocence.”28 It uses a history of persecution to excuse, distract, and step around the hard work of setting relationships right, addressing uncomfortable histories, and seeking reconciliation. By utilizing Mormon rhetorical habits of undergrounding, including nontransparency about LDS history and managing insider and outsider narratives through careful speech, Cook preserves white racial innocence and with it white supremacy, and he enlists his conservative Black hosts in a silent agreement to preserve white innocence as well. Moreover, his remarks signal to Cook’s secondary audience—the many LDS readers who would read them because they were subsequently published on the Church’s website—that it was...