Review: Mormonism and White Supremacy: American Religion and The Problem of Racial Innocence, by Joanna Brooks

Abstract

Over the past ten years scholars have published a profusion of books about institutional racism. Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law (2017) examines how federal, state, and local governments imposed racial segregation in various cities throughout the United States, creating zoning laws meant to stifle African American mobility. In The Color of Money (2019), Mehrsa Baradaran probes how banking policies affected African Americans and kept them mired in poverty. Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2012) evaluates the racial inequities in the criminal justice system, particularly among African American men, who were often stripped of their rights by the courts. Now we have Joanna Brooks’ book Mormonism and White Supremacy, which explores institutional racism within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—a faith with which Brooks affiliates. She provides a penetrating case study demonstrating how the Mormon church created a racist theology that continues to persist well into the twenty-first century. As Brooks states, her purpose is to “identify how anti-Black racism took hold in Mormonism” (13).Part history and part cultural analysis, Brooks provides a sweeping overview of Mormon racial theology. She defines white supremacy as “the entire system of ideas, beliefs, and practices that give white people better chances based on perceived skin color and ancestry” (1) and argues that Mormon leaders instituted a number of policies aimed to discriminate against persons of black African ancestry. In 1852, Mormon prophet-president Brigham Young instituted a priesthood and temple ban, which denied black people access to the faith’s most cherished rituals. Then, even after the ban was lifted in 1978 by Mormon church president Spencer W. Kimball, Brooks writes that black people continued to suffer because the Mormon hierarchy failed to reckon with the church’s racial theology. The governing hierarchy neither condemned its racist teaching, which alleged that God had cursed black people, nor sanctioned interracial marriage, thereby giving the impression that it was still sinful and wrong.Like many Protestant and evangelical Christians, Mormons privileged whiteness, creating an inhospitable environment for persons of color to flourish within the church. An underlying theme in Mormonism and White Supremacy is that Mormons suffered from “racial innocence,” blithely unaware of the harm the church has done to people of color (3). Brooks convincingly argues that rather than confront its history of white supremacy, the governing church hierarchy looked to the future rather than correct the mistakes of the past. It was only recently, Brooks writes, when LDS church leaders repudiated Mormon racial teachings. Prompted by Mormon Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential run and a spate of bad publicity in the national news media assailing Mormon racial teachings, the church hierarchy published an essay on “Race and Priesthood” in which it explicitly repudiated the notion that blacks were cursed. The essay also expressed support for interracial marriage and condemned the decades-old teaching that black people lacked moral purity in a pre-earth life.One of the strengths of the book is that Brooks succeeds in demonstrating the ways in which Mormons created a racial hierarchy favoring white people and how, in turn, that privilege poisoned the church body. She is less successful narrating the history of Mormon racial theology. There is very little historical context in her analysis—ideas are static and relationships and influences are assumed, not probed. Nevertheless, this book is a stark reminder that institutional racism plagues even the best of churches.Finally, the book is a call to action for Mormon leaders to do more to confront the pernicious effects of racism in the church. Scholars of Mormonism and religious studies will find this book both informative and engaging.