White Privilege, Racial Innocence, and the Costs of Anti-Racist Dissent, Mormon Examples
Just as white Christians develop silent agreements among themselves to define morality in individual terms that take no responsibility for systematic anti-Black racism, white Christian churches develop means for managing and disciplining adherents who do take on anti-Black racism in a serious and discomfiting way. This chapter reconstructs a lost archive of dissent by LDS Church members against white supremacy in Mormonism, including public criticisms by national figures like Stewart Udall. It analyzes the calculus of identity, race, class, gender, belief, belonging, and social and political capital that condition dissent in religious communities, observing that white privilege and status in predominantly white Christian churches allow some to dissent more publicly and with lesser costs than others.