The Persistence of White Supremacy Beyond Desegregation

Systematic anti-Black racism did not end with the legal abolition of chattel slavery in the United States. It simply changed shape: into debt peonage, criminalization, mass incarceration, housing segregation, sexual predation, voter suppression, and discrimination of all kinds. The same holds true for systematic anti-Black racism in white American Christianity. This chapter examines how structures of everyday white supremacy persisted in everyday Mormonism beyond the end of the priesthood and temple ban, especially through rhetorical strategies on the part of LDS Church leaders that evaded historical facts or dismissed history as insignificant and demonstrated no commitment to responsibility, reconciliation, or reparations.

The Production of National Racial Innocence

Since when and on what grounds have white American Christians declared themselves innocent of the sins of their generations? When did white American Christianity excuse itself from grappling with the most serious and far-reaching human abuses to make as its object instead the perpetuation of an undisturbed and unchallenged hold on continuity and capital? This chapter examines how mass media contributed to the production of white racial innocence by featuring spectacles of white patriotism and “wholesomeness” including, prominently, Mormon performing acts. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir and the Osmonds enacted a spectacle of innocence that normalized anti-Black racism as an unremarkable element of a “wholesome” morality. Their performances engaged audiences in a silent agreement to “forget” racism and to claim a moral high ground without taking responsibility for the oppression of people of color.

American Christianity, White Supremacy, and Racial Innocence

Racism is not a simply a character flaw or extremist conduct; racism is the centuries-old system of social organization that has marked people with dark skin as available for exploitation—for advantage-taking of their lands, labor, bodies, cultures, and so forth. “White supremacy” refers not only to the grossest forms of racist terrorism but also to the entire system of ideas, beliefs, and practices that give white people better chances based on perceived skin color and ancestry. This chapter reviews American Christian theology, history, US law, and critical race theory to frame an assessment of white American Christianity’s failure to grapple with anti-Black racism as a moral issue.

Dismantling White Supremacy and Racial Innocence

Systems as pervasive as white supremacy do not just transform quietly. They must be recognized, investigated, understood, and intentionally abandoned or dismantled, and their impacts to communities of color must be repaired. Predominantly white American Christian communities that wish to take moral responsibility for the advantage-taking that has yielded white privilege and Black suffering must engage with the concept of reparations. But how does a religious community—a predominantly white American Christian community—begin to conceive of reparations? This chapter assesses the pathways toward dismantling white supremacy open to predominantly white American Christian denominations, including Mormonism, through institutional and grassroots changes.

The Religious Micropolitics of White Over Black

White supremacy gains power through millions upon millions of micropolitical decisions that people who believe they are “white” make every day. The idea that being “white” was good and valuable took shape over time as people who believed they were “white” preferred one another’s interests over the interests of those who were non-“white” and so began to consolidate group power. This chapter introduces the micropolitics of white supremacy—the day-to-day choices and interactions through which whiteness assumes value. It investigates critical moments in nineteenth-century Mormon history when LDS Church leaders chose to privilege the interests of whites over the lives and concerns of African Americans, setting into place the micropolitical foundations for a fully institutionalized white supremacy.

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.

Originalism, Infallibility, and the Institutionalization of White Supremacy

When a predominantly white religious community casts its lots, chooses whiteness, and designates its Black scapegoats, history shows that it attributes these outcomes to the will of God. White Christians begin to tell themselves that although Black suffering is regrettable, it is inevitable. Predominantly white institutions assume the facade of inevitability and timelessness and the exclusion of Black people hardens into a self-perpetuating fact. This chapter examines how systematic theologies produced by American Protestant “fundamentalists” and Mormon theologians alike contributed to the erasure of histories of Black exclusion and normalized anti-Black racism as timeless, essential, and originating with God. This in turn contributed to the institutionalization of anti-Black segregation and discrimination in Church bureaucracies.