Mormonism and White Supremacy by Joanna Brooks

Author:Joanna Brooks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The query came in a critical decade for Mormon scholars and writers, a decade in which out-migration, increased access to education, and moderate accommodation of US norms on the part of LDS people ended cultural isolation and contributed to a new capacity for critical reflection on Utah Mormon experience. This so-called Lost Generation, in terms first used by Mormon literary historian Edward Geary, saw the emergence of writers and works such as Vardis Fisher’s Harper prize–winning novel Children of God (1939), Virginia Sorenson’s A Little Lower Than the Angels (1942), and Maureen Whipple’s The Giant Joshua (1941), a critical reflection on Mormon polygamy, their plotlines often depicting a younger protagonist grappling with the weight of Mormon authoritarianism and Mormon history and the isolation of rural Mormon life.7 Historian Fawn Brodie was excommunicated after her publication of No Man Knows My History (1945), a frank, scholarly quality biography of Joseph Smith Jr. Grassroots historian Juanita Brooks, a southern Utah organic intellectual, published with the assistance of the Huntington Library, Wallace Stegner, and Stanford University Press a direct, nonhagiographic history of the Mountain Meadows Massacre (1950), an ambush and mass killing of white emigrants through southern Utah ordered (as Brooks’s research showed) by top-ranking Church leaders but blamed on local indigenous people and Mormon renegades. While the book received praise from American studies luminaries like Henry Nash Smith for its “probity,” even Stanford University Press’s director warned Brooks that she might be excommunicated. She said in response: “I do not want to be excommunicated from my church for many reasons, but if that is the price that I must pay for intellectual honesty, I shall pay it—I hope without bitterness.” Brooks’s father had offered her advice that pertained to her entire “Lost Generation” of newly critical LDS thinkers and writers, comparing the position of the loyal dissident writer to the cowboy who rides “not in the middle of the herd,” nor “abandon[s] it altogether,” but “ride[s] on the edge where she might be able to alter its course.”8

From his position on the edge of the herd—as an observant multigenerational Mormon in a secular university far outside the Mormon corridor—Nelson may indeed have hoped to alter its course. His June 26 response to Meeks reflects honest surprise that customs and folklore mitigating against welcoming Black Mormons into full fellowship had taken on the status of doctrine:

The attitude of the Church in regard to the Negro makes me very sad. Your letter is the first intimate I have had that there was a fixed doctrine on this point. I had always known that certain statements had been made by authorities regarding the status of the Negro, but I had never assumed that they constituted an irrevocable doctrine. I hope no final word has been said on this matter. I must say that I have never been able to accept the idea, and never shall. I do not believe that God is a racist. But if the church has taken an irrevocable stand, I would

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