I just finished reading Matt
Harris’s excellent book on the history of racism in the Church, including the
source, practice, and aftermath of the priesthood and temple ban. Second-Class
Saints: Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality is a sobering
book and should be required reading for every Latter-day Saint. What is obvious
is that at least since Brigham Young’s presidency, we Mormons have had real
problems with racism, and these problems did by no means end with the June 1978
announcement of a revelation extending priesthood to Black male church members.
We don’t have to look any further
than the DOJ investigation into Utah’s Davis School District that resulted in a
settlement agreement that has unfortunately not ended the racist incidents. To
claim that these incidents did not involve Latter-day Saint youth, educators,
and administrators would be naïve. And to claim that these sorts of racist incidents
occurred only in the Davis School District would be even more naïve. Or we
could look at the sixty-page 2021 report released by BYU, “Race, Equity, and Belonging,”
which revealed that racism is alive and well at the Church’s flagship
university. The resulting twenty-six recommendations by the faculty are an encouraging
sign but also constitute an admission that the issue of racism on campus is no
simple problem that can be solved by an admonition in a devotional address.
Perhaps most disturbing to me is
that so many Latter-day Saint Republicans, including Utah Governor Spencer Cox
and Utah’s Republican legislature, have jumped on the anti-DEI bus in passing
and rubber-stamping laws aimed at decreasing diversity, equity, and inclusion
in the Beehive State, as if these goals are somehow evil. Yes, it is possible
to go a bit too far in aiming for greater inclusion for those who have
perennially been left out, but let’s be honest. The culture-war issue that DEI
has become is nothing more than thinly veiled racism.
It is no surprise that Donald
Trump is a racist. He has made that clear again and again. And now that he is
in office, his war against DEI is not just blatant racism; it is also
discriminatory against women. A couple of days ago, Heather Cox Richardson, in
her daily “Letters from an American” email series, listed several examples. I’ll
share a few here.
The first example concerns the Native
American Code Talkers, who were instrumental in our victory in World War II. “Erin
Alberty of Axios reported that at least ten articles about the
Code Talkers have disappeared from U.S. military websites. Broken URLs are now
labeled ‘DEI,’ an abbreviation for ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.’”
“Axios found that web
pages associated with the Department of Defense have also put DEI labels on
now-missing pages that honored prominent Black veterans. Similarly missing is
information about women who served in the military, including the Women Airforce
Service Pilots (WASPs) of World War II.”
“Two days ago, media outlets noted
that the Arlington National Cemetery website had deleted content about Black,
female, and Hispanic veterans.
“The erasure of Indigenous, Black,
Hispanic, and female veterans from our military history is an attempt to
elevate white men as the sole actors in our history. It is also an attempt to
erase a vision of a nation in which Americans of all backgrounds come together
to work—and fight—for the common good.”
This may seem a petty complaint
when compared with the indiscriminate carnage Trump and Musk are wreaking on
the federal government, most of it unconstitutional, but the fact that so many
Mormons have lined up behind this racist demagogue is disgusting. A church with
our history of racism and white supremacy (which lingers in the Book of Mormon)
should be doubly on guard against even a hint of racism. But the LDS Republican
embrace of the anti-DEI movement is an embrace of racism.
We can be better than this. But
apparently we are not.
Again, I recommend Matt Harris’s
book. Some parts are painful to read. But there is only one way to rid
ourselves of racism, and it is not by fighting against the MAGA bogeyman of DEI,
which is based on the ludicrous idea that we are now suffering in America from
anti-white racism. How fragile have we Caucasians become? And how callous?
