When Joanna Brooks wrote this book, she likely didn't expect it to be so timely. But the official publication date, summer 2020, coincided with protests across the nation that called for an end to racial oppression. These loud #BlackLivesMatter chants have forced institutions, corporations, and churches to reassess their connection to the systematic racism upon which America was built. Mormonism and White Supremacy, then, was perfectly timed to add to a growing chorus at a moment of discursive crescendo.
Yet in other ways, Brooks’ work was a long time coming, as it reflects decades of work within the Mormon historical community, and it builds on the efforts of previous scholars and activists who have paved the way to reassess Mormonism's troubled history with white supremacy. What the book lacks in novelty, it certainly makes up for in punch: it is one of the most trenchant and persuasive appeals to confront the history of LDS anti-Black racism, past and present, and is a clarion call for academic intervention in contemporary issues. Historians, Brooks explains, have done an admirable job at outlining the extreme examples of racism, but have not taken full account of how religions built a world that enabled what she calls “racial innocence,” or the notion that one is “innocent—morally exempt—of systematic and pervasive anti-black racism” (3–4). The reorientation of sin and guilt from a collective to an individual level has allowed Christians, including Mormons, to maintain a belief in moral superiority despite historic and contextual evidence otherwise.
Brooks emphasizes a full accounting of the faith's anti-Black racism, especially these six lessons: (1) the Mormon fear of racial mixing often outweighed their commitment to racial equality; (2) Mormon leaders formally excluded Black voices from positions of power, relegating their experiences and beliefs to the margins; (3) Mormon theology and history have often cast Black exclusion as divinely justified; (4) in the twentieth century, Mormons largely adopted America's silent agreement that enables white innocence; (5) Mormon leaders have consistently repressed internal critique and dissent, instead buttressing and solidifying prophetic infallibility; (6) LDS leaders have used multiculturalism, rhetorical evasion, and duplicity to manage the legacy of Mormon anti-Black racism without taking responsibility.
Mormonism and White Supremacy moves in a chronological narrative from Joseph Smith's day to the present, detailing both specific episodes and “micropolitical decisions” (23) that led the church to prioritizing whiteness over emancipatory possibilities. Brooks refuses to turn away from the most damning episodes and startling quotations, and often spends extended time on particular moments or documents that exemplify the codification or perpetuation of white innocence. Even the church's conscious decision to “move forward” after removing the racial restriction, rather than address the past, resulted in an inability to fully account for historic wrongs and decolonize a theology still rooted in racial superiority.
Brooks’ strongest portion is chapter 3, where she traces how early twentieth-century theologians and leaders synthesized Mormon theology. Previous historians have identified how figures like James Talmage, John Widtsoe, and B. H. Roberts created a modern form of orthodoxy, but few have demonstrated how central a role race played in their ideological projects. “The systematization of Mormon theology,” Brooks explains, “went hand in hand with a centralization and bureaucratization of Mormon religious life at the turn of the century. Consequently, modern Mormonism instituted one of the most rigidly enforced systems of racial segregation in the history of American Christianity” (59).
Scholars familiar with Mormon history will likely not find much new with regard to historical figures, texts, and stories because Brooks is mostly building upon and drawing from a host of existing scholarship. Further, though Brooks initially frames this project as one meant to address the broader issue of American Christianity through the lens of Mormonism, much of the narrative is told in a contextual vacuum that does not fully engage the extent of assimilation with or divergence from broader cultural currents.
But it would be unfair to expect this book to fit into the typical categories and standards of traditional historical monographs. Mormonism and White Supremacy is, at its best, a scholarly jeremiad, an attempt to use academic tools to address contemporary problems.
