Talk:Blacks and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

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[edit] Leaders' positions are quoted here. What about the flock?

I may be biased (I'm attempting Good Faith here, so my intentions are good... I hope), but outside of the very generous Mormons that I've met here in Puerto Rico (either native Puerto Ricans or missionaries from abroad) and at Temple Square in Salt Lake City when I visited (extremely nice, I should add), at one time I had to interface with various members of the Church, whose ideas on multiculturalism were, uh, negative, to say the least. Two particular women that I met were brutally (and stupidly) racist. Somehow I sense that in Mormon culture, racism is a taboo topic. Of course, reporting on this on a Wiki topic is a NPOV minefield, but I sense that, somehow, the topic has to be addressed beyond what is official LDS church policy. Any comment? Demf 01:09, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

I imagine there might be as many opinions among "the flock" as there are members of said flock. Racism is a very touchy topic everywhere in the United States. The LDS community is no exception. My own personal experience mirrors yours a bit.

• When I lived among Latter-day Saints abroad (Venezuela) I encountered almost no racism. The members were very proud of their "Lamanite" heritage, and very little if anything was said about blacks or the former policy of exclusion.
• On the other hand, I grew up in a Sundown town in Southwestern Lower Michigan. The Latter-day Saints there found the topic of racial exclusion very interesting and noteworthy and discussed it at length, presumably because it reinforced their own opinions that blacks should be kept separate from whites.
• I have also heard reports from North Carolina that no such nonsense exists among the members. All the hardcore racists left the Church in 1978, so the congregations there are the most integrated anywhere.
• While "Western" Saints are the most likely to keep their children home from camping trips if there is any chance they might share a tent with a black child.
• I also heard a story about a white high school student dating a black student. A fellow ward member asked another how she felt about that: she replied: "Fine, he's a member of the Church after all."

In short, I believe the answer to your question is an interesting one, well worth the time and energy of research, but I'm not aware of any research that has been done. I have only anecdotal hearsay, but if you find any comparative study of LDS racial opinions, I totally think that we should include it somehow.--ErinHowarth 18:15, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Citation

I would like to see more citation. I am reading Rough Stone Rolling, and there is a ton of great information there. I would like to see Joseph Smith's history with blacks cited and fleshed out more, particularly with their issues with local government, and how the church was basically neutral, and then had to present themselves as not supporting freedom for slaves, more for their own survival and peace with their neighbors. Remember, they were being forced out of their homes and their very survival depended on good ties with their non-mormon neighbors. Bytebear 07:02, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Wherever you would like to see a citation, place a '''{{fact}}''' tag. The section on Joseph Smith is at Blacks and Mormonism. I think you've found it already. It's a mess. I think it has had many contributors and it needs a lot of clean up. It's completely disjointed. I started on such a project once, but I became overwhelmed. I, for one, would appreciate you're input. On the other hand, I reject the theory that the Saints adopted a racist policy in order to get along with their neighbors, in part, because it didn't work. They were not racists enough to get along with Missourians. I believe they remained true to their own feelings against slavery while simultaneously remaining true to their feelings of racial superiority. In other words, they didn't think that blacks should be slaves, but they were obviously inferior, very complicated, but there is good evidence to suggest that Joseph began maturing away from this position while he lived in Nauvoo. Also remember that a person could oppose both slavery and abolition at the same time. Abolition called for the immediate release of all slaves. This terrified many people who called for granting freedom to the slaves in a more orderly and gradual manner. -ErinHowarth 19:04, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] I Removed the First Sentence

"African Americans have long suffered from racist laws and policies in the United States."

I'm removing this sentence because it makes an unfounded and inappropriate connection between the United States and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. No evidence is given that the church's policy was determined by popular policies in the United States or polices or laws of the United States government. Furthermore, the church's policy had a wider application than just the United States.