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Deleted member 848
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I have to compliment Jope for having the most balanced post in this thread. There has long been a culture of extreme sports heckling here in Utah, and some of it is definitely racist. From the high school level on up. If Jope didn’t grow up here, I would be very surprised.
But Utah’s racism is unique among American cultures. It’s on the scriptural level, and takes its cues from Brigham Young who was an extreme racist who condemned blacks in General Conference and sympathized with the South both before and after the Civil War. (How many western states can you think of that refer to their southern region as “Dixie”?)
But not only is the racism in the canon (Book of Mormon, Pearl of Great Price). It is also on the unwritten level, where many of the Baby boomer generation will still tell groups of teens and missionaries at dinner appointments that blacks have their skin because they were “unfaithful in the pre-existence”.
Read David O Mckay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism by Gregory Prince. The chapter on blacks and the priesthood is worth the purchase price alone. My favorite part of that book describes Nigerians who discovered the Book of Mormon in the ‘60s, converted on their own, and grew to 20,000 strong. They were begging the church to send missionaries to baptize them, and the church hedged in part because they didnt want to give the priesthood to them. McKay suggested just giving them the Aaronic priesthood, but the Twelve Apostles shouted him down. They wouldn’t have it. Then the Biafran war broke out and the church waited for decades to even address these people.
That kinda **** is under the surface for any racist incident that involves anyone who comes from our dominant religious culture.
If anyone wants to read a concise study of why Utahns are still preoccupied with race, scope Paul Reeves’ Religion Of A Different Color, which describes the local response of Mormons being labeled “non-whites” in the 1850s by eastern Protestants.
Mormons have been over-asserting their whiteness (as if they had to) for more than 170 years because the US white power structure chose to lump them in with Jews, Irish, Italians, and other “lesser” caucasians as a function of (i) polygamy, and (ii) the mythic caste system that American Anglo-Saxons have always asserted to stay in control of local politics, business, and real estate.
So it should not shock anyone who can read that Utahns, and especially LDS Utahns, still act like they are better than everyone because they are fronting to cover up for a gigantic case of little man’s disease that stems back to the most racist era of our history.
Things like the Olympic committee bribing scandal, the over-the-top American patriotism, and even the Jazz fan fear of non-acceptance by the larger US NBA community of players and media all stem from the Antebellum notion that Utah = Mormons = sub-whites, so Utah is always forced to try harder to prove that they belong to this country.
TLR - It’s not just the demographics. It’s the history of those demographics. And if you are a non-Mormon reading this, all I can say is that if you want to avoid contributing to the intentional ignorance on these matters, then you should absolutely own this history so that you aren’t a party to a tradition of doubling down on a matter that is older than the state.
damn, what a take.
