Funny how none of my mormon friends are saying that.
Zero of them.
Those personal examples may be meaningful to you, and that's great. But the overarching history of the Church, and especially in Utah, is a hand-in-hand agreement with white supremacy and institutional racism.
If you are going to look at those you know today and reason backwards through time, you are going to remain ignorant of what Utah is and where it has been. We are talking about a place where it was legal to own slaves and had whites-only establishments. We are talking about a religion that prefers whiteness and "fair skin" on the scriptural level. The changing of laws did not erase attitudes, it merely caused the residents to change the ways they expressed their racism.
Here is an excerpt of an
interview of Chieko Okazaki about her experience of Utah:
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But anyway, what I see in this world today is that we forget who we are and where we came from....When I first came to Utah in 1950, I noticed that most people didn’t know that there was more than the white race. I came as an exchange teacher. My husband did his graduate work while I was doing this. People didn’t know how to take me—not my education status, but more who I was. I looked different. They wondered whether I could possibly be like them and whether I could teach their children, being Japanese. There were three parents who said they didn’t want their children to be taught by me. But I had a very, very great principal. She was way ahead of her time, in relation to acceptance of different peoples and acceptance of their traditions and ideas. So she accepted me, just like that (snapping fingers), when she saw me. She was so grateful that I was placed in her school. She said to these reluctant parents, “That will be fine,” and she transferred those students to another second-grade class.
I thought many of the parents would feel the same way—not knowing my skills and my qualifications. I used to sew during those days, and I made a fuchsia dress. I had very black hair, and the fuchsia really looked dramatic with my hair, and then I topped it off by putting a f lower in my hair. All three of us second-grade teachers opened the door to the schoolyard that first day, and I saw many parents standing there with their children. I knew how unusual that was. Of course, parents bring their children to kindergarten and often for a few days in first grade, but for second-graders to have parents come—that was really a message. I was pretty sure that they came to see who I was.
The other two teachers said, “Why don’t you call your children first?” I said, “That will be fine.” I just said, “I’m very happy to be here in this wonderful school and to be a part of this society here and to work with your children. I’ll start calling the names of the children, and you come up and form a line and I’ll take you to the classroom.” So I said, “James Backman.” He came running up. I said, “Goll, you just had a haircut, didn’t you?” I put my hand on his hair. He said, “Yes, I did.” I said, “Well, you look really great." He said, “I want you to know that my dad is the president of the Salt Lake Board of Education.” I said, “Oh, that’s nice to know.” I called the name of the next child: “Beth Benson.” She came up, I said, “Beth, you have beautiful hair. I love your braids.” (I found something positive to comment about with each child.) Beth said, “My daddy is an apostle in the Church.” I said, “Oh, yes, that’s nice to know.” And so it went. Each child’s parents were heads of this and heads of that. I thought, “What a class I’m going to have! Thirty-five children of very important parents.”
So I took my class in; and within a few days, those three women went to the principal and asked if their children could be returned to my class. The principal looked at them and said, “Well, you know, opportunity just knocks once. I’ve already changed them to another class. I’ve had three other children take the places of your children.” The principal then came running down and told me what had happened. She was really a great advocate and friend.
I’m telling that story to illustrate that Utah really was something of a closed society in many ways. It was difficult for many of the Saints here to really get to know others and to accept people who were not of their race. Of course, one of the best things that happened was the missionary program. When the missionaries were sent out into the different parts of the world, they began loving the people they worked with. This broadened their scope of understanding about what all human beings have in common. They began to understand the concept of “Other sheep I have which are not of this fold” (3 Ne. 15:21). But Ed and I just accepted that, where the older generation was concerned, there would still be some prejudice and some feeling of “you’re not as good as I am.” I remember that one of the really hurtful things that I heard soon after we moved here was: “If you were not born under the covenant, you can never enter the kingdom of Heaven.” I’d sit in church, listening to that, and I’d think, “How do you account for the people who are converts to the Church? How in the world can I be in this church?”
My principal used to be on the Sunday School General Board. She came in one day and said, “Chieko, do you realize that I fought for you yesterday?” I said, “You did?” “Yes. In my class, they talked about people who are not born under the covenant—that they will not be able to enter the kingdom of Heaven.” I said, “You’ve heard that, too?” “Yes, and I fought for you. I said, ‘Do you mean to tell me that Chieko, who is a convert, will not be eligible for the kingdom of heaven?’ And the teacher said, ‘That’s right. That’s the doctrine.’” Anyway, we don’t hear things like that anymore, and it definitely isn’t the doctrine. But that’s what we’ve progressed from. That’s why I think people of my generation—white members of the Church—always have a little bit of a problem with racial prejudice. They don’t talk about it, and it certainly has mellowed; but I’m sure if they had to make a choice in relation to their child or grandchildren marrying into another race, they’d have hard feelings about it and might try to stop it.
I remember when I was a student at the University of Hawaii during World War II, one of the apostles of the Church at our stake conference spoke. I was a member of the Japanese Branch, and of course we all went, although I have to say it was hard for us to go to the tabernacle, because everybody else was white people. We felt that we were intruding somehow. Many servicemen were present, and this apostle said very bluntly, “I want all of you soldiers to know that you are not to get into the situation where you would like to be married to any of these people. And you women, you are not to get to the point of integrating yourself to the point where you think you are going to be married to one of these men. Each of these men has a person waiting for him in one of the wards in the city they come from.”
I remember how surprised I was. It was a completely new topic to me, and maybe it was a problem for some of the older young adults there. I’d never dated in high school, because I was focusing on my education. In fact, I didn’t date in college until I was a sophomore. So to me, that wasn’t a problem. But I thought, “Why is it that the Church doesn’t look upon us, who are of a different race, as worthy to marry a white Mormon man? If we are daughters and sons of God, I don’t think the Lord would look at us and say, ‘You’re different, so there are things you can’t do.’” I realized that I was still learning about the gospel, but that was a contradiction that I tucked into the back of my mind. I had to think more about the contradictions when Ed and I moved to Utah. (Ed was Japanese, like me.) One of our friends was marrying a white person, and they could not get married in the temple because the state had what was called a “Mongoloid law.” They had to go to Canada to get married in the Cardston Temple. That was in 1951. I remember thinking about that scripture when the Lord said, “Other sheep I have which are not of this fold,” and I could understand that, where ethnicity was concerned, I really was not of this fold.
So Ed and I really could have left the Church here in Utah. What I understood as the gospel message didn’t match what we encountered so often with the people. There was a big gap in so many ways. Again, my mother’s wisdom helped. She said, “Know that you know the truth”—she wasn’t a Mormon. She was a Buddhist until she died—“and others haven’t learned it yet. So just hold fast and let the rest go.” So that’s what we did. We just held on and tried to look at the doctrines of the gospel rather than how people behaved sometimes, and believed that our Father in Heaven and Jesus Christ would not look at us as any different from white members.
For a long time, we weren’t asked to serve in any Church callings. But I’m glad to say that when our wards got to know us and realized that we could contribute, we were asked to serve. My husband got his degree in social work at the University of Utah. He worked for the American Red Cross for a while, and then with the Veterans Administration as a psychiatric social worker. Then he became the first director of aging for the whole state of Utah. Then he was offered an excellent position with the government in Denver. That’s when we moved to Colorado. We found a different climate, a lot more openness. We had neighbors of all religions, including Jews. So there we were, Mormons, and we just were part of it. But even the Mormons had a lot more openness about them. I noticed that right away. We felt free to associate with one another and talk openly about things that we couldn’t bring up in Utah. I remember in Utah that a few times Ed and I tried to express our feelings about some of the things we noticed, and we got a pretty stiff response, like: “Whoa! Are you trying to change our attitude?” So we quickly learned never to discuss the questions we had about the gospel and how we were treated. But in Denver as I listened to other people and the way they talked about things, I thought, “Well, in this society, I probably could.”