{"id":40249,"date":"2020-04-21T04:00:14","date_gmt":"2020-04-21T09:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=40249"},"modified":"2020-04-21T07:06:25","modified_gmt":"2020-04-21T12:06:25","slug":"race-and-lineage-among-early-latter-day-saints","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2020\/04\/race-and-lineage-among-early-latter-day-saints\/","title":{"rendered":"Race and Lineage among early Latter-day Saints"},"content":{"rendered":"

Race is an incredibly sensitive topic, but it is also an incredibly important topic to discuss and understand.\u00a0 A number of important books have been published about the racial narratives that were adopted by early members of the Church in recent years, including Max Perry Mueller\u2019s Race and the Making of the Mormon People<\/em><\/a> (The University of North Carolina Press, 2017).\u00a0 Kurt Manwaring recently sat down with Max Mueller to discuss the book in a 10 questions interview.\u00a0 What follows here is a summary of the interview, but I encourage you to go read the full interview here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Max Perry Mueller is an assistant professor of religious studies at University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a fellow at the Center for Great Plains Studies.\u00a0 He describes himself as \u201ca theorist and historian of race and religion in American history, with particular interest in indigenous and African-American religious experiences, epistemologies, and cosmologies.\u201d\u00a0 He turned his interest to the Latter-day Saint experience because of the \u201cinsider\/outsider paradox\u201d that is a part of our culture and the fact that while \u201cLatter-day Saints have been stand-ins for \u2018American,\u2019 \u2026 in their exceptional-ness, they remain set apart.\u201d\u00a0 As he went on to say:<\/p>\n

Race, of course, factures heavily into these historical and cultural understandings of Latter-day Saints. Non-Mormon Americans have projected their own anxieties about race, religion, and gender onto Latter-day Saints since the Church\u2019s founding. And at the same time, Latter-day Saints have responded by projecting out claims to racial, religious, and gender purity, and sometimes superiority.<\/p>\n

My book explores this intersectional and multi-vectoral history, while trying to foreground the experiences of non-white Mormons who were often caught in the middle.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Thus, in his book, Mueller uses Latter-day Saints as \u201cmy primary case study\u201d in how \u201cthree original American races\u2014\u2018red,\u2019 \u2018black,\u2019 and \u2018white\u2019\u2014were constructed as literary projects before these racial divisions were read onto bodies of Americans of Native, African, and European descent.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the interview, Max Mueller worked to tease out the differences between the terms \u201crace\u201d and \u201clineage.\u201d\u00a0 He states that race is a \u201cconstructed distinction and hierarchy,\u201d such as the idea of \u201cwhite\u201d and \u201cblack\u201d in America.\u00a0 Lineage, on the other hand, is the \u201corigin narrative describing how different races came to be.\u201d\u00a0 Within Mormonism, the lineages or \u201cliterary narratives\u201d were what \u201cconnected the \u2018racialized\u2019 persons that the early Latter-day Saints encountered \u2026 with those persons\u2019 (supposed) ancient biblical (and\/or Book of Mormon) progenitors.\u201d\u00a0 For example, Mueller pointed out that Joseph Smith Jr. is portrayed in the Book of Mormon as being \u201cthe fruit of [the] loins\u201d of Joseph, the son of Israel\/Jacob.[1]<\/a>\u00a0 Meanwhile, Hyrum Smith\u2019s patriarchal blessing to Jane Manning James, a notable African American Latter-day Saint, placed her in the lineage of Ham and Canaan. \u00a0Mueller observed based on this that \u201cJane Manning James\u2019s place in the American and Mormon racial hierarchy was determined by her connection to \u2018Ham,\u2019 the lowliest of the ancient biblical patriarchs,\u201d and concluded that: \u201cRace becomes, then, less about phenotype and more about narratology.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Book of Mormon takes a central place in his discussion of race among early Latter-day Saints.\u00a0 Mueller noted that he \u201cworked hard to write about the Book of Mormon\u2014especially its racialized histories and prophesies\u2014that would allow Latter-day Saints to see the book in a new light,\u201d even though some \u201cresist\u2014full stop\u2014any reading that implicates the Book of Mormon in racialized history.\u201d\u00a0 He went on to state that:<\/p>\n

What\u2019s powerful (and certainly not unproblematic) about early Mormon racial theology is what I call \u201cwhite universalism.\u201d The Book of Mormon teaches that race wasn\u2019t fixed, permanent, authored by God. Non-whites could return to their original non-raced status through the adoption of the Mormon gospel (to become, once again, as the Book of Mormon infamously put it, \u201cwhite and delightsome\u201d).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It can be said that the Book of Mormon follows a narrative where being \u201cwhite\u201d is the default, original race, but that God can change people\u2019s race based on their relationship with the gospel.<\/p>\n

The way this view of race played out among Latter-day Saints is discussed in the interview.\u00a0 For example, the Book of Mormon focuses on the idea that maintaining an identity is connected to literacy, and the Lamanites \u201c\u2018forgot\u2019 their true ancestry \u2026 because of illiteracy.\u201d\u00a0 As a result, in many of the early Saints\u2019 efforts to convert \u201cNative Americans (most of whom they called \u2018Lamanites\u2019)\u2014missionary work and literacy-promotion work went hand-in-hand.\u201d \u00a0Thus, according to Mueller, \u201cin Mormon history, illiteracy\u2014or even antipathy to literacy\u2014is particularly racialized.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Latter-day Saints with African ancestry adapted how they spoke to their white co-religionists with the \u201cwhite universalism\u201d idea in mind.\u00a0 For example, Jane Manning James made the painful statement that: \u201cI am white except for the color of my skin.\u201d\u00a0 Mueller interpreted this to mean that:<\/p>\n

She understood that the Mormon gospel promised her that she could overcome the (so-called) limitations of her race by adhering to the strictures of the Mormon gospel. And, as she argues in her \u201clife sketch,\u201d few if any Mormons lived a more Mormon life than she did. \u2026 At the end of her life, she argued that she had overcome the accursed legacy of her ancient forefathers and rejoined the (white) universal human family.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That being said, Mueller also suggests that James made that statement, engaging \u201cin a form of \u2018code switching,\u2019\u201d because she \u201cwrote for specific (white) audiences\u201d at least partly as \u201can act of performance so that she\u2019d be accepted and get access to the temple.\u201d\u00a0 Thus, Max Mueller suggests that the narrative of the Book of Mormon and the idea of \u201cwhite universalism\u201d deeply impacted how Latter-day Saints approached race.<\/p>\n

The interview is interesting, even though the topic is a heavy one.\u00a0 For more information about Jane Manning James, Mueller\u2019s forthcoming biography about the Ute chief Wakara, the position of \u201cMormon Studies\u201d in academia today, and a few suggestions towards dismantling racism, follow the link to read the full 10 questions with Max Perry Mueller<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Footnotes:<\/strong><\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> See 2 Nephi 4:5.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Race is an incredibly sensitive topic, but it is also an incredibly important topic to discuss and understand.\u00a0 A number of important books have been published about the racial narratives that were adopted by early members of the Church in recent years, including Max Perry Mueller\u2019s Race and the Making of the Mormon People (The University of North Carolina Press, 2017).\u00a0 Kurt Manwaring recently sat down with Max Mueller to discuss the book in a 10 questions interview.\u00a0 What follows here is a summary of the interview, but I encourage you to go read the full interview here. Max Perry Mueller is an assistant professor of religious studies at University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a fellow at the Center for Great Plains Studies.\u00a0 He describes himself as \u201ca theorist and historian of race and religion in American history, with particular interest in indigenous and African-American religious experiences, epistemologies, and cosmologies.\u201d\u00a0 He turned his interest to the Latter-day Saint experience because of the \u201cinsider\/outsider paradox\u201d that is a part of our culture and the fact that while \u201cLatter-day Saints have been stand-ins for \u2018American,\u2019 \u2026 in their exceptional-ness, they remain set apart.\u201d\u00a0 As he went on to say: Race, of course, factures […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10397,"featured_media":40252,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,17,2890],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-of-mormon","category-church-history","category-from-the-desk"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/Max-Perry-Mueller-2.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10397"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40249"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40249\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40258,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40249\/revisions\/40258"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}