Traces Of Blackface In The Mirror*
I decided to revisit my post by this same title from several years ago. Has my thinking changed with the more recent culture wars and the claim that the history of Africans and Blacks as taught in the United States is its own form of racist ideology?
The same day I posted this, February 6, 2022, during Black History Month, a “high-level” Mormon leader and BYU religion professor, Brad Wilcox, gave a speech at a so-called fireside webinar in which he said he fields questions from Mormons on why Black males were prohibited from receiving the priesthood until 1978. Rather than explaining and apologizing for the church’s history of racism, or even toeing the revisionist party line —that this represents disturbing teachings of flawed church leaders and not the mind or will of god — Wilcox said: “Maybe instead of asking why the Blacks had to wait until 1978 to get the priesthood, we should be asking why did the whites and other races have to wait until 1829,” when god restored the priesthood to the world through Joseph Smith. He apologized the next day: “I recognize that what I hoped to express about trusting God’s timing did NOT come through as intended.” Even his apology misstated the recently revised history advanced by the church.
I submit that it is not possible for a racist ideology to be more structured, more endemic, than if god mandates it. I recently wrote about that in Utah Lawmakers Who Suggest “CRT’s Claim of Embedded, Structural Racism Is an Abomination” Might Want To Consult Their Scriptures. That post traces the direct line of structural racism, integral to god’s plan, from the Mormon Church’s inception in the 1830s to 1978. It also explains that the church’s more recent position that “its teachings on race, including which are god’s revelations and which are ‘disturbing’ ‘theories’ of ‘church leaders,’” “also leave the Mormon believer in the awkward position of not knowing who is the racist, god or the unrepentant Mormon prophets and apostles.” The church has refused to renounce the canonized Mormon scripture that sources its racist ideology. See Mormon Religion, Revelation and Racism by David Isom.
The year I was born, Mormon apostle and apologist Bruce R. McConkie published Mormon Doctrine. The tome’s description on Amazon is as follows:
“This work on Mormon Doctrine is designed to help persons seeking salvation to gain that knowledge of God and his laws without which they cannot hope for an inheritance in the celestial city.
“Since it is impossible for a man to be saved in ignorance of God and his laws, and since man is saved no faster than he gains knowledge of Jesus Christ and the plan of salvation, it follows that men are obligated at their peril to learn and apply the true doctrines of the gospel.
“This gospel compendium will enable men, more effectively, to “teach one another the doctrine of the kingdom”; to “be instructed more perfectly in theory, in principle, in doctrine, in the law of the gospel, in all things that pertain unto the kingdom of God, that are expedient” for them “to understand. (D. & C. 88:77–78.)”
Given my accidents of birth, I had little chance not to become a racist. I was born in northern Utah in the late 50s, male, white and to parents whose religion and culture were devout Mormon. I knew people of color were morally and spiritually inferior in the eyes of god. Why? God said so, through his mouthpieces to whom he revealed his eternal truths. If it was good enough for god, it was good enough for me. Obedience to their words and directives was priority one, and all else would fall into place.
My parents had a copy of McConkie’s thick black work and eventually, and proudly, I acquired my own. I studied it, marked it throughout with red pencil, and took it with me to Japan in 1977 as a missionary. That edition included a discussion of the consequences on earth from a war in heaven:
“In the pre-existent eternity various degrees of valiance and devotion to the truth were exhibited by different groups of our Father’s spirit offspring . . . some were more valiant than others. . . . Those who were less valiant in pre-existence and who thereby had certain spiritual restrictions imposed upon them during mortality are known to us as the negroes. Such spirits are sent to earth through the lineage of Cain, the mark put upon him for his rebellion against God and his murder of Abel being a black skin. . . . Negroes in this life are denied the priesthood; under no circumstances can they hold this delegation of authority from the Almighty. . . . The present status of the negro rests purely and simply on the foundation of pre-existence. . . . The negroes are not equal with other races where the receipt of certain spiritual blessings are concerned, particularly the priesthood and the temple blessings that flow therefrom, but this inequality is not of man’s origin. It is the Lord’s doing, is based on his eternal laws of justice, and grows out of the lack of spiritual valiance of those concerned in their first estate.”
Mr. McConkie visited the Japan Kobe Mission in early 1978 where I was serving and spoke at a mission conference. His words are seared in my memory. I wrote about it in my daily journal. With unwavering hubris and certainty, he bore solemn testimony to us that “the negro” would not receive the blessings of god’s priesthood until the second coming of Jesus Christ.
Later that year, his certain knowledge of the mind and will of god took a detour. To the best of my knowledge Jesus hadn’t reemerged in all his glory. But the church, seemingly trying to catch up with the times, let “the worthy negro” receive the blessings of god’s priesthood anyway. Apparently, this had not been some eternal truth after all, but rather a convenience of changing times in which Mormonism followed with cowardice rather than led with honesty and moral courage.
On August 18, 1978, Mr. McConkie gave his never mind speech:
“It doesn’t make a particle of difference what anybody ever said about the Negro matter before the first day of June of this year, 1978. It is a new day and a new arrangement, and the Lord has now given the revelation that sheds light out into the world on this subject. As to any slivers of light or any particles of darkness of the past, we forget about them. We now do what meridian Israel did when the Lord said the gospel should go to the Gentiles. We forget all the statements that limited the gospel to the house of Israel, and we start going to the Gentiles.” McConkie Says Never Mind
It didn’t make a particle of difference what anyone had said for the first 150 years of Mormonism and the first 20 years of my life? Yes, I paid close attention to this shit. And to exclaim everything is forgotten, history erased, he may have overlooked the fact that generations of Mormons were indoctrinated with the tenets of overt racism as commanded by god almighty. How one eradicates racism from his entire formative upbringing and experience, coupled with a religion and culture steeped in and built on white privilege and designed for self-propagation, was a mystery.
In fact, a major premise of the Mormon Church’s sacred canon, one that distinguished the good guys from the bad guys throughout Mormon mythology, was that the ancestors of American Indians and Latin Americans were “cursed” with dark skin due to their wickedness and unbelief. See Book of Mormon, 2 Nephi 5:21:
“And he had caused the cursing to come upon them, yea, even a sore cursing, because of their iniquity. For behold, they had hardened their hearts against him, that they had become like unto a flint; wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them.”
“My people” were god’s favorites. They were not to intermarry with the cursed, the ones like the negro, who were on god’s shit list.
How many times had I read that and similar Mormon canon? And because Mormon culture and its indoctrination were central to my very existence and the quid pro quo with god — eternal salvation, a racist ideology permeated me.
I am not suggesting god was a white supremacist. I reserve judgment, however, for the Mormon leaders who created him in their image and perpetuated these hateful myths. Unfortunately, I lacked the wherewithal to muster the moral courage or outrage to recognize this for what it was. If it was good enough for god, it was good enough for me. So yes, I was a racist, and the June 1, 1978 Mormon manifesto didn’t miraculously cure that malignancy.
Long after I departed Mormonism, church officials attempted to eliminate “vestiges of racist theology that linked dark skin to spiritual accursedness.” Online chapter headings in 2 Nephi, Chapter 5 changed from, “Because of their unbelief, the Lamanites are cursed, receive a skin of blackness, and become a scourge to the Nephites,” to “Because of their unbelief, the Lamanites are cut off from the presence of the Lord, are cursed, and become a scourge unto the Nephites.” A second chapter heading in Mormon, chapter 5 changed from, “The Lamanites shall be a dark, filthy, and loathsome people . . .” to “Because of their unbelief, the Lamanites will be scattered, and the Spirit will cease to strive with them . . . .” Dark Skin No Longer A Curse In Online Book Of Mormon
Confronting my racism hasn’t been easy or, frankly, consistent or persistent. In fact, I haven’t understood the degree of its perpetuation or the depth of its insidiousness. It’s been somewhat more difficult for me than, say, addressing the overagainstness of homophobia, another of Mormonism’s evolving but sustained wars on immutability. When your brother and one of your best friends are gay, the hateful shit doesn’t resonate at quite the same depth, at least for some.
It has taken some time to develop my own moral code, a work in progress. What strikes me is not that I was an accidental and, eventually, a complicit racist. Rather, it is that I was oblivious to the broader truth, that our social order is built on a footing of white inheritance and privilege designed to sustain and propagate itself by continuing to advantage some and marginalize others. It’s also that recognizing this truth is much too discomfiting to those of us white folk — progressives many — who are confident we are positioned a morally safe distance from any form of racism.
No, a fair history of the United States cannot be told absent a clear focus on the centrality of Africans and Black Americans, including their integral role in shaping the country and its course, and their courageous examples of innovation, sacrifice, perseverance, and creative problem-solving in the face of insurmountable obstacles, from the country’s earliest days to the present. Nor can a fair history of the United States be taught without addressing the horrors of slavery and its central role in shaping the country.
Such history neither equates with Critical Race Theory nor refutes it, but current culture warriors are helping make CRT’s point. More recently I have written about how lawmakers are falling into their own trap:
“Cynically, I suggest, maybe they are motivated by a more sinister plot, that in structuring a whitewashed curriculum, they fully recognize their false equivalency supports a Theory they characterize as dangerous, one they must renounce with all conceivable measures. On balance, the argument goes, they control that narrative in that way precisely because it is disadvantageous to underprivileged people and sustains and perpetuates a structurally favored status they deny exists while consciously enjoying its benefits.”
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*My brother the very talented fiction writer and novelist, Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner, deserves considerable credit for offering both substantive and technical suggestions to https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner and https://lastamendment.com. Rob’s second novel, a beautifully written suspense drama that takes place in Utah, Wyoming, and Norway, dropped on November 17, 2020. Available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple Bookstore and your favorite local bookshop, this novel, **The Contortionists**, which Rob himself narrates for the audio version, is a psychological page-turner about a missing child in a predominantly Mormon community. I have read the novel and listened to the audio version twice. It is a literary masterpiece. **The Contortionists** is not, however, for the faint of heart.
**Richard J Van Wagoner is my father. His list of honors, awards and professional associations is extensive. He was Professor Emeritus (Painting and Drawing), Weber State University, having served three Appointments as Chair of the Department of Visual Arts there. He guest-lectured and instructed at many universities and juried numerous shows and exhibitions. He was invited to submit his work as part of many shows and exhibitions, and his work was exhibited in many traveling shows domestically and internationally. My daughter Angela Moore, a professional photographer, photographed more than 500 pieces of my father’s work. On behalf of the Van Wagoner Family Trust, she is in the process of compiling a collection of his artwork. The photographs of my father’s art reproduced in https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner and https://lastamendment.com are hers.
