Yesterday the Salt Lake Tribune reported on the end of a Department of Justice investigation into the Davis School District in Utah. And frankly, its findings were disgusting. You can (and should) read the DOJ’s report here, but in summary, but in summary, the DOJ found “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive race-based harassment” in Davis schools by students and staff. A taste of the kinds of harassment Black students had to deal with: white students called them
monkeys or apes and said that their skin was dirty or looked like feces. Peers taunted Black students by making monkey noises at them, touching and pulling their hair without permission, repeatedly referencing slavery and lynching, and telling Black students “go pick cotton” and “you are my slave.” Harassment related to slavery increased when schools taught the subject, which some Black students felt was not taught in a respectful or considerate manner. White and other non-Black students demanded that Black students give them an “N-Word Pass,” which non-Black students claimed gave them permission to use the n-word with impunity, including to and around Black students. If Black students resisted these demands, they were sometimes threatened or physically assaulted.
(Note that the report also discusses anti-Asian discrimination.)
And what happened when students reported this behavior to school faculty and staff? At best, nothing. And that alone would be unacceptable. But students and parents also “reported incidents in which District staff targeted and assaulted students of color, ridiculed students in front of their peers, endorsed pejorative and harmful stereotypes of people of color in class, and retaliated against students of color for reporting harassment.”
This is a huge Davis School District problem. But this is also a huge Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints problem.
And why do I say that? Well, it looks like at least 77% of the population of Davis County are members of the LDS church. And while its possible that it is only the other 23% discriminating, count me skeptical of that.
And before any of us dismisses Davis County as an outlier, I want to be clear: racism by church members isn’t limited to any one area. I’ve heard shockingly racist statements by church leaders here in the Chicagoland area,
But the DOJ’s report on Davis schools really puts a point to the fact that we have not managed to teach our people the basics of the Gospel, including that racism is wrong.
And it’s not that we haven’t tried. In 2006, at General Conference, Pres, Hinckley condemned racism in stark terms:
Now I am told that racial slurs and denigrating remarks are sometimes heard among us. I remind you that no man who makes disparaging remarks concerning those of another race can consider himself a true disciple of Christ. Nor can he consider himself to be in harmony with the teachings of the Church of Christ. How can any man holding the Melchizedek Priesthood arrogantly assume that he is eligible for the priesthood whereas another who lives a righteous life but whose skin is of a different color is ineligible?
That doesn’t leave a lot of wiggle room for justifying racism. More recently, Pres. Nelson has joined with the NAACP in calling for racial harmony (and, by implication, the end of racial discrimination by members of the church).
But these moves have clearly been insufficient to rip racism out of our hearts and our communities. And we both can and should do more.
What should we do? I have a simple proposal: we should devote a church curriculum to battling racism in ourselves, our church community, and the larger community around us. That curriculum should be taught either in Sunday School or in our priesthood and Relief Society classes (as well as youth classes and even Primary). And it shouldn’t be a fifth Sunday kind of thing: it should be a consistent class for whatever period of time we need to fully cover the curriculum. (I imagine at least three months, but I don’t actually know.) And it should repeat on a regular basis.
(Note that I’m not open to the idea that somehow this isn’t appropriate for a church setting. I’ve been in classes that discussed financial planning—heck, I’ve taught that once or twice—which strikes me as perfectly fine but also far less central to the Gospel than, say, “All Are Alike Unto God.”)
And what would this curriculum look like? I don’t know exactly; I would hope the church would reach out to people with expertise in the area to design it (and that they would produce a detailed lesson manual that would be legitimately helpful to teachers). But I have some ideas of what it should include:
Scriptural and Prophetic Statements Decrying Racism. Fairly self-explanatory, right? And we have plenty.
Racism in Church History. We need to confront our history. We like to tout the idea that Missourians in the 1830s didn’t like us in part because we were northern abolitionists. Which is true as far as it goes. But we also need to confront the fact that, while Illinois was formally a free state, church leaders allowed chattel slavery in Nauvoo. Brigham Young permitted slavery in Utah. While we may have made some rhetorical moves toward abolition, our revealed preferences suggest we weren’t, as a community, actually terribly uncomfortable with it.
And then we have the priesthood and temple ban. We should learn about the people who faced that ban. We should confront the harm it did to them and their families. We should learn about the origins and development of it.
We have J. Reuben Clark’s and Ezra Taft Benson’s opposition to the civil rights movement.
Fallible People and Scriptures. Now the thing is, I’m not arguing that we should confront our past to tear down the church. But simply put, our past is our past and we don’t put it behind us by ignoring it.
But we also need to learn how to read past leaders—and scriptures—as something other than the infallible will of God to us. Because they’re not. The Book of Mormon has passages that are tremendously racist, equating whiteness with goodness and dark skin with badness. But it doesn’t force us to read that equation as God’s will; in fact, the narrative of the Book of Mormon ultimately subverts and condemns those racist ideas.
But a surface-level reading of scripture won’t get us there. We need to learn how to engage with scripture rather than assuming its infallibility. This class would be a perfect way to engage with that. It could give us the skills to recognize not only the spiritual worth of scripture, but how to read scripture.
Likewise, it could teach us that prophets are not, and don’t have to be, infallible. Many of our church leaders held racist views. That a prophet held those views doesn’t make those views right, and that they had racist views doesn’t make their actual revelatory statements wrong. But we need to learn to navigate these shores.
How To Prevent Racism. I think most of us don’t want to be racist. I think most of us would like to shut racism down. But I think most of us—in the U.S., at least, majority white—also don’t entirely know what constitutes racism. It’s not just dressing like a Nazi and using the n-word while white (though it certainly includes dressing like a Nazi and using the n-word). It would be valuable to address the range of things that constitute racism. But more than that, it would be valuable to learn tools for recognizing and combatting racism in our own selves, as well as tools for confronting racism in our church and non-church communities.
There’s certainly more that a class could involve. But we really need a more sustained approach to racism than merely its mention and condemnation in General Conference and in press releases. We need tools to deal with it, and tools to help rid ourselves of it.
And outside of a class, the church needs to formally and institutionally apologize for its racist past. Its racist past does not somehow make it invalid. Apologizing doesn’t somehow make it weak. But this idea of leaving our past behind us isn’t working; it’s not sending a message to members.
And we desperately need to send members this message: racism is unacceptable. Is ungodly. And is something that each one of us is capable of engaging in. It takes effort and humility to overcome and repudiate, but repenting of our racism helps to heal our selves and our communities and is a critical step toward creating Zion.