Race and the Making of the Mormon People

Max Perry Mueller's Race and the Making of the Mormon People successfully lays bare the problems with racism and conceptualizations of belonging that plague the history of Mormonism. Mueller complicates how race was initially imagined and later transformed. Unlike the national fervor of many toward chattel slavery and native genocide, Mormons conceptualized race differences through much more fluid possibilities. Readers might be astonished to learn how the Latter-day Saints Church was once radically inclusive of members of color. Still, this Lds drive toward tolerance grew out of paternalistic ideology to “convert, civilize, and create covenants” with nonwhite peoples (pp. 10–11). Mueller illustrates how main tenets of the Book of Mormon justified a conditional acceptance of otherwise-marginalized communities. Initially open to embracing freed black members, the Church devolved into segregated practices. The resulting schema of white righteousness ensnared members of color in damaging self-deprecating identities. Mueller reveals how Elija Abel, a black priesthood holder and member of the Quorum of Seventy in 1841, was perceived to have “transcend[ed] his own blackness in the afterlife” (p. 127). Jane Manning James, “the most famous black Mormon in Salt Lake City,” fought her entire life to be accepted and welcomed in God's everlasting glory as a full member of the Church (p. 119). Instead, she was sealed to Joseph Smith as his eternal “servitor” or servant. Even as she advocated for her inclusion into the afterlife, this marginalized belonging took a toll on James, who stated in 1899, “I am white with the exception of the color of my skin” (p. 149). Mueller provides a detailed account of the relationship between white Mormons and members such as James, albeit through an undercurrent that discredits James's narrative. Additionally, the book explores Ute chief Wakara's dealings with the Church and Brigham Young. Throughout these chapters, Mueller addresses how respectability politics equated to embodied whiteness. The book ends with a necessary critique on what is etched, remembered, and performed in Church representations of people of color. The book presents an excellent analysis of conducting research on otherwise-neglected or underarchived communities. Historians of Utah, the Lds Church, and religious race relations in the nineteenth century will find this book invaluable

Aesthetics · Afterlife · Art · Ideology · Literature · Political science · Politics · Race (biology · Racism · Sociology · White (mutation · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Gender Studies · History · Law · Mormonism, Religion, and History · Philosophy · Religious studies

• Liminally White

  Open Access•Jamie Moshin, Richard Benjamin Crosby•Communication Culture and Critique•2018

  Add to list

• The Celestial City

  Open Access•Russell W Stevenson, Russell Stevenson•African Studies Review•2020

  Add to list