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[Anonymous]

Thanks, mom3

Quote:

Sociologist Maurice Halbwachs has written that “society tends to erase in its memory everything that might separate individuals or that might distance groups from each other.” In our effort to protect ourselves from ourselves, we have quietly removed these [early African American] pioneers from our minds and memories, hoping that it will bring us healing and peace. So we tell each other (and again, ourselves) how little we know, how few documents we have, how much ambiguity there is.

But the peace this approach brings is a superficial one, manufactured primarily for Saints who have enjoyed the luxury of never being told that they were less valiant in premortality or that they are “cursed.” White Latter-day Saints can banter around explanations all day and then go home, not having felt their influence. For peoples of African descent, these are not academic ventures, speculations or flights of fancy. This question is one that faces them in the mirror every day: “Am I cursed? Am I worthy? What have I done to deserve this?” Why can’t they “get over it,” we white folks ask? Perhaps for the same reasons that the Latter-day Saints have not “gotten over” the Missouri persecutions.

In 2015 the Saints can do better. The sources are readily available. The documents are plentiful. They do not provide every answer we would like, but they provide more than enough for us to know that we should be unsatisfied with sound bites.

I do not know the particulars concerning Dawson’s interactions with his bishop, but we can be certain that the story of the temple and priesthood ban matters. We ought not expect peoples of African descent to shrug their shoulders in complacence at a history that fits too well with a broader system of systemic discrimination.

If the Latter-day Saints hope to claim for themselves the prospect of a global faith community, then they must answer the sincere question of many: Why? “There is hope smiling brightly before us,” indeed, the Mormon hymn declares, but we can only echo the prayer of President Hugh B. Brown: “From the cowardice that shrinks from new truth, from the laziness that is content with half truth, from the arrogance that thinks it has all truth — O God of truth, deliver us.”

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