Race and religion scholar Joanna Brooks offers an atypical treatment of the imbrication of anti-Black racism and American Christianity in her book, Mormonism and White Supremacy: American Religion and the Problem of Racial Innocence. While treatment of the subject is influenced by her background and membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, readers are given new language and the vocabulary to dissect and understand White supremacy and White racial privilege, particularly regarding how it has infiltrated and operated in the American Christian church. Brooks accomplishes this through content analysis of rare but significant documents and a historical study of the institutionalization of the LDS Church.
The practices of anti-Black racism and White supremacy are part of the social fabric and history of the American church. Yet Brooks highlights two points that distinguish the LDS Church from all others. First, Utah Mormons’ and the institutional LDS Church's early...
