Joanna Brooks Quotes

A student of mine said, “Oh, yes,” he said, “Racism is not a character flaw. It’s a system.” It’s not a character flaw. It’s not you’re a bad person because you harbor some deep dark secret. You are part of something much bigger than you unknowingly, maybe sometimes knowingly, that benefits you because of your race. We live in racist systems. They precede us.

So, let's start with sin. So, in the book, I talked about early Christian theology. And when I say early, I mean through the 1800s. Calvinism, a lot of the theological wellsprings from which Joseph Smith threw. It had a notion of sin that was much more rich and complicated than the one we teach in primary. And we get a sense of it in some of the higher teachings in Mormonism and some of the language about being free from the sins of your generation, right? So, we get a sense of it there. But sin was understood by early Protestant theologians, as early Christian theologians, it's just something we're born into as humans. It's a condition, right? I mean, it's the natural man that's an enemy to God, right? So, as created beings, we operate in a material sphere that is flawed, that is not yet exalted, that where there are just mistakes, there are accidents, people are hurt badly, people can lose their lives, laws are broken. And that's the sphere we move in. So, sin is the condition that defines us all. And achieving redemption from sin in early theology was about covenant with a community, to look out for the community and do your best to hold each other accountable and you transact through the redemption of Jesus Christ, right? So, it was a collective understanding. In the 19th century, that gets really rationalized, as what I call it is individualized and emptied out. So, we move to an idea of sin that's less about belonging to a community that struggles than it is about you individually did something wrong. You put your hand in the cookie, you stole a cookie from the cookie jar, right? You didn't pay your tithing. You killed someone, you coveted your neighbor's spouse. That individualized notion of sin. And then, churches offered a notion of redemption. That was if you come to church in a transactional way, you'll be forgiven of that, right? You show up. You pay your tithing or give your offerings every week and be a good citizen and don't say bad words and you're safe. You're check. But the downside of that is that sin evacuates us of have a much deeper sense of moral responsibility and culpability. It makes it impossible for us to conceive of, everybody's caught up in something wrong. We're all caught up in something wrong, right? And that is the scale of moral imagination we need to understand the extent of racism, right? So, sin is the structure and condition of humankind. Racism is the structuring condition of human life in the US in the 20th and 21st centuries. It's just the way it is. And it was made that way. It came into being through a set of deliberate choices, millions of them to privilege white over black. But it's a system. It's a condition. And the only way out is through choosing out and choosing out in community.

And so, this is the story I tell in the book of Abraham Smoot, who had been born and raised in Kentucky, had gone on a mission Alabama, was a southerner and came west but told Brigham pretty much he wanted to maintain his slaves when he came. And it was the influence of people like Smoot who helped motivate young to make sure the territory was a pro-slavery space. So, Smoot gets here. He moves down to Provo. He becomes like state president and mayor and first trustee of Brigham Young University. He's a really successful businessman. In 1879, after State Conference one day, John Taylor comes down to visit a conference and afterwards goes back to one of the Smoot's four houses in Provo, and asked Smoot to recollect for him the story of the ordination of Elijah Abel because Abraham Smoot had been ordained at the same time on the same day in the same place as Elijah Abel. And the man who are named him and Elijah Abel was a man named Zebedee Contrin, who by that point was a poor farmer, barely scraping by on the outskirts of Spanish fork. And Smoot, in fact, owned the land that Coltrin lived on via the united order, right? No pressure on Coltrin, right? So, Abraham raised Coltrin and Coltrin says, 'Yeah, I ordained him, but it really wasn't supposed to be that way.' And Joseph Smooot himself said that it shouldn't be. And then, Abraham Smoot said, 'Yup, what he said and I say the same thing and ordination of black people should not happen.' And they lied. They lied together. They had both been there. They had both seen hands placed on Elijah Abel's head and the priesthood conveyed upon him. Coltrin had done it himself. And yet, they arrayed their testimonies against him and they knew what that meant. Elijah Abel had documents of his ordination. He would carry around to try and show people. And it was always being debated. And this very powerful figure cast us lots decisively against black testimony, against black authority. And against black lives. He held black people in slavery in Provo. But he's a human, right? I mean, but he's a human. And we're not going to hate on Abraham Smoot. It's just like, but we need to be big caution. The way you came to power in this territorial theocracy, the way we carved out the space we have, the fact that it is a resolutely whitespace still, that's not an accident. If we want that to change, we have to know how we got here.

racism isn’t a character flaw. It’s a system that allocates life chances based on your race. And the idea that race is not a real thing. This is something that scholars in ethnic studies and in social sciences in the academy have been talking about for decades. Whiteness is a fake idea. These categories of racial identification understanding came into being. We can pinpoint the moments in history when they come into being, when these words start being used in the way they’re being used now. They haven’t existed from the dawn of time this way, right? They became a shorthand in the 17th and 18th centuries where people could go into a really complicated reality and sort it out, right? Imagine you’re in Virginia in 1720 and you have people from everywhere flooding into this place, and race became the shorthand through which people could say, “You play this role. You play this role. I dominate you, you dominate them,” right? So, it was color coding almost to sort out complicated social realities.

So, but if you look at it, there’s no gene for race. Different people have counted as white over time, right? There was a time in history, in US history, when Irish people were not considered white. Southern Europeans were not considered white until they demonstrated through their actions by opting in and supporting the white majority and discriminated against or differentiating from black people that they belonged, right? So, that’s a helpful term as well.

And so, I think, just to return your original question, Tim, how do we have these conversations, how do we translate them? For me, the spirit of it that is most that makes sense for me is in a spirit of shared responsibility. These are not conversations about who’s on the Lord side who. This is not you’re in and you’re out. It’s like we have work to do. I feel we have work to do. My understanding has been changed. It’s about doing through your actions. It’s about showing up where it matters with your money and your body. Right? And others will notice and follow.

And so, I think, just to return your original question, Tim, how do we have these conversations, how do we translate them? For me, the spirit of it that is most that makes sense for me is in a spirit of shared responsibility. These are not conversations about who’s on the Lord side who. This is not you’re in and you’re out. It’s like we have work to do. I feel we have work to do. My understanding has been changed. It’s about doing through your actions. It’s about showing up where it matters with your money and your body. Right? And others will notice and follow.

racial innocence is actually a term that comes from legal scholarship. That basically this notion of sin and innocence, the simple version that started materializing in the 19th century, is transported into legal reasoning. The idea that a white person is not responsible and shouldn’t be “harmed” in any way by legislative or judicial actions and segregation and structural inequality, right? So, we see it in the 1950s and the 1980s, around US Supreme Court decisions, around desegregation of schools, around affirmative action, where they say, “Oh, no, we can’t apply this remedy because it would hurt this white person.” And they’re innocent. They didn’t hurt anyone.

So, it’s what we hear. For example, my family didn’t own slaves. I never did anything wrong. Correct. Your ancestors individually may not have committed overt racist acts to your knowledge. But does that mean we shouldn’t be responsible for these vast systems that have given us unearned advantages? And racial innocence is that individually plea like, “But I’m not racist,”

It hurt me to write it. It was painful. It wasn’t like, “Yay!” It wasn’t joyful. I found another instance, it was like, “Oh, crud.” Like, “Ah.” Like, “Really? We quoted from Confederate history and BH Roberts course on the ’70s, that was our footnote? What the.” It was gut punch. Not fun. Now, that’s sorrow. That’s the humbling that we have to do, right? And so, is that what guilt is? Maybe. But there’s no way through this without a humbling. Dr. Cornel West said years ago that if white people could taste just a tiny bit of the sorrow black people carry, it would be astonishing. And so, how do we be in a community if we’re not willing to sit with sorrow, and sit with discomfort, and sit with things that make us sick enough to say, “I can’t. I can’t. Not one more day of this, I can’t.”? I will not raise my children in a world where black men are killed on the street under the boot heels of police officers. That’s no longer acceptable. I’m sick about it. Right? That’s the sorrow that leads to good things, I believe.

So, yes, Joseph Smith ordained black people. Was he a firmly committed soldier for black freedom? No. He was all over the place because that’s who Joseph Smith was. He was just a big personality. And then, Brigham, torch is passed to Brigham and he comes West. And his goal is to establish a territorial theocracy. He wants to establish an empire and he’s pretty clear that religion and territory can join in government and priesthood government. And that is a government in which, in his words, white men will rule over all others and over black men, right? And he establishes through the legislature, territory legislature, pro-slavery policies, anti-black voting, anti-black holding elected office policies, not to get a big captive labor force in Utah but to keep black people out of Utah. Black people were coming West at that time. They were going to California in large numbers from the gold rush on. And Utah’s population stayed very low because it was a slave state. It was a slave state. We were a slave state. So, after that point, after Brigham’s death, some of the people who are the guardians of this territorial theocracy made really conscious choices to maintain the story that Elijah Abel’s ordination was illegitimate and should not be honored, that it was a mistake or a one off or a concession.