Core "Thinkings" 3 of 3: What "Race" are Mormons Supposed to Be Anyway?

A few years ago I led a course on Race and Culture (but not in a White-splainey way).  We studied A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America by Ronald Takaki.  He retells the interconnected stories of many marginalized groups across U.S. history.   Commonalities include subjection to massive violence and pressure to assimilate into, or subserve, Whiteness.  Members of many of these groups served with renown in the U.S. military, possibly hopeful that full acceptance in U.S. life would follow.  In each case, however, persecution or subjugation persisted.  Yet each group also resisted in ways that positively transformed America’s trajectory. 

Throughout the course we identified our ancestral connections to those histories.  Latter-day Saints, the people I come from, are famous for “family history,” which means not only tracing genealogy, but knowing our forebears’ stories (at least the faith-promoting ones) in relation to Church history.  To believers that history is, essentially, that Jesus established His Church while He was on this earth, then persecution and dissension dissolved its authority.  God inspired the Protestant Reformation to bring back much of the lost light and to pave the way for religious freedom.  Within the milieu of U.S. religious pluralism, God chose Joseph Smith to restore His one true Church.  Hell-bent on stopping God’s work, Satan stirred up persecution, leading to Smith’s murder and to the Saints’ forced migration to what is now Utah.  There, the Lord continues to lead His church.

Like most Pioneer descendants, my family augmented our Saintliness by recounting myths connecting us to Joseph Smith.  One ancestor was supposedly the Prophet’s bodyguard and, ahem, didn’t do a very good job.  But we also had substantiated connections.  William Hyde, my sixth-great-grandfather, was a participant-observer in the “Mormon Battalion”, an acclaimed unit in the U.S.-Mexico War.  He was quoted in “Our Heritage” – an official Mormon History booklet, which even had the Church’s logo on it.  If One-Wish-Willows were real, this kind of credibility is what many Mormons would wish for, even above being loved by a beautiful woman against her will.  (Polygamy probably took care of that anyway.)