I attended the “Black, White and Mormon” conference sponsored by the University of Utah’s Tanner Center, Thursday night and all day Friday. You can find writeups just about everywhere:
USNews
Salt Lake Tribune (Being Black at BYU)
Salt Lake Tribune (Black Women)
Salt Lake Tribune (Elder Sitati’s talk)
Deseret News (Lester Bush’s talk)
so I won’t try to summarize the conference in any sort of journalistic way.
There is one personal observation I want to make, my takeaway from the conference that I hope will remain fresh in my mind and heart forever:
We’ve talked about the priesthood restriction for years. I know as well as anybody else the dates and names and ins and outs of the restriction, the hope for its ending, the 1978 revelation, ongoing racism, and all the ways we have talked and talked and talked about those issues over the years. When I have taken part in those discussions, I was serious. I wanted to know the truth, I wanted to share it, I sincerely cared, I thought I felt the pain and the hope.
I thought.
It turns out that was all I was doing – thinking. For me, and perhaps for most other white Mormons, all of that was an intellectual exercise. It was never anything more, no matter how deeply I thought it was something more – I was talking about someone else, and never living the experience.
Look, for example, at my recent post on William and Marie Graves. There’s nothing really wrong with it; I’m still quite happy about it – but I understand now that there is something missing, something I’ll never be able to put into any story. I can find the external facts, I can acknowledge that Marie had a terrible experience in Atlanta, I can acknowledge that because Marie and William Graves lived and died in a pre-1978 Mormon world, they never lived as full members of the Church.
But even while supposing that must have been painful, I don’t really know the first thing about it. I realized that yesterday listening to the Race and Mormon Women panel, chaired by Paulette Payne and addressed by Janan Graham-Russell, Catherine M. Stokes, LaShawn Williams-Schultz, and Tamu Smith. Being denied the priesthood didn’t just mean that William couldn’t bless the sacrament, and that Marie couldn’t go to the temple. Enduring racism at Church didn’t just mean an uncomfortable few minutes in Atlanta. Rather, the teachings that accompanied and rationalized the priesthood restriction went far beyond restricting the outward actions of African-American Latter-day Saints. Those teachings and the behavior of white Latter-day Saints struck repeatedly – and continue to strike today – at the center of black members’ very selves: “God doesn’t love you.” “You won’t go to heaven.” “You don’t belong here.” “You’re cursed.” “You aren’t wanted.” “You are invisible.” “Your children are a threat to mine, and I’ll do whatever it takes to keep you away.” “You have no place in the Kingdom, past, present or future.”
That the women and men who participated in this conference, and those like Marie and William Graves from earlier generations, somehow withstood those attacks on their very souls, and knew, despite what they were told, that God does love them, and that they do have a place in his plan and in his Kingdom, is nothing short of the greatest witness to grace that I have ever seen or heard of.
We – the Bloggernacle, Facebook, the newspapers – as whites, talk about racism and the Church as an intellectual exercise, from outside, something to explain, something to be indignant about. Black members lived it, and live it, and have an entirely different, more relevant perspective than I can ever hope to have. They aren’t talking about it from outside, but are living it from inside, in a way that I glimpsed for the first time yesterday.
I don’t know quite what to do. At the moment, I feel like a fraud in trying to tell a story like that of Marie and William Graves’. A black woman or man would understand that story in ways that I cannot, and could tell it from a more authentic viewpoint. It’s my story in the sense of its being about Latter-day Saints … but that doesn’t make it entirely my story, not in this case. When the point of the story is not their Mormon-ness, but rather their faithfulness under the onslaught of racism, I have no way to really understand or to convey that. It’s someone else’s story.
On the other hand, I do have skills and the interest to dig out the germs of stories that not many other Latter-day Saints, whether black or white, have the skills and time to do right now. Maybe seeing the black Latter-day Saints who have been part of our history is at least a part of the solution. Maybe bringing the stories to light in a rough form will then allow someone else to finish telling the stories with a perspective closer to that of the black Saints of the past. That’s what I expect to do, for now – but I tell you, I’ve never felt more inadequate, even fraudulent, than I did while listening to those women yesterday.
It is certainly fair to recognize the differences in our circumstances that give us such different experiences. We can admire those who have faced far greater challenges than we have ourselves, but we can’t claim to fully understand them.
There is one thing that has helped me a little, I think. Do you remember the New Testament story of the crippled woman whom Christ healed on the Sabbath day? When the onlookers objected, Christ pointed out that that each of them loosed their ox and ass from the stall on the Sabbath day to lead them to water. Why should not this daughter of Abraham be loosed also on the Sabbath day?
Whenever I meet someone who seems different to me, uncomfortable or awkward to get to know (and I’m shy enough that this is a large part of the populations), God whispers, “She also is a daughter of Abraham,” and then I know how He expects me to treat her.
I enjoyed reading this, your humility, and your insights. As a man, I suppose, in like manner, all men of the church should be acknowledging inadequacies over against understanding or representing women’s experiences in the church.
Brilliant, Ardis! I remember a similar feeling on my mission. A white American woman, who’d investigated the Church, told me that she’d dropped the discussions when she learned that of her three boys, the oldest, whose father was black (her second husband was white), would not be allowed to hold the priesthood. She said, “How can I tell my son that he’s not as worthy as his brothers?” I well remember the helplessness I felt at not being able to give her (or me) a satisfying answer.
Great thoughts, thank you, Ardis.
It was an excellent event.
One of the biggest takeaways I had was the several times the difference between an African perspective and and African-American perspective on the priesthood ban and a Mormon experience.
It was clear to me that one prominent African speaker, though careful not to say that he could speak to the African-American experience, was manifestly unaware of the importance of the American historical context for the ban and the African-American Mormon experience. And to the detriment of his perspective and recommendations to African-Americans.
I have come to recognize this to some extent when I have considered women’s issues, and realized that for all my supposed sensitivity, I really didn’t have a leg to stand on. Perhaps the most important thing we can do is to listen, really listen, to these stories of the black Mormon experience, and the stories of women, and stories of Mormon’s with same sex attraction, and empathize to the extent we are capable of, while always knowing that we are always on the inside, looking out from our privileged position, and never fully capable of full understanding.