Thought you guys would like to check it out :)

http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?3,1117175,1117175#msg-1117175

Thanks, Susan for sharing this.

I found hearing her heartfelt story informative, plus gut wrenching. She has been through a lot and is very brave to share her experiences and thoughts so that we can, hopefully, learn from them.

I was brought up being taught racial intolerance in my home environment as well as from the LD$ cult,and as a young person, I only associated with people who looked like myself which further narrowed my experience of learning anything different. New insights arrived when I attended university as well as when I came in contact with a wider circle of people, some who were different than myself. However, change was gradual because of the prejudice I have been around.

Thanks for the heads up.

This is a very interesting U.K. perspective on something that many of us here usually see only through American eyes.

I am glad she wrote this, for all of us.

She is right.

After the essay on race, I apologized on FB for ever believing what the church taught me about the mark of Cain and how this meant blacks were denied the priesthood as punnishment for not making the right choices in the pre existence. I admitted to being embarrassed by repeating the teachings taught in our home and church. And I was happy that the church was making a statement disavowing past teachings of racial inferiority.

I guess my doing this was embarrassing to my family. It was not intended to be. I figured I was showing I could allign with coming clean while showing some of the damage such teaching caused. It was embarrassing to support the church's position on race when it felt so wrong. But I wanted to please my family and community so it had to be the right thing to do.

My sister and my dad told be I was making things up about the church because of my animosity toward the church. That I was never taught these things and I was living in fantasy land. I don't blame my parents for passing down what their church taught. I was happy about the admission happier that I had been with the church in a long time.

Then dad calls to explain God can discriminate and who do I think I am to say God can't. And if God discriminates it's not racism.

So on one hand I am embarrassing them with my apology about what embarrassed me. But they are still defending the embarrassing stuff they say publically I made up?

It is so damaging.

he want into a rage over my disagreement about the blacks. It showed the depth of his brain washing. I should have had the marriage annulled.

I liked the introduction a lot.

I was reared in a very Mormon place and in a family that bought into the racist stories. But that didn't last long. In little league sports I interacted with a lot of black kids, and by the time I was in high school several of us had grown quite close. I'm still in touch with one of them, decades later, a man who had a military career and now lives across the country. I guess I believed the pre-existence story but it didn't seem relevant to my life or my friendships.

In college I had two black roommates; we remain in touch today. My best friend in grad school was Ghanaian. He ironically gave my daughter her first Barbie. My wife and I did not like the white, blond dolls and had decided not to have them in our house. But Kwaku gave her a white, blond doll and that was that. I still remember that day. My two-year-old girl climbed up on his lap and kissed him. He wept, saying "white children don't kiss black men."

At graduation, another friend from the deep south invited me and my visiting brother to a party. The other people were all young blacks from the States, the UK and Africa--except my friends' parents also attended. The couple were old, from sharecropper families, and the husband was a Baptist preacher. After a conversation, my friend's mom said, "You know, I feel so comfortable with everybody here, but you [residents of X state] just seem different." My friend got hugely embarrassed because I had come to the state for education and had only been there as long as he had. But he looked and me and saw I was having a hard time not laughing because my parents would have felt the same way if two black people attended one of their parties. That bond--coming from provincial places where people had very limited experiences--is one of the things that brought us together.

There were two elderly black women in my last ward. My wife asked one of them to sing at her baptism, and we hired the other's granddaughter as a babysitter. We also hired a young Nigerian from the local pre-school because every time we went to pick up my kids, one of them was always with her.

I've always been grateful for those early sporting experiences. They have given me a wider range of friendships than most white people enjoy, Mormon or not. Those friendships always enriched our lives. We did not welcome black people into our ward; they welcomed us. My kids, grown now, still hug and kiss my black friends when they visit, and they have close school friends from different races as well.

I am so sorry that racism, particularly Mormon racism, has hurt all sorts of non-whites. I am also sorry it has hurt whites by not letting them get to know and love as many of God's children as they should have.

Welcome, ExBlackSister, and thanks for sharing your story.

Its true that missionaries target, in a sense, ethnic people and families.

In my mission a common question was "How many black people have you baptized?"

It's like the missionaries were collecting these people, very strange.

Some wards were very negative about other races joining, other wards were so overly excited whenever a non white person came or joined that it was absurd.

But during a Gospel Doctrine class in one of my wards, a very vocal man got up and said loudly that the ONLY reason blacks were ever denied the priesthood was racism, pure and simple.

Too mad more people wouldn't just speak the truth.

I was always embarrassed by that doctrine, and couldn't make sense of it. But once you realize that the whole religion is man-made, everything makes sense.

One thing that I've noticed, both at my university and at my work, is that in a work environment different races get along well and are able to work together productively in a collegial atmosphere. But there is a tendency to gravitate toward one's own racial group when it comes to socializing (I'm not saying this happens everywhere, just in my border-south state.) For instance, I can walk into my university's cafeteria, and see a "dividing line" of where students choose to sit.

It might be at a church that is largely white that people are sticking to their comfort zones. The OP is right, people should be reaching out, but it may be that they see church more as a social outlet and they don't realize that they need to make the effort.

I can imagine that the Mormon church would be a very uncomfortable experience for African Americans.

Very interesting.