And I'm not just talking about Mormon theology -- that was just copied from then current racist ideas in 18-19th Century America.

Have you ever noticed that people will claim any fraction of ancestry from anywhere -- except sub-Saharan African, Aboriginal Australian, and, until relatively very recently, Native American.

Why?

Why was this supposed to be the ultimate "stain" that could never be erased?

It doesn't make any sense.

Today, except for Mormons, EV fundies, and WN types, no one cares.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/02/2023 05:50PM by anybody.

A brief vocabulary correction: penultimate actually means second to last.

But to your point: it's just racism designed to justify privilege.

It's hardly unique to America or other European-based cultures. For a time the Japanese did not consider Koreans human. The Hindu caste system says that your assigned caste is determined by karma, meaning something you must have done in the life before this one. How convenient. And the Mormon version of this is fence-sitters in the War in Heaven. A large part of the Inquisition was to determine non-Jewishness. And on and on. In actual fact racial tolerance is the odd man out in human history.

slskipper Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> A brief vocabulary correction: penultimate
> actually means second to last.

Made the correction, thanks.


>
> But to your point: it's just racism designed to
> justify privilege.
>
> In actual
> fact racial tolerance is the odd man out in human
> history.

Agreed.

Because brother brigham said so.........

I have been actively wrestling with this question for nearly all of my life.

The maternal side of my family were slaveholders. Some (like my step-grandfather, who was the second husband of my maternal grandmother) were, in addition, also KKK (or some similar offshoot involving death-if-you-tell-anyone threats, in addition to white sheets used as clothing).

In my family of birth, where racism ran rampant on my maternal side, I think two factors are very important to try to understand. (I, myself, am still trying--with not a whole lot of success.

I think the people I have known who are racially prejudiced (black/white prejudice) have a very strong need to feel superior to (with some very limited exceptions) those who are not "white." If your entire family (spread across a number of Southern and Midwestern states), feels that their "whiteness" is THE most important part of their being, you're going to witness prejudice against "the other."

There is often, in addition, a very complicated mixture of different prejudices, especially if (as is true in my family) your family owned slaves. Outside of some limited and contrary historical accounts, slaves are, virtually always, the lowest social sector of a slave-holding culture--and this can cut so deeply into an otherwise normal brain, that all connection with reality (EVERYONE'S reality!) is severed.

I grew up in a crazy family of dispossesed slaveholders.

In my opinion, there is no logic, no facts, no decency that can avoid that kind of inborn and in-bred craziness (unless, perhaps, your family moves to California during the Depression, and quickly learns that keeping your mouth shut when these kinds of issues come up is the wisest course of action).

Tevai Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I have been actively wrestling with this question
> for nearly all of my life.
>
> I think the people I have known who are racially
> prejudiced (black/white prejudice) have a very
> strong need to feel superior to (with some very
> limited exceptions) those who are not "white."

This is my thinking as well.

It's totally irrational, and doesn't make any other sense.

The Mormon side of my family were southern dirt farmers two generations before me, and my grandparents were born about 35 years after the Civil War, which means it was considerably closer in time to them than Vietnam is to us now. The Civil War was lived memory to the adults in their lives. I find that kind of startling.

The attitude I sensed, even in my TBM youth, was "we may be poor, but at least we aren't Black".

IOW, if you were white, you were guaranteed not to be on the bottom rung.

I remember as a child hearing the adults speak in hushed tones about two lynchings that had occurred in a nearby town about the time my mother was born. That such stories would be repeated for decades was the major point of lynchings - to create the narrative that being an Uppity Black, in any way, shape or form, was dangerous to your wellbeing.

Why? Because people hadn’t invented homophobia yet.

Back in the days of yore, if one had to ride a Six-Mountains roller-coaster, which was worse, being paired up with a Black man or a gay man?

How about the year you turned 21?

How about today?

When I was a kid being paired up on a roller coaster with any man would have been upsetting.

Putting that aside, I grew up doing sports with all sorts of people, so I can answer definitively that I did happily ride roller-coasters with black and Latino and Chinese kids--as opposed to adult men--and when I turned 21 two of my three college roommates were black. Given that we are still close, I hope they agree that there were no significant problems.

The same goes for non-cis people. Athletics put all sorts together and we were part of a common effort and hence partners and friends. As I have shared with some in the RfM community, my children have two godfathers who are far better family than the humans to and with whom I was born. I am sure Lot and I make the occasional mistake that they must forgive, but they know how much we love and respect them and that seems to do the trick. And again, like with sports, the four of us are on a team with a common goal: to produce the next generation of well-adjusted and loving adults. I will forever be grateful to them for joining our team and yet for some reason they think we did them a favor by letting them be watch and support our little ones.

That said, my point is that humans like to find groups to hate. The primary object in the US has always been black people but the non-cis have more recently become what I perceive as a comparably targeted minority.

Hatred, in other words, appears to be having a moment.

Is it fair to say that 'hatred' is easier to justify than 'tolerance'?

You can be criticized for who you love, but friends and family will help you hate.

Well said, cousin!

I'm not alone in seeing parallels between the mistreatment of African-Americans in current attitudes towards non-cis people.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/photo-women-snickering-trans-lawmaker-210535832.html

Even as a TBM I wondered why African "blood" was "dominant" and blood of Ephraim "recessive", to use genetic terminology. Why didn't one drop of Israelite blood make someone a member of the House of Israel?

It really did puzzle me. I'm embarrassed now to realize how little I "got" the racism of my youth - I remember separate water fountains and BBQ joints in the south where whites could go inside and order and eat. Blacks could buy food, but had to pick it up at a side door and take it home. They were not allowed inside the establishment. I more or less accepted that as the way things were.

I knew there was a civil rights movement when I was in HS, but it was an abstract concept. I lived in a coal mining town full of European immigrants, and my HS (7-12th grade) had over 1,200 students. There were no Blacks until my last year, when one Black family had kids in the school. I now wonder what it must have been like to be them.

I was oblivious growing up about racism in general. I got a strong dose of how to think from movies, my parents, and especially church. The Bible is full of stories about groups of people thinking they are superior.

Picking "less than us" people is what humans tend to do, unfortunately. Education and diversity are important. Apologies and repudiation seem frustratingly difficult because each generation has a new crop of losers who need to feel important.

The quote that smacked me in the face about racism and how it is used came from LBJ (who may as well have been Satan to people like my dad).

Lyndon B. Johnson once said (apparently, according to Snopes), "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

This is how religion and politics work. They play to that lowest primal urge to feel special. We should know better by now. The way they perpetuate it is to keep people away from books and history that might "wake" them up.

It's mortifying how we condition ourselves to think that anything that does not look exactly like us must be OK to let suffer.