Understanding the Issues

I came to the MA SJHR program with a desire to learn about social injustices around the world and what I can do to combat them. Now I am walking away with a deeper understanding of my own privilege and my positionality. I gained the tools needed to unpack my own lived experiences and recognize how I have personally benefited from my privilege and also how I have felt marginalized or othered within my own communities.

This “unpacking” started in my very first class – Proseminar in Social Justice & Human Rights. Andrea Smith’s, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, allowed me to connect my experience within Mormonism to the “cultural assimilation and missionization” (Smith, 2005, p. 52) of colonists, as described by Smith. She states, “In the colonial imagination to truly be Christian is to be white and vice versa. Thus, any struggle to dismantle white supremacy needs to incorporate a critique of Christian imperialism in its analysis” (Smith, 2005, p. 52). Her narrative on white supremacy and Christian imperialism pushed me to examine the concepts within the religion I had been born into, raised in, and eventually left. I have since learned about how Andrea Smith claimed Cherokee heritage at the time she wrote Conquest, but that she no longer claims to have Native American heritage publicly (Viren, 2021). While I still agree with her description of the missionary work of colonists, I think it must be noted that she misrepresented herself and failed to center the voices of those harmed. She is not the only one who has done so, and I believe it is important to recognize that even in scholarship where Black and Indigenous voices should be amplified, many white people still strive to be the loudest to the point of being deceitful about their own heritage and identity.

Proseminar in Social Justice & Human Rights also introduced me to the graphic novel Nat Turner by Kyle Baker. I was struck by the violence in a story that I had not yet heard. It challenged me to reimagine what it means to stand up against oppression and it forced me to change my perspective as a privileged white woman. It was the perfect setup for what I would learn throughout the MA SJHR program because I would find myself constantly challenging my own view of the world. My pursuit for a master's degree no longer was just about learning how to combat social injustices in the world. It was about learning of my own participation in white supremacy and xenophobia, and how the very existence and power of those two things benefitted me personally.

As I became more aware of how whiteness is constantly centered, even in discussions of the experiences of racism and xenophobia, I started examining how the religion I was born into has perpetuated white supremacy by reading more about Mormon Church history. Mormonism was started by a young man in 1830 in New York who claimed to have seen God the Father and Jesus Christ as separate beings as a fourteen-year-old boy, so it should be no surprise that portions of the religion's teachings uphold white supremacy and xenophobia, considering the time period in which the church was established. Unfortunately, many of the teachings have not yet been disavowed, and racist and xenophobic ideas still get preached at the pulpit, despite the church's influence across the world. In my final paper for the course, I detailed some of the racist rhetoric taught in the church’s scriptures and other printed materials, as well as racist teachings pushed by past and current leaders. I concluded my paper with a call to action:

The Mormon Church often claims that it is a “worldwide church,” and this is thanks to its missionary program. I, myself, did not serve a mission, but my entire immediate family did. While I think they did so out of pure intentions, I now believe that the church is engaging it its own version of Christian imperialism with every missionary it sends into the mission field. I wrote about this issue in Critical Humanitarianism after studying how humanitarian organizations often carry out their missions with good intentions, but potentially inflict harm on those they serve.

My final paper was influenced by the works of Redfield and Bornstein (2010) and Harrell-Bond (2002). I drew from Redfield and Bornstein’s (2010) criticism of humanitarian groups for providing aid that only alleviates suffering for a short time and Harrell-Bond’s (2002) description of damaging power structures within humanitarianism. I also discussed how abolitionist thought could be applied to addressing the Christian imperialism and colonialism of the Mormon Church, which was supported by the work of Paik (2017) in focusing on the importance of “creating new institutions” (p. 18) rather than just “tearing down” (p. 18) the institutions themselves. While it drew on the same themes as my paper on white supremacy, this paper looked the church's mission to convert the world under a critical humanitarianism lens, while the other provided a more historical context. My concluding remarks were similar in both papers: