“Is white supremacy inherent to Mormon doctrine?”

The other day, I linked to a Huffington Post blog item about women in Mormonism, by Mette Ivie Harrison.  I said that I had reservations about it, but that it was thought provoking.

Here, I offer a link to another piece by Dr. Harrison:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mette-ivie-harrison/is-white-supremacy-inhere_b_7614052.html

I have considerably more reservations about this one.

For example:

1.  I don’t think it’s fair, just, or appropriate to invoke the specter of generalized “white racism” in connection with the repulsive massacre in Charleston two days ago.

2.  I think it’s ridiculous to suggest that the Book of Mormon is largely if not entirely about skin color.  (And, I might note, its position on Nephites and Lamanites is much more nuanced than Dr. Harrison seems to allow.  For one thing, as any good reader of the book surely knows, there are a number of places in the narrative where the Lamanites are far superior, in spiritual and moral terms, to the Nephites.)

Still, once again, I think there are issues here that are worth discussing.

I’ll offer a couple of preliminary thoughts:

a.  There may well be racism in the Book of Mormon.  But that would scarcely demonstrate it to be a nineteenth century document, because, by twenty-first -century American standards, virtually everybody in the pre-modern world would probably count as a racist.

b.  Latter-day Saint depictions of God must depict him as looking like some particular, determinate kind of anthropomorphic being.  We believe him to be corporeal.  I doubt that he’s white — unless one means by that “very white,” as in gloriously and brilliantly so, not just, as “whites” actually are, rather “pink” — but I also doubt that he’s black or yellow or red.  And Jesus simply wasn’t black or yellow or red.  He was a first-century Palestinian Jew, so he was probably, by my Nordic standards, somewhat brown.  And we’re not really free to seriously pretend otherwise, however useful it might be for certain purposes.  The incarnation put the Son of God in a particular place and culture at a particular time in a particular and determinate body.