DiaBLOGue

Father-Daughter Interview on Blacks and the Priesthood

Verlyne: We saw a documentary a few weeks ago and you were featured in it, with Darius Gray. I don’t know when it was done, but it was on Blacks and the priesthood. 

Greg: Thank you. 

Egide: I want to thank you for all the work that you have done to clarify all of the history. That’s just amazing, the things we are learning now.

The Black Cain in White Garments

Dialogue 51.3 (Fall 2018): 209–211
Jackson explains “The Church refused to grant the Black body whole recognition and divinity. To Nephi, I was not fair and delightsome. To Joseph, I was a violator of the most sacred principles of society, chastity, and virtue. To Brigham, I was Cain’s curse. To McConkie, I was an unfaithful spirit, a “fence-sitter.” To you, I am colorless, my Blackness swallowed in that whiteness reclaimed, “a child of God.”

Shifting Tides: A Clarion Call for Inclusion and Social Justice

Dialogue 51.3 (Fall 2018): 201–208
“What can we do to help and make a difference in the fight for racial and social justice?” McCoy responds to the BYU students who asked these questions which he brought up in an annual MLK March on Life held by BYU was ‘stop tiptoeing around the subjects of race, inequality, and inclusion. Many well intentioned white people in this country do not understand how the deeply rooted systems of racism and inequality function.’ He encouraged people to step up and do their own part for obtaining social justice for all.

When Did You Become Black?

Dialogue 51.3 (Fall 2018): 193–200
After taking a genelogy DNA test, Houston finds some African ancestory. “Where to begin in answering all those questions? But at the most basic level, I simply liked that I was from Africa. The percentage was small but the jolt large and wondrous. In the nineteenth century, the United States had the one-drop rule about race: if you had one drop of African blood you were considered to be Black.”

A Balm in Gilead: Reconciling Black Bodies within a Mormon Imagination

Dialogue 51.3 (Fall 2018): 185–192
“As much we may hope that one would disregard the explicitly racial teachings of the past, the significance of corporeality in the Mormon imagination is such that Mormonism’s racial wounds run deep. With-out a thoughtful consideration of the impact of the priesthood and temple restrictions, their legacy manifests in implicit and explicit ways.”

One Devout Mormon Family’s Struggle with Racism

Dialogue 51.3 (Fall 2018): 155–180
This article tells the impact of LDS racial teachings on a single family history, the Marshalls, from Alabama in the 19th c. to Filmore, Utah in the present.

Martin Luther King Jr. and Mormonism: Dialogue, Race, and Pluralism

Dialogue 51.3 (Fall 2018): 131–153
This essay provides an outline for how to have a more robust intrafaith dialogue about race among members of the LDS church. Using principles from Martin Luther King, Jr. about dialogue on race, Whitaker argues for the need for greater dialogue to overcome the past.

Mormons & Lineage: The Complicated History of Blacks & Patriarchal Blessings, 1830–2018

Dialogue 51.3 (Fall 2018): 83–129
The priesthood revelation of 1978 eased some of the tension when the apostles affirmed that Blacks could now be “adopted into the House of Israel” as full participants in Mormon liturgical rites. But this doctrinal shift did not resolve the vexing question of whether or not Black people derived from the “seed of Cain.”