I went to a great public school, had a top notch teacher and lived in a great community. I paid attention and my teachers encouraged me to think critically. If best-case scenarios could be created in a test tube, they would look much like my real one did.
I loved social studies.
We learned all the dates and names. We even learned about things like context and perspective. I left high school knowing who Nat Turner, W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes were. I recall experiencing a version of the famed blue-eyed-brown-eyed segregation exercise in elementary school. Though I think we were divided by shoe color or some other arbitrary thing. We memorized Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous speech. I think this is where we all missed the point. By “we” I mean all the White people.
The one thing my class was missing was Black people. In fact, my whole school, city and state lacked them. This happenstance of geography and time is not unique in this respect but common in America. What I’m not sure was common was how we thought we cared about things like equality. We were taught it in school and church. We, again that would be all of us, were Mormon.
I was taught in my home and my class reinforced the ideal that one should be judged by content of character and that skin color was irrelevant. There is a scripture in the Book of Mormon that reads, “And he [God] denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female … all are alike unto God.” We were taught that in church and on the streets as well. Racial slurs were tolerated by no one, empathy with the oppressed was emphasized and no punches were pulled in illustrating the wrongs African-Americans endured. I was gifted both a sense of shame in what my White race had done and a sense of pride that we had repented and shed our prejudice.
Then I left my home in suburban Salt Lake City to be a Mormon missionary in urban Atlanta in the mid 1990s. There I met Black people.
They were not as friendly as I had hoped. In fact, it seemed to me that I was distrusted and disliked. None of these people knew me nor did they know anything of my faith. They could not tell I was one of the “good ones.” I tried to show what I was, but others were slow to be swayed. In fact, it seemed as if they judged me by the color of my skin with no regard for the content of my character.
