The Security Apparatus Loves White Supremacy

Probably the most racist thing I encountered during my LDS childhood (and there were many, many of them) was the time we went to "Youth Conference" at Gettysburg College when I was 16 in 1989.  In addition to the usual dances and requisite maudlin finale testimony meeting in which teenage girls got up and testified how coexisting with their fellow teens from their ward for two or three days had shown them once again that this was "the one true church," we very briefly went to the battlefield park.  We were only there for about 45 minutes - I'm not even sure we went to the visitors center.  Instead of touring the sites and monuments of the battle like any normal youth group, we only went to the battlefield to play a silly and offensive game of "Lamanites vs. Nephites" in which the youth were divided into two racist and mythic "peoples" and instructed to reenact some supposed battle in which the wicked, savage, and cursed dark-skinned ancestors of the indigenous peoples of the Americas attacked their more righteous and sophisticated and of course white and lovely kinspeople.  I'm not sure if the result was predetermined to be that the savage "redskins" completely exterminated their civilized white counterparts, but we all knew from years of Primary, Sunday School, and early morning seminary that this was the final outcome in the explicitly referenced "Book of Mormon."  

It's utterly astounding to me that even at that time we were instructed and expected to play-act some mythic and ludicrous battle of a supremely arrogant cult of white supremacy and religious superiority on the very ground in which the the United States of America and its military courageously battled to stop the advances of a cause of white supremacy and racial exploitation, losing thousands of men in the process.

Of course, the LDS church and its members in no way participated in this effort, preferring to abscond to what was then foreign territory to illegally perpetuate the subjugation and control of women on land taken from indigenous peoples.  It's no wonder that the Republican Party of Lincoln and Grant was founded with the explicit goals of fundamentally and permanently eradicating the so-called "twin relics of barbarism" that then defiled this nation and its ideals - Mormon polygamy and Southern slavery.

Twenty years earlier, teachers and coaches at T.C. Williams High School had famously taken a similar group of northern Virginian teens to the same battlefield.  Of course, instead of trying to indoctrinate and brainwash impressionable young people with pernicious and thoroughly discredited myths of white supremacy and religious superiority in order to bind those young people to an openly exclusionary and bigoted organization, they reasonably taught the exact opposite message.