What is different about this post is that we have specific examples of the problem that we can all see and discuss, even if there is disagreement on exactly what it means. We don’t have the same common ground when people generalize their unverifiable personal experiences as representative of all Mormonism, and that’s where the fights really start.

By all means, talk about what we ought to learn from the past and where we ought to go in the future. I just hope to avoid generalized and unverifiable remarks about present Latter-day Saints that would tend to put other readers on the defensive.

Let’s let Rameumptom’s eloquent comment represent that entire conversation on this thread, please, and not repeat arguments that are available elsewhere.

But racism continues. It is alive and well in the Church, among the members.

As I’ve mentioned, I struggled for almost 17 years in Montgomery, Alabama, trying to get the members in that stake to accept blacks as members. Progress is being made, thankfully. But there’s still a long way to go. I hear anti-Latino and anti-Black statements from members more often than I’d care to think.

I still hear the “N” word used in jokes by members. They look at me funny, when I tell them that I find that word and those jokes offensive. I’ve heard such jokes from PEC members. This is in Indianapolis in 2009.

This will continue to be an issue, until we all come to a unity of love and faith. How can we ever become a Zion people, while denigrating any of God’s children? While I understand the term “presentism”, I also understand the term, “Zion.” B.H. Roberts and other General Authorities should also have understood that term. While cultural issues may make some things seem okay, we need to be talking about Zion culture. Such a culture would be unchangeable in its attitudes, language, and actions towards others, regardless of the period.

In 100 years, I hope Saints will be considering our flaws of 2009, so as to learn to be better Saints in building Zion. But I would truly hate to have them think we had not progressed any further in our language and attitudes concerning the children of God.

To relate it back to another part of the original post, some version of the Beneficial Life ad could have been funny without being racist: what if it had shown a child surrounded by more toys than he could possibly hold, and he was having to decide whether to drop this one in order to pick up that one? Even a white guy at a buffet, having to choose among more kinds of food than he could pile on his plate, would have supported the same punchline.

But the ad, because it used watermelons and a chicken in connection with a black man, was built on the stereotypes that black men are shiftless and up to no good. It’s the underlying assumption more than the literal surface image that is the problem.

Just to illustarte a tiny bit:

I am engaged currently on my blog with someone who keeps telling me “you need to understand” about the things we are discussing. I told him in the very first response that I have studied the topic at a well-known divinity school, surrounded by Catholics, Protestants and those of every imaginable major religion in the world – and yet he still adds those disclaimers, in his own words in his third response, because I am Mormon. (“It is my sad experience when speaking to Mormons that when they say they know they usually don’t and the level of ignorance of these things among Mormons is depressing so I cannot and do not assume anything even when it is insisted upon.”) This is someone who isn’t addressing my points directly but relying on arguing other issues and making statements that simply aren’t accurate about the topic we are discussing – yet I am ignorant, becasue I am Mormon. It is frustrating and infuriating.

I know this is a very minor example commpared to this post, but it illustrates your point, I hope.

Or think of your favorite ex-Mormon who brushes aside your defense of some facet of church doctrine with the smug assertion that when you grow up and the scales of blind obedience fall from your eyes, you’ll abandon your faith just like he did.

On the surface, both instances are complimentary to you — but could they possibly be any nastier at heart?

Imagine if this poem had been written about a Mormon baby: Wow! Even Mormon babies are capable of love! Even Mormon mothers take care of their babies! Even Mormons are free of guile as long as they’re fresh from God! God is so good, and Jesus is so loving, that they can love even little Mormon babies!

Writing as if you have made the startling discovery that members of another race or another culture are actually human beings is not at all uncommon in world literature, and literature students should have no trouble recognizing the paternalistic, patronizing point of view which is that poem’s worst trait. The sting of surprise at the recognition of one’s humanity would have been felt by any black person who might have read the poem in 1920 — the objects of such a sting feel it immediately; it takes time and changing attitudes for the authors of the sting to recognize it for what it is.

Again, this does not mean that the poet or the magazine editor or our grandparents reading the poem in 1920 recognized the paternalism, or that any slur was deliberately intended. To the contrary, the poem is so positive — on the surface — that I have no doubt it was meant as a complimentary, favorable, delightful piece of sentimental writing.

It’s that irony — the difference between what was intended and what was actually being said — that makes it so hard to read today, with or without the racial epithet.