I don't think the bible is racist and i think that point has been argued round and round.
No, it is not, but it uses black/dark and white/pure the same way the Book of Mormon does.
there has been plenty of evidence of the LDS making clear racist remarks, I think that much has been clearly shown, it is correct that the priesthood was witheld from blacks until 1978.
And if you research history, you will find the same kind of remarks made about the mark of Cain among basically all Protestant sects. Guess where LDS converts came from? These same sects. So people with these attitudes came into the LDS church. But the LDS didn't practice segregation. We didn't make blacks sit in separate churches. We didn't practice slavery. We didn't persecute blacks or Indians like Protestants, yet they now come here and make LDS out to be the bad guys. We didn't promote slavery like Calvinist preachers and Baptists, etc.
U.S. slavery was probably the worst that ever existed.
Slavery
Race and Slavery in America
February 28th, 2009
When I was writing “Eric Holder and Cowards” a couple of days ago, I was looking for sources when I came across a 1965 Department of Labor document titled “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action.” This document, also known as the “Moynihan Report,” was written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan when he was an Assistant Secretary of Labor. (His small staff included a very young Ralph Nader.)
I’ve heard of the “Moynihan Report” and read quotes from it, but I had never seen the entire document. I found it to be interesting, enlightening, and prescient. It’s the source of the often-quoted (and sometimes misquoted) Moynihan statement,
The steady expansion of this welfare program [ADC], as of public assistance programs in general, can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States. (Chapter II)
Not only was Moynihan right in 1965, every year since has seen his observation re-validated. He was called a racist then for stating the truth as he saw it, and despite the accuracy of his observation, there are still those who attack him.
There’s also another statement in the Moynihan Report that was true then, when I had just entered the Army and could see things for myself, and it’s true today:
Service in the United States Armed Forces is the only experience open to the Negro American in which he is truly treated as an equal: not as a Negro equal to a white, but as one man equal to any other man in a world where the category “Negro” and “white” do not exist. If this is a statement of the ideal rather than reality, it is an ideal that is close to realization. In food, dress, housing, pay, work — the Negro in the Armed Forces is equal and is treated that way. (Chapter IV)
What I found most informative was a discussion of why slavery in America was worse than in other places in our hemisphere and what the impact of that difference has been. About 12,000,000 African slaves were brought to the New World via the hellish “middle passage” over a period of about 400 years. About 645,000 (5 percent) came first to the British colonies in North America and then to what had become the U.S. The U.S., which outlawed the importation of slaves in 1807, permitted legal slavery for a total of about 85 years. From the “Moynihan Report:”
The most perplexing question about American slavery, which has never been altogether explained, and which indeed most Americans hardly know exists, has been stated by Nathan Glazer as follows: “Why was American slavery the most awful the world has ever known?” The only thing that can be said with certainty is that this is true: it was.
American slavery was profoundly different from, and in its lasting effects on individuals and their children, indescribably worse than, any recorded servitude, ancient or modern. The peculiar nature of American slavery was noted by Alexis de Tocqueville and others, but it was not until 1948 that Frank Tannenbaum, a South American specialist, pointed to the striking differences between Brazilian and American slavery. The feudal, Catholic society of Brazil had a legal and religious tradition which accorded the slave a place as a human being in the hierarchy of society — a luckless, miserable place, to be sure, but a place withal. In contrast, there was nothing in the tradition of English law or
Protestant theology which could accommodate to the fact of human bondage — t
he slaves were therefore reduced to the status of chattels — often, no doubt, well cared for, even privileged chattels, but chattels nevertheless.
Glazer, also focusing on the Brazil-United States comparison, continues.
“In Brazil, the slave had many more rights than in the United States: he could legally marry, he could, indeed had to, be baptized and become a member of the Catholic Church, his family could not be broken up for sale, and he had many days on which he could either rest or earn money to buy his freedom. The Government encouraged manumission, and the freedom of infants could often be purchased for a small sum at the baptismal font. In short: the Brazilian slave knew he was a man, and that he differed in degree, not in kind, from his master.”
“[In the United States,] the slave was totally removed from the protection of organized society (compare the elaborate provisions for the protection of slaves in the Bible), his existence as a human being was given no recognition by any religious or secular agency, he was totally ignorant of and completely cut off from his past, and he was offered absolutely no hope for the future. His children could be sold, his marriage was not recognized, his wife could be violated or sold (there was something comic about calling the woman with whom the master permitted him to live a ‘wife’
, and he could also be subject, without redress, to frightful barbarities — there were presumably as many sadists among slaveowners, men and women, as there are in other groups. The slave could not, by law, be taught to read or write; he could not practice any religion without the permission of his master, and could never meet with his fellows, for religious or any other purposes, except in the presence of a white; and finally, if a master wished to free him, every legal obstacle was used to thwart such action. This was not what slavery meant in the ancient world, in medieval and early modern Europe, or in Brazil and the West Indies.
“More important, American slavery was also awful in its effects. If we compared the present situation of the American Negro with that of, let us say, Brazilian Negroes (who were slaves 20 years longer), we begin to suspect that the differences are the result of very different patterns of slavery. Today the Brazilian Negroes are Brazilians; though most are poor and do the hard and dirty work of the country, as Negroes do in the United States, they are not cut off from society. They reach into its highest strata, merging there — in smaller and smaller numbers, it is true, but with complete acceptance — with other Brazilians of all kinds. The relations between Negroes and whites in Brazil show nothing of the mass irrationality that prevails in this country.”
Stanley M. Elkins, drawing on the aberrant behavior of the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps, drew an elaborate parallel between the two institutions. This thesis has been summarized as follows by Thomas Pettigrew:
“Both were closed systems, with little chance of manumission, emphasis on survival, and a single, omnipresent authority. The profound personality change created by Nazi internment, as independently reported by a number of psychologists and psychiatrists who survived, was toward childishness and total acceptance of the SS guards as father-figures — a syndrome strikingly similar to the ‘Sambo’ caricature of the Southern slave. Nineteenth-century racists readily believed that the ‘Sambo’ personality was simply an inborn racial type. Yet no African anthropological data have ever shown any personality type resembling Sambo; and the concentration camps molded the equivalent personality pattern in a wide variety of Caucasian prisoners. Nor was Sambo merely a product of ‘slavery’ in the abstract, for the less devastating Latin American system never developed such a type.
“Extending this line of reasoning, psychologists point out that slavery in all its forms sharply lowered the need for achievement in slaves… Negroes in bondage, stripped of their African heritage, were placed in a completely dependent role. All of their rewards came, not from individual initiative and enterprise, but from absolute obedience — a situation that severely depresses the need for achievement among all peoples. Most important of all, slavery vitiated family life… Since many slaveowners neither fostered Christian marriage among their slave couples nor hesitated to separate them on the auction block, the slave household often developed a fatherless matrifocal (mother-centered) pattern.”
With the emancipation of the slaves, the Negro American family began to form in the United States on a widespread scale. But it did so in an atmosphere markedly different from that which has produced the white American family.
The Negro was given liberty, but not equality. Life remained hazardous and marginal. Of the greatest importance, the Negro male, particularly in the South, became an object of intense hostility, an attitude unquestionably based in some measure of fear.
When Jim Crow made its appearance towards the end of the 19th century, it may be speculated that it was the Negro male who was most humiliated thereby; the male was more likely to use public facilities, which rapidly became segregated once the process began, and just as important, segregation, and the submissiveness it exacts, is surely more destructive to the male than to the female personality. Keeping the Negro “in his place” can be translated as keeping the Negro male in his place: the female was not a threat to anyone. (Chapter III)
Articles written by Tom Carter
If one wants to see terrible injustice and slavery perpetrated on a people one need look no further than Protestant religions who were the persecutors of not only LDS, but Indians and Blacks