Newell G. Bringhurst

This is a book of contributed papers that explores the attitudes of the Mormon church toward blacks, both before and after the "revelation" that allowed blacks to attain the priesthood. The book has a number of serious flaws, the most serious being reliance almost totally on official Mormon sources, which are not always regarded as the most reliable by serious (non-Mormon) scholars, since the church has been known to clean up their own history at times. Another serious flaw is the use of statistics; while the authors do give cursory attention to the extremely small size of the Mormon samples compared to the greater population, the data are presented as though they are totally to be relied upon, and the problems with their statistics in at least some cases might require at least one, maybe more, statistics courses for someone to catch. Another weakness is the lack of black contributors; though the final contributor (and one of the editors) is black, there still seems to be a great deal of white people talking about how black people feel about the church, and in some cases, appearing to talk about how black people should feel about the church. They also utilized some interviews with black Mormons, but since there are none included who have left the church, this again is a seriously flawed analysis. In addition, there appears to be some selective use even of these small sources, and you wonder what was in the sources they chose not to report. Overall, mainly interesting for those who would like to know how the Mormon church sees itself in regard to race relations. For a more complete and complex analysis, it might be wise to look for some works that include not only non-Mormons but also black voices.… (mere)