Grappling with the Race Dilemma, by Laura Rutter Strickling

Laura Rutter Strickling is the author of On Fire in Baltimore: Black Mormon Women and Conversion in a Raging City, Greg Kofford Books, 2018, which was an AML Religious Nonfiction award finalist. 

(The race dilemma: biologically, race is meaningless, while socially, race means everything.)

Ruth was one of the first of fifteen Latter-day Saint women I interviewed for On Fire in Baltimore: Black Mormon Women and Conversion in a Raging City. During the heat of the interview my racial assumptions were exposed and I began to understand more clearly how the Black/White racial binary–the most pervasive of all color lines in America–underpins the race dilemma. A binary is two theoretical opposites that are strictly defined and set off against each other, with one of the two assuming a role of dominance over the other. Conceptualizing people as Black and White, and privileging whiteness over blackness is a socially constructed binary based on racist ideology. The day I interviewed Ruth, this theoretical construct became personal.

“I love doing these interviews,” I explain, taking a stab at getting the interview started, “because I feel like the sisters are with me every day when I listen to their recorded voices and transcribe their words.” Ruth smiles at me and nods her head, and I’m feeling confident in the work I’m doing. But my satisfaction is short lived and I am quickly reminded of how fragile the interview process can be. With my next comment, I fall from academic grace onto uncertain interview ground. I tell Ruth that I have run across colleagues who were surprised to learn that there were African American Latter-day Saint women in Baltimore, and that they were interested in hearing these women’s conversion stories. Without a hint of accusation, and with her customary mild voice, Ruth asks, “Are you only interviewing African American women? Because I’m not African American. My father was White and my mother was Native American.”

I panicked. After years of university study which had imbued me with sociocultural theory about identity, culture and race, I had, nevertheless, assumed Ruth’s racial identity. In retrospect, I saw that during the interview this racial binary, buried within the depths of my cognitive upbringing, had surfaced and overshadowed my theoretical knowledge of race. Instead of seeing racial and ethnic complexity, I had made an assumption through a dualistic lens. And even though it is a natural cognitive inclination to conceptualize dualistically, the troubling part was that I felt that labeling Ruth as Black had been a serious social transgression. In my subconscious, I had accepted that Black was the antithesis of White, and if White is desirable, then Black must not be. It surprised me how difficult it was to disentangle my racialized self in the heat of an encounter, how effortless it was to take whiteness for granted, and how easy to fall back on the racial instincts that my White American history had bequeathed me.

It became clear that I could not separate race from these Black Latter-day Saint women’s conversion stories, and that I had to address the race dilemma if I were to continue my analysis. By race dilemma I mean that, in terms of biology, race is a meaningless concept, yet the social reality is such that race is profoundlymeaningful. Race impacts where we live, how we live, our job prospects, and our educational outcomes, as well as how we navigate our daily comings and goings. So, given the reality that race matters, I had to address how I would acknowledge and analyze the importance of race in the lives of these Black Latter-day Saint women–and in mine–without re-endowing the concept of race with essentialist meaning.[1] How could I examine the experience of these Black Latter-day Saint inner city women, and my own–a White woman from rural Oregon–as racialized beings without drawing upon concepts and language that reflected racialized, if not racist, ideologies, while developing an interracial relationship within our nation’s racial binary? I knew that I did not have the wherewithal to free up the language as novelist Toni Morrison had from its “racially informed determined chains.”[2]

I would start by addressing my whiteness. The research process enabled me, as a White woman, to feel “raced.” Because race is a social construct, we typically are not aware of our blackness, browness, or whiteness until someone’s behavior points it out. For example, several of the Black women I interviewed told me that they did not realize they were Black until they got their first paycheck and went shopping, only to be told that Black people could not try on clothes in that store. Similarly, I began to feel “raced” and more aware of my whiteness when I went to a segregated part of the city to visit Black sisters.

The neighborhood is deserted except for a tall Black man about our age wearing jeans and a T-shirt. He walks by and nods his head, acknowledging us. I smile back but feel his gaze linger too long and immediately become alert to my whiteness in a Black neighborhood. Then, not wanting to frame his attention in terms of race, I consider that maybe the man’s glance has little to do with skin color; he could be looking at us because we are female, or perhaps because we are newcomers in a place where everyone knows each other. But upon further reflection, I decide that brushing aside a racial explanation entirely, is not realistic, and I wonder if the tendency to do this, is the result of an internalized perspective of whiteness. By this I mean, as a White person living where whiteness is linked to stature and is innately esteemed, I have acquired a kind of racial confidence and a blind eye that takes whiteness for granted. But at this moment, in the Westside Projects, I have become “raced,” and not being accustomed to this kind of social disequilibrium, my inclination is to deny that race is the reason for the his scrutiny.

I also had to address my whiteness as a researcher. Among scholars, White women writing about Black women has been a longstanding and contentious topic–a subject beset with accusations of neo-imperialism and “a certain kind of racism.”[3] It raises the question of who can speak on behalf of whom, especially when researching women who, historically, have had little voice, and if such research would be better aimed at empowering women to speak for themselves. While this is a feminist critique, feminist qualitative research methods also enabled me to attend to relationships and the emotional phenomenon that relate to researching people generally, and the race dilemma specifically. First, a feminist approach is not just research about women, but for and with women; it begins with the standpoints and experiences of women; second, feminist research actively seeks to remove the power imbalance between researcher and women participants and seeks to change social inequality; feminist research also posits that truth can be discovered when establishing an interactive relationship with the participants. A feminist theoretical approach obligated me to be mindful of the emotions and thoughts I encountered and enabled me to adopt a reflective process aimed at exposing my biases and questioning my responses. It provided me with the theoretical underpinning to acknowledge that, I affect the research I do and my research affects me. These aims, while not resolving the race dilemma, helped me to expose the impact of race in specific instances.

When I look back at my conversation with Tabitha, I see that she and I were both struggling–struggling because we were trying to cut our way through a dense social jungle overrun with decades of racially-troubled history. Instead of freeing ourselves, we found that we had become entangled, and we did not have the communicative tools to clear the ground and forge a linguistic path where we could both walk. I wondered if, sitting next to Tabitha at the kitchen table, I represented the whole White race and the White people who had abandoned her in her childhood. I wondered if I was emanating “whiteness” in a way that caused distress and, if so, how could I make myself less White? Was I, like Du Bois had explained in The Souls of Black Folk, provoking a double consciousness between “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled stirrings,” one soul of African descent living in a White normative society, and the other, an esteemed American? And because it is impossible to “serve two masters,” the African American must continuously trade identities, subduing one while the other dominates, otherwise the “two warring ideals [would be] torn asunder.”^[4] I wondered if my White presence had brought both souls to the forefront, head to head, deadlocked in a battle for sovereignty.

As I came to know and love the Black sisters in my congregation, I began to see that they possessed a spiritual trust that, as a White woman, I could not be acquainted with. W.E.B. Dubois helped me articulate this, “We who are dark can see America in a way that White Americans cannot,”[5] or “We, who are dark can see [spiritual things] in a way that White [Latter-day Saints] cannot.” The Black sisters featured in On Fire in Baltimore, had converted to the Gospel of Jesus Christ in a racialized America, and while we all inherit the vestiges of our sociocultural racial history at birth, “women of color have inherited the worst of racism over the decades.”[6] Yet, Black Latter-day Saint women have had to reconcile their membership in a historically White church that, at one time, had denied them access to spiritually emancipitory temple ordinances–they were denied full membership.

Now, let’s continue the discussion of the race dilemma for Latter-day Saints today. What can we learn from Latter-day Saints of African descent and from our racialized church history? How can we approach and resolve the race dilemma that exists within Latter-day Saint communities?

[1] the belief based upon a racial binary where one race is inherently superior over the other, rendering the conceptualized opposite as inherently inferior.

[2] Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination. New York: Random House. 1994. ix.

[3] Griffin, Gabriele. “The Compromised Researcher: Issues in Feminist Research Methodologies.” Sociologisk Forskning 49, no. 4(2012). 333-47.

[4] Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk, 1989. 3.

[5] Du Bois, W.E.B. “Criteria of the Negro Art.” The Crisis. 1926. 290.

[6] Crummel, Alexander. Destiny and Race: Selected Writings, 1840-1898. Edited by Wilson Jeremiah Moses. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. 214.

Laura Rutter Strickling received her undergraduate degree from BYU and a Master’s in Intercultural Communication and PhD in Sociocultural Linguistics from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She also completed a two-year post-doctoral position in Urban Education in Baltimore City. She has written articles about language, culture, and education. In her free time, she rides bikes with her husband throughout the city of Baltimore.