Item Detail
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30303
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0
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0
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English
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A Balm in Gilead : Reconciling Black Bodies within a Mormon Imagination
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Dialogue : A Journal of Mormon Thought
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Fall 2018
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51
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3
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Farmington, UT
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Dialogue Journal
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185-192
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I acknowledge that “Black,” “Blackness,” and Black bodies differ across time and space. Varied socio political exchanges between indigenous groups in Africa, citizens of the Afro Atlantic, and white Europeans make it challenging to define a monolithic Black identity. Still, I predicate my remarks on the belief that Mormonism is, arguably, a uniquely American religion. As such, I’ve formed my opinion around reflections on the construction of race in America as a social artifact, an artifact assembled by social, theological, and political theories and practices exchanged between institutions and individuals. In other words, I posit that race is a process of being and becoming. Black Latter-day Saints became Black through the enfleshment of the curse of Cain—whether one identified as Haitian, Ghanian, or Malian, among others—in the Mormon imagination.
[from author]