Drawing upon scholarship from his recent book, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness, Paul Reeve explores the ways in which outside observers racialized Mormons as not white enough in the nineteenth century. Mormons responded by trying to claim whiteness for themselves, even at the expense of their own black converts. Reeve argues that it is only in viewing Mormon whiteness as a contested variable, not an assumed fact, that a new paradigm emerges for understanding Mormonism’s tortured relationship with blackness.

W. Paul Reeve