lming national and international pressure… And while Brigham Young’s racist rants in “Journal of Discourses” is not official LDS gospel, it reflects the age and the practice of most Churches at the time. This is not bigotry, or bias, these are facts. I have met many modern Christians of all sects, Protestants, Catholics, Evangelicals and Mormons who come to terms with this and cannot truly justify some of the more outlandish claims of their church, but who use their faith to try and better their lives. But in examining these facts, it is an actual part of the religion, it is something that cannot be skirted and perhaps that is why some people of that faith are very quick to not seek and have open discussions about these doctrines preached. The same way there are banks and companies, who directly benefited from the middle passage who refuse to open their old records to public view on the matter. But the most damaging of all these causes of ignorance is the Racial Science of Eugenics, which tried to prove through a fundamentally flawed discipline that their were sub human species exemplified by Indigenous people and of course the black African. But this was also applied lightly to other “races” of South Eastern Europeans, like Greeks, Italians, Spaniards, Armenians and Slavs who had to apply to be considered white and received benefits from being included in that group that others never did during the early 1900s.
It is because of these excuses and junk science that were actually accepted or at least not challenged in a manner which was formidable until 1935 when it was finally decided to be phased out of the scientific community and the forceful and secret sterilization programs of Native Americans continued into the 1970’s and is still the subject of great international debate.
The destruction of the outwardly racist aspects of Eugenics also became necessary as the US descended into a propaganda war with Germany during World War 2. Racial science still found support from students of Darwin’s Theory’s of “Survival of the Fittest” and interpreters of “The Descent of Man” coupled with the disgraced Eugenicists eagerness to prove the superiority of the white race. The ghost of racial science still haunts the hallways of intellectual institutions through its promotion standards of achievement based on racial heredity implicated by the Bell Curve. Eventually though, the rise of Nazi Germany would show the world what a state could do in Modern times when using science to claim the superiority of one race over another. Perhaps we could have avoided this inhuman Holocaust if we had acknowledged the existence of others before it under a similar premise.
Realistically though if those people who were caged could have been connected to the glory of their past then perhaps they themselves would not have been so easily convinced of their own proposed “heathen nature”, and could not have accepted it as if it were the essence of their true selves. And that goes for all enslaved people… all of those who find themselves oppressed throughout the globe. A people’s identity comes not only from the color of their skin and the language they speak, but also the God they whisper their prayers to or loudly proclaim their undying loyalty to with action. There is no such thing as a white man’s religion just a white European interpretation of a certain religious faith — and all religions, no matter how the zealots who love them have to understand, have been introduced to people by conquerors.
At this point, it is necessary to acknowledge that revolutionary concepts are present in both Islam and Christianity and how both have respectively created the basis for a revolutionary path to those enslaved people who were confined to a world of ignorance which is a prison darker than any man made dungeon. Judaism, Buddhism and all other faiths have built into them a mechanism to preserve themselves even under the harsh conditions and people can always find methods to convert any faith into a weapon. But the strongest weapon that one has when it concerns fight