6-7-12 Links Roundup
- Black Mormons And The Politics Of Identity (The New York Times)
While the church does not track members by race, there are thriving Mormon churches with hundreds of black members today in many urban areas, including Washington, Chicago and New York, although African-Americans represent only a tiny fraction of the six million Mormons in the United States.
The conversion of blacks in this country has been a challenge, given the church’s turbulent history of excluding people of black African descent. Until 1978, black men were not allowed to become priests or bishops; dark skin was considered a biblical curse. During the 1960s, when Mitt Romney’s father, George, made civil rights a personal priority during his time as a Republican governor of Michigan, his progressive views put him at odds with church doctrine.
Over the last decades, however, there has been an aggressive campaign to diversify, and racism in the church — which was itself once powerless and persecuted as a cult — has been repeatedly denounced.
“I feel a definite sense of pride in the U.S.A. that we have a Mormon candidate and black candidate,” said Catherine Spruill, who lives in a suburb of Salt Lake and is mixed-race like Mr. Obama and Mormon like Mr. Romney. “I feel pride for my people, because America picked that.”
There is even a black Mormon Congressional candidate, Mia Love, who will soon be on the ballot in Utah. She is running as a conservative Republican for the newly created Fourth District, which includes part of Salt Lake County. A campaign video describes her in these terms, among others: “mother, mayor, leader, gun owner.”
- Facebook’s Diversity Flop (The Root)
When Facebook announced that it was launching a $5 billion initial public offering, with a corporate board composed exclusively of white male members, Alice Buttrick and Alice Baumgartner launched Face It, a campaign to spread the message that the company’s board should represent the diversity of its users and the country. To the two white Ivy League graduates in their early 20s, that means “the board of white men should include women of all colors.”They founded the organization in April of this year, using protests and an online petition to pressure the social networking giant to go public with a board that reflects what it claimed was its own corporate mission: to make the world more open and connected. That didn’t happen, and although on May 15 it was reported that Facebook had hired a search firm to find “at least one woman” for the board, Buttrick says, “We think just one woman reinforces the token status of women and minorities in leadership, and we are keeping the pressure on.”
Even after the IPO flop, Face It is not stopping the push for representation. The campaign provided Facebook with a list of candidates that it says are qualified, which it declined to disclose to The Root. However, Buttrick told The Root that she’s confident the company’s leadership “knows now, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the problem is not supply but demand.”
In both “Shahs of Sunset” and “K-Town” — even Jersey Shore — sensitivities to depictions of these particular ethnic groups are fueled by the legacies of race, class and immigration, whether we’re talking about a history of anti-Italian American discrimination dating back to the late 19th century, post-9/11 Islamophobia, or the enduring model minority mythology of Asian America. Communities used to seeing themselves diminished or demonized in mass media are understandably uncomfortable with the idea of reality shows that highlight bad or deviant behavior even as this is precisely what television audiences hunger for.
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