Over the past ten years scholars have published a profusion of books about institutional racism. Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law (2017) examines how federal, state, and local governments imposed racial segregation in various cities throughout the United States, creating zoning laws meant to stifle African American mobility. In The Color of Money (2019), Mehrsa Baradaran probes how banking policies affected African Americans and kept them mired in poverty. Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2012) evaluates the racial inequities in the criminal justice system, particularly among African American men, who were often stripped of their rights by the courts. Now we have Joanna Brooks’ book Mormonism and White Supremacy, which explores institutional racism within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—a faith with which Brooks affiliates. She provides a penetrating case study demonstrating how the Mormon church created a racist theology that continues to persist well into...
University of California Press