Mitt Romney's (and my) BYU

1968, Provo

A cold night. January or February. I stand with friends outside Brigham Young University’s “Smith Family Living Center.” Students are dancing inside the plate-glass windows. A young black man approaches, looks into the building, moves on.

I know him, someone claims. He’s LDS. Must be lonely. Can’t hold the priesthood. Can’t marry in the temple. Seed of Cain. Curse of Ham.

We enter the Family Living Center, join the dancers.

His testimony of the true gospel, I think, commits him to a difficult life now; but in the eternities. . . . My mind skids to the warm, firm thighs of the tall girl from Idaho who is holding me as close as I her.

This is a scene I come back to often, especially when I'm wondering just how I became who I have become and what possibilities lie in my future. 

Eighteen years old. A Mormon missionary in waiting, just months from two years spreading the Gospel in Germany (spreading is too strong a word, there was only one odd convert). Fresh out of high school. Gathering experience at the Mormon university—social experience as well as intellectual and theological.

And, unwitting fellow student with Ann Davies Romney.

This I learned this morning as I read Jason Horowitz's Washington Post piece on Mitt Romney's two years at BYU (the two years I was in Germany). It's a good account, I think, of life at our university in those days. You can read it HERE.

As the son of school teachers, raised in Farmington, New Mexico, naive about the Civil Rights movement (only the vaguest thoughts, including a hint that it was probably Communist inspired), unable to think of a term-paper topic except for a diatribe against socialized medicine (lamented in an earlier post—click HERE), I knew little about the social world Horowitz sketches in his piece. Cougar Club? I did, once, disastrously (or, better, hilariously), attend a costume ball at the invitation of a Cougarette. 

Although he mentions it, Horowitz doesn't elaborate on the racism that infected us on the BYU campus in those days. (See my earlier post on my own racism—click HERE.) I, in Germany, Mitt Romney, in France, and thousands of other missionaries preached and defended the belief that a black skin (as well as the brown skin of Native Americans) was a curse carried by descendants of the murderous Cain (or by descendants of the unrighteous Lamanites).

Mitt's father (see the earlier post on pressure from a Mormon apostle to do otherwise—click HERE) supported the Civil Rights movement; but as a practicing Mormon there was no way around the ongoing denial of the Priesthood to black men (women are, to this day, still denied the power that the Priesthood bestows). No way around for me. No way around for Mitt.

ADDENDUM: EMAIL SENT BY CHUCK HAMAKER

You said that you in Germany, Mitt Romney, in France, and thousands of other missionaries preached and defended the belief that a black skin (as well as the brown skin of Native Americans) was a curse carried by descendants of the murderous Cain (or by descendants of the unrighteous Lamanites).

We had specific instructions in Peru to be polite to those who we assumed --given our North American prejudices -- had African origins but not to “encourage them”. People in all shades and hues. I rebelled against this in a small town where I was the branch president in Northern Peru. A man who missionaries had baptized and was active in the local branch leadership had two sons, and the previous missionaries who were branch presidents had refused to permit them to be ordained with the Aaronic priesthood because of what missionaries thought might have been African heritage on their mother’s side based on some grainy black and white photos that indicated the relatives had curly hair. The Spanish term they used for the curly hair was crespito. I looked at the pictures and laughed. They are crespitos como yo, since I had curly hair too.  It wasn’t long after that (it was sometime in 1968 when my experience happened) that the church began to rethink this grotesque practice, but it couldn’t do much else given the boom in baptisms in Brazil, where if you used standard north American prejudices most of the populace looked like crespitos or negritos or some other such types. But the people were being baptized in the thousands. They would have had to mandate genealogy tracing before baptism and ordination to sort it all out in Brazil, and in much of Latin America where “working like  a black man” was often said with pride of anyone of another race who was doing their best..at least that’s my memory and I’m sticking by it.  And we were very solicitous of those we thought were Native Americans in Peru and Ecuador, actually seeking them out, doing our best to proselytize them, so that although we had that damned "white and delightsome" language from the Book of Mormon, in my brief experience in the “lamanite” world areas, they were part and parcel of who we were trying to convert.

And finally, in those days, in the Mormon temple ceremony, the devil was said to have black skin.

ORIGINS OF MY RACISM

The new year begins with old thoughts provoked by one of Paul's letters in the New Testament. I quote from notes I made in the late 1990's while thinking about my brother John, his homosexuality, and my own homophobia:

For there are many unruly and vain talkers and deceivers, specially they of the circumcision: Whose mouths must be stopped, who subvert whole houses, teaching things which they ought not, for filthy lucre’s sake. . . . Wherefore rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith; Not giving heed to Jewish fables, and commandments of men, that turn from the truth.

 Following Paul's lead, conditioned by his biases and the prejudices of a Christian nation, our parents helped pass along, or allowed to be passed along, part and parcel with their conservative stability, a subtle racism. I had to confront this again a few weeks ago, waiting at a streetlight. Around the corner came a car with a black male driver and a white female passenger sitting intimately close to him. My stomach turned.

A bowl of nuts for the holiday season: hazelnuts, peanuts, walnuts, pistachios, pecans, and nigger toes. That’s what I grew up calling them.

Standing next to the east goal post of the football field at Hermosa Jr. High, a fellow seventh-grader gleefully and perhaps maliciously informed me there were creatures in the world called “homaphrodites.” Incredulous, yet believing, I instinctively acted to brace up my crumbling world, erecting the first, but not last, phobic pillars to protect me from those hitherto unknown, still faceless, but now named “homos.”

Dad taught science and math at the junior-high school before he became principal. As a science teacher he had access to mercury and to our delight he brought home plastic vials of it. We split it into quivering masses with our fingers and raced heavy blobs down inclines. Dimes, when rubbed with mercury, glistened like new silver.                             

 BOCA RATON, Fla. (AP) --

Drips and drabs of silvery mercury led officials to about 3 pounds of mercury sitting in a dorm room at Florida Atlantic University, forcing the evacuation of 187 students. The toxic metallic element, which attacks the lungs and central nervous system, was in a bottle labeled “mercury” with a hand-drawn skull and crossbones.

Families can be toxic with the best of intentions. A threatening letter written during an election in which another Romney was running for President of the United States gives ample context for my own family's religiously based racism (see inserts).

[from the Boston Globe]

Not long after Stapley warned George Romney not to mess with the racial order set up by God, these notes from an experience at BYU, 1968:

A cold night. January or February. I stand with friends outside Brigham Young University’s “Smith Family Living Center.” Students are dancing inside the plate-glass windows. A young black man approaches, looks into the building, moves on.

I know him, someone claims. He’s LDS. Must be lonely. Can’t hold the priesthood. Can’t marry in the temple. Seed of Cain. Curse of Ham.

We enter the Family Living Center, join the dancers. His testimony of the true gospel, I think, commits him to a difficult life now; but in the eternities. . . . My mind skids to the warm, firm thighs of the tall girl from Idaho who is holding me as close as I her.

And another set of notes:

Rodney Barker’s book, The Broken Circle, about the murders and civil unrest in my home town, Farmington, New Mexico, takes me back to additional origins of my racism. Most surprising is a 1975 Civil Rights Commission assessment of the events following the torture and murder of several Navajo men by boys in my high school. 

            There were large demonstrations against anglo insensitivity to the case, a case that resulted in the killers being sent to reform school till they turned eighteen.

            The Mayor of Farmington in 1974, just a few months in office when the marches began, was also the LDS Stake President. He was a family friend. He did what he could to manage the situation. He held meetings with the protestors. He tried to explain that the three boys didn’t represent the rest of Farmington’s Anglo population. Their abbreviated sentences to juvenal reform school were not evidence of racism, but products of technicalities of the law.

The Mayor could not understand why the Navajos were so riled up. To understand, he would have had to oppose the society he represented, the culture that had made him. That made me.

When “The Farmington Report” finally appeared, concluding that investigators had found ample evidence of racism, discrimination, and brutality against Navajos, Mayor Webb’s frustration was manifest:

 This is a typical example of how the ever-growing cancer of bureaucracy is dominating and directing our country and the lives of its citizens. . . . This commission would appear to want to drag each of us down to the level of the lowest common denominator and obviously is advancing the cause of socialism in this country. They advocate that government fill all of the needs of the individual rather than achievement through individual effort. This would be impossible to finance and completely contrary to the American way of life, and the greatness achieved through the free enterprise system and self-achievement of the individual.

Sterling Black, chairman of the Advisory Committee, responded with frustrations of his own:

There appears to be little awareness on the part of the general population or elected public officials of the complex social and economic problems. . . . Navajos are aware of the indignities and injustices, and want something done to better the situation. . . . [Unfortunately, they hear only that] there are no problems existing, people in this town get along very well with each other, there are no indignities, there are no injustices, and there is nothing to be done to remedy these complaints.




Some Final Thoughts:
My years in high school and at BYU during the sixties and early seventies were sheltered years flavored by an unrelenting political conservatism. In that world, the civil rights movement was a Communist front. William Dibble, a decent Mormon painter, began to dabble in abstraction sometime about mid-century. The Dean of Fine Arts at BYU thought it prudent to warn him: Bill, you are flirting with apostasy and are on the brink of Communism.

Dragan Aleksic's novel "Chiaroscuro" and My Home Town

I have just read Dragan Aleksic's novel "Chiaroscuro" in English translation (originally published in Belgrade). In an earlier post, I quoted a piece of a poem of his printed in a book of German translations of Serbian writers, edited by my friend Zarko Radakovic.

Here the image on the cover of the novel:

And here the passage, near the end of the novel, that has my mind reeling:

Maybe it told him: ‘There, your town is dead, you’ve heard the music, and now you can leave peacefully, with calm in your heart. Everything has died, the bitterness has run dry, and you have nothing to do with it any more, you can go, go.’

The music did not stop, the record played again and again; the invisible orchestras were wondered along the streets and hooted their sorrowful tones towards the sky.

Suddenly Emil Farnik felt a need to void his bowels. He smiled a sour smile and thought that maybe it was another message from his destiny. He turned and walked two or three steps, thinking that perhaps he would not need to do it. But he had to: the urge was getting stronger and stronger.

He thought: ‘Why don’t I vomit, since I am sick of everything, since that is why I came here?’

He pulled his trousers down and his underpants; he turned his back to the streets, churches, houses, trees to everything that was down there. He turned his back to his twenty nine years.

While squatting and waiting to be relieved, Emil Farnik felt tears in his eyes.

‘I shit on you, my home town,’ he said aloud and tearfully.

The music stopped.

On Friday, I presented a short paper at the UVU conference honoring Martin Luther King. It was a series of memories about my own home town, Farmington, New Mexico, a town that played a large role in shaping who I am. Unfortunately, I pointed out in my paper, part of who I am is a racist.

Let me quote a piece of my history, a part that makes me, like the character in Aleksic's novel, need to (not want to) shit, tearfully, on my home town, and thus on myself:

15 October 1998, Provo

A couple of days ago, a Wyoming student named Matthew Shepard was beaten and left to die in Laramie. One of the killers was raised as a Mormon. Shepard was gay.

Laramie has always reminded me of Farmington.

21 October 1998, Provo

Laramie residents deny that their town is a homophobic place. We live and let live here, they keep saying, a western mantra that rings true until you bring homosexuals into the equation.

Or Indians.

In 1974, thousands of Navajo marchers packed Farmington streets after high-school boys tortured and killed three Navajo men. I ask Mom about that tense summer.

I didn’t understand it, she says. We had never had any trouble with the Indians before.

Aside from the nervous night I spent on the Reservation guarding the Cactus Drilling Company equipment, I have little memory of what happened.

Like the other good citizens of Farmington, you simply went to work? No impulse to march with the Navajos? No desire to end the violence and discrimination?

None whatsoever. Not much curiosity beyond a quick read of the newspaper.

19 November 1998, Provo

I’ve been trying to cut through my culturally induced amnesia. Rodney Barker’s book about the murders and civil unrest, The Broken Circle, has been enlightening. Most surprising has been a 1975 Civil Rights Commission assessment of the events called “The Farmington Report.”

Early in report, the authors quote Philip Reno’s essay in The Nation, August 31, 1974 to the effect that “various services have bound Indians and border towns together in the same ‘relentless reciprocity’ that Jean Paul Sartre saw binding colonized to colonizer in Africa.”

Sartre and Farmington in the same essay!

Reno argues that “now the old reciprocity, which was based on inequality and dependency, is breaking down and a new reciprocity, based on more equal rights and power, must be established.”

He’s right about the need, naïve about the future.

22 November 1998, Provo

Marlo Webb was Mayor of Farmington in 1974, just a few months in office when the marches began. Mayor Webb did what he could to manage the situation. He held meetings with the protestors. He tried to explain that the three boys didn’t represent the rest of Farmington’s Anglo population. Their families had moved in from elsewhere and didn’t have a history with Navajos. The boys were unfortunate aberrations. Their abbreviated sentences to juvenal reform school were not evidence of racism, but products of technicalities of the law.

Mayor Webb could not understand why the Navajos were so riled up. To understand, he would have had to oppose the society he represented, the culture that had made him. That made me.

When “The Farmington Report” finally appeared, concluding that investigators had found ample evidence of racism, discrimination, and brutality against Navajos, Mayor Webb’s frustration was manifest:

This is a typical example of how the ever-growing cancer of bureaucracy is dominating and directing our country and the lives of its citizens. . . . This commission would appear to want to drag each of us down to the level of the lowest common denominator and obviously is advancing the cause of socialism in this country. They advocate that government fill all of the needs of the individual rather than achievement through individual effort. This would be impossible to finance and completely contrary to the American way of life, and the greatness achieved through the free enterprise system and self-achievement of the individual.

Sterling Black, chairman of the Advisory Committee, responded with frustrations of his own:

There appears to be little awareness on the part of the general population or elected public officials of the complex social and economic problems. . . . Navajos are aware of the indignities and injustices, and want something done to better the situation. . . . [Unfortunately, they hear only that] there are no problems existing, people in this town get along very well with each other, there are no indignities, there are no injustices, and there is nothing to be done to remedy these complaints.

More thoughts on photos and meaning

Over the weekend I've been thinking more about photos, those historical/artistic records we figure will outlast us but that, in the most important sense, are as brief as our faces (John Berger).

The examples I gave of knowledge I had of the people in the 1966 photo of young men and airplanes at Lake Powell, knowledge that supposedly would disappear when I do, weren't as good as they might have been. I listed names and professions and what became of some of us after the photo was taken.

Better examples might have been taken from the thinking I've been doing while trying to read the photo for some writing I'm doing.

I was in Boise, for instance, following traces left by my brother John before he died of AIDS in 1992, when I stepped right into Larry Echohawk's campaign for Governor. The contrast between his extremely public and successful life and John's death in a cheap apartment across the street from the State Capitol was painful. Those thoughts and memories create an aura (see Walter Benjamin) that no one besides me can experience.

The future Mayor of Farmington is interesting to me because of his role in the 1974 demonstrations by Navajos in Farmington after three Navajo men were tortured and killed by Farmington High School students. The Mayor, a kind and gentle and generous man, excoriated the Federal Civil Rights Commission's "Farmington Report" as the product of a socialist government and claimed there was no racism to speak of in our red-neck, oil-boom town.

I look into the faces of the five generous men who have brought us here in their airplanes, I look at our faces, and I try to trace present and future beliefs and affiliations. I scan the photo most intensely for explanations of the racism that raises its ugly head at the most awkward times in my own psyche indelibly formed by this and other events tied to my home town.

"And our faces, my heart, brief as photos."