Don Imus used rapper and comic talk to describe a group of black basketball players. The words he used were defamatory and down right rude. Nobody would have noticed if he said those same words on the Daily Show or Comedy Central where filth abounds. Don Imus used the words to describe the young women of the Rutgers University Basketball team that played for the national championship.
Although the words were said in Don’s usual drown, they were picked up by the media and microphone-grabbing black activist. Indignation roared!
Imus quickly apologized, After all, he was talking on cable where nothing is regulated and everything goes. On cable, vulgarity, jibes, and insults should not be taken seriously. In other words, he didn’t really mean what he said.
The media quickly picked up on the story. Although the young ladies, to their credit, were more tolerant to Imus than most blacks, the media furry cost Imus his job. Now he is out in the cold—where he probably belongs. He has a history of racial intolerance—as most everyone does— but his intolerance is a public record.
When I was a boy, I brought a young friend home of Mexican decent. My mother, who was raised in a Utah mining town and who’s father had been stabbed (she didn’t say by whom), was startled by the presence of my friend. She said that I shouldn’t associate with a Mexican boy.
The fact of the matter was that I had been associating with my friend, Don Lopez, since we were in kindergarten. I broke out laughing at my mother. I said, “Mother, I didn’t think you had a racial bone in your body.” I did not change my relationship with my friend and when our National Guard unit was activate during the Korean War we stayed together until I left for Korea.
There were not many black people in the city where I was born but I knew that those who were there were not treated fairly by everyone. They worked shining shoes or cleaning the public restrooms under Main Street on the Temple Block. Kids would say evil things to black people on the street. One day, when I was very young, I repeated such a saying. I was then so embarrassed and humiliated that I spent the rest of my young life treating the man as a man, not a black man.
One black man in Salt Lake City had his own business. He had a pickup truck that he kept just like new. When I was going to the University of Utah and working in my uncle’s service station on weekends, this man would come in and we would shoot the bull together. He had gained a lot of respect in the community by owning his own business.
In Korea, the black men in our company fought and died like the rest of us. There was some prejudice in our infantry company against blacks and the blacks knew it and told us about it. Most of us treated each other as human beings.
As for the Mormon Church, we were taught racial tolerance, not only tolerance but that a black man in a “fine carriage” was as good as any other man. Joseph Smith, who founded Mormonism, made the “carriage” reference and it was often quoted. In the early days of the Church, a few black men received the priesthood.
Church policy changed with time. A reference in the Pearl of Great Price, a Mormon scripture, said that certain Egyptian men had been denied the priesthood. Church policy became to deny black men the priesthood and not to proselyte to black people. It was common knowledge in the Church that one drop of black blood could keep you out of the Mormon Temple.
Mormon missionaries were told to take courtesy leave if a black person opened a door to them. However, things changed. Blacks were joining the church in droves in Africa. One man had come up on the Book of Mormon and converted his friends. He wrote to the Church and action were taken to service the new congregations.
I was serving as the bishop of a Pennsylvania congregation. We had several mixed families in our ward. There were black adopted children. In our church it is important the children be sealed to their parents, but church policy was that blacks could not be sealed in the temple.
To tell you the truth, I prayed about it. I asked the Lord why the church could not make it possible for these families to be sealed in the Temple. I was surprised by the answer that I got in a very firm voice, It was: They must hold the priesthood.
I was sure of how to interpret that answer, but I knew the Lord was thinking about the problem. A short time later the Stake President called me and said, “John, I have wonderful news for you!” Then he read me the announcement from Salt Lake City that all worthy men, regardless of race, would now receive the priesthood.
To this day, I don’t know how the Stake President would know that would be wonderful news to me. I had never discussed the problem with him. Also, I didn’t know that I would have five black and four brown adopted grandchildren.
The news that all races would receive the priesthood was not accepted with joy throughout the church. Some probably left the church because it no longer was lily white. Missionaries started to proselyte any person who came to the door, not just white people and Asians.
The fact of the matter is that racial prejudice is not a white phenomenon. All races have some reservations about each other. A black father may not want his daughter living with a white man. A Chinese mother may not want a black or white man invited to dinner. In some cases, it is not hatred but a requirement of separation. “Stay on your own side of the street!”
Putting Don Imus out of business will not solve the problem but it has brewed a whirlwind that may change the way we treat women and each other. My father worshiped my mother because his mother taught him that women are to be worshiped. We should teach our children that all races are the same just as all dogs are the same. We are of the same species but different races. We would not look down on a dog because of his color. We don’t hate brown pigeons or gray rabbits.
The origins of racial wariness probably originated back in the darkness of time when the interaction of racial groups meant war. The American Indians discriminated against each other and war parties from one tribe would seek out and kill warriors from other tribes. Perhaps in the deep jungles of South America, this is still going on.
Adolph Hitler was the supreme racist of our time. Millions died because of the Nazi hatred of other peoples. If we don’t teach our children to ignore race, we may create a new Hitler.
We need to do what the Mormons did, eliminate race as an eternal principle.
copyright2007©John Taylor Jones, Ph.D. (Taylor Jones the hack writer)
John T. Jones, Ph.D. (tjbooks@hotmail.com, a retired VP of R&D for Lenox China, is author of detective & western novels, nonfiction (business, scientific, engineering, humor), poetry, etc. Former editor of Ceramic Industry Magazine. He is Executive Representative of IWS sellers of Tyler Hicks wealth-success books and kits. He also sells TopFlight flagpoles. He calls himself “Taylor Jones, the hack writer.”
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