When writing about the Book of Mormon, most authors imagine Lamanites to look physically different from Nephites. In 2 Nephi, “the Lord did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them,”1 referring to the Lamanites. In 2013, in an essay on race, the LDS church wrote that it no longer supported the idea that dark skin was a curse from God.2 However, that doesn’t change the fact that members have imagined it as one.
Seeing dark skin as a curse is racist. I believe that we should talk about and document racism in our past in order to understand our present. As late as 2015, we see dark skin as a curse in Jason Pruett’s Seek and Find: Book of Mormon Stories. “Lamanites turning dark” is one of the things to find.3 The idea that the curse on the Lamanites changed their skin from light to dark is very much still around, and is supported by the Book of Mormon’s text.
This idea comes up a lot in Book of Mormon fiction in the early 20th century. Accounts differ on what color, exactly, the Lamanites are. Elizabeth Cannon Porter consistently describes Lamanites as Indians with red skin in her collection of Book of Mormon stories, Cities of the Sun. She doesn’t describe how, exactly, skin changes though.
Julia McDonald, in her novella A Ship of Hagoth4 shows a Lamanite curse that is disconnected from a person’s heritage.
Our protagonist, Relia, is part of the group of Zoramites who followed Ammon. The Zoramites were originally Nephites who split off and made their own group. They had stark class divisions, with the rich praying on rameumptoms about how grateful they are that they’re so much better than everyone else. The poor people weren’t even allowed to worship, so Ammon found it easy to convert them. This is significant because Relia is, by ancestry, a Nephite, but she is cursed. She talks about it openly to her cousin, Reulon, in the passage after she meets the Nephite Corianton (Alma the younger’s son):
“Ah, yes, Reulon, thou art kind, thou art ever kind,” thrusting her small hand into his larger one. “But see cousin, is he not beautiful, his eyes are blue as the corn-flowers, and shine—yea, they shine as the lovely stars we have so often watched together. And his hair! It is like flax for color and like silk for fineness, and it curls Reulon, so lovingly about his head, not at all like our straight black locks.”
“Remember Relia,” said her companion calmly, but with grief and anger in his breast. “He is a Nephite and the curse does not rest upon him as upon us.”
“Ah, that dreadful curse” she exclaimed shudderingly, and looking ruefully at the bronze hue of her hands and arms as she spoke.
“Good cousin, dost thou believe these hands will ever become white, this face ever shine with beauty as does his, the young Nephite’s?”
“We have that promise, Relia and according to our faith so shall it be. But whether or not it so happens we must not let it spoil our happiness. Our children and children’s children will receive the blessing if we do not.”
“Yes, I know, but it doth not satisfy. Once I did not care but now, since the new light came, I crave this blessing more than all else beside.
Relia worries that because of the curse, she won’t be attractive to Corianton.
“I know—I know—it is the—curse. The maidens of his own nation are fair and beautiful as he; he has no eyes for such as we. Our dark skins, our straight, black hair, and our black eyes have no charms for him. And yet—I never dreamed such beauty lived and breathed.”
“Art thou ill, my cousin?” asked Reulon, anxiously. He was riding near, and not a movement or an expression of the girl escaped his notice.
“Nay, nay, Reulon, I was but thinking.”
“Thy thoughts were scarcely pleasant, then, methinks.”
“My thoughts, good Reulon, were dark-hued as my skin. My thoughts were of the curse. But sayest thou, my cousin, that as our faith is, so shall the blessing be?”
“According to our faith, so shall it be,” murmured the young man, and they rode on in silence.
Her worry is supported by the Book of Mormon’s text, where God describes the curse: “I will cause that they shall be loathsome unto thy people, save they shall repent of their iniquities.”5 To McDonald’s credit, she makes the curse something that can suddenly disappear. After some time passes, Corianton returns to Relia’s village and notices that everyone seems lighter-skinned than he remembered:
Corianton stands idly near, listening in a desultory fashion to the conversation, but taking no part therein. From time to time his eyes rest upon a beautiful dark face, with large liquid black eyes, whose depths seem unfathomable. There is something in the eyes, and in the crimson curve of the full lips, strangely familiar to him, yet memory fails to recall where and in what manner they have impressed their likeness upon his mind. He is thinking at the present moment that she is very fair to look upon, despite her dark skin. Then it occurs to him that she is not very dark after all. He looks around at her companions, and decides that they all are decidedly different in color from the Lamanites who are now warring against them. He notes that she appears somewhat lighter than some others and wonders what is the reason.
The racial etiology, or explanation, as explained by Julia McDonald here, is one that is not genetic. Yet it does seem to affect a group of people.
The name of McDonald’s story, A Ship of Hagoth, alludes to the ending, where Relia is shipwrecked on an island and finds Corianton there and they live happily ever after. The Nephites who leave on the Ships of Hagoth have long been a folk explanation for why Polynesian people were considered Lamanites by mid-century Mormons.6 But if the people who left the Americas on the ships of Hagoth were Nephites… how do they get to be Lamanites? One explanation is that their skin changed somehow, maybe because they forgot the Christian beliefs that marked them as Nephite.
Equating dark skin with a curse from God is racist in a way that is really messed up. I’ll admit that my first inclination is to simply ignore the ways that race comes up in the Book of Mormon. However, it’s clearly important to the authors of Book of Mormon fiction. I have a lot more background research to do to integrate my literary research with work other scholars have done on race in the LDS Church—thanks for sticking with me while I figure it out.
2 Nephi 5:21
See Scripture Central’s entry on “What Is the “Skin of Blackness”” for the apologetic argument.
I haven’t confirmed if the second edition still includes the racist imagery (if I were a publisher doing the second edition, I’d take it out), but you can buy it today on Deseret Book.
A Ship of Hagoth was originally serialized in Young Woman’s Journal. You can read it in the collection I linked in my previous post, or read the nice edition that Ardis Parshall and Michael Austin made (it’s print-on-demand and available on Amazon and part of a larger work that collects closely-related adaptations of the Corianton story). Mike wrote a great Wikipedia page on Julia McDonald, where you can learn about how she studied medicine at the University of Michigan and wrote updates for the Young Woman’s Journal on her experience.
2 Nephi 5:22
FAIR has a pretty good breakdown of official people calling Polynesians Lamanites (it is another apologetic source).
Gran artículo. Voy a pasarselo a Rafael Vazquez que tiene un taller de escritores sud latinoamericanos. Creo que les puede importar mucho este asunto.