Ex-Mormon does not equal Anti-Racist

Leaving Mormonism doesn’t make you anti-racist. You can leave a religion and not leave a cult/ure. Being ex-Mormon doesn’t automatically make you more anti-racist than Mormons. 

I write these stories not so that you can show them to your Mormon family and say, “See!” If that helps you process your religious trauma and validate your feelings I am grateful that this work is able to support you in that way. But this work is meant to go beyond your individual relations to our collective relations. 

But I write so that we can ask: 
1) Where is this still living in me? How am I perpetuating this ideology? 

2) What can I do to be personally and collectively accountable to these histories and to be sure they don’t continue happening? 

3) How can I help others also learn and unlearn to build community accountable so that collectively we can unsettle what our ancestors (ideological or genetic) settled?

Cause I’ve seen participating Mormons take this information and search inward for where this is in them. And I’ve seen exMormons take this information and point it outward at others. 
Just because you don’t support this church anymore doesn’t mean you aren’t complicit in these ideologies or that you are exempt from being accountable to them. 

I started this project after having been exMormon for half my life. I started it because these ideologies inform my baseline reality. Without conscious and critical awareness of them, they’ll unconsciously inform my choices and actions. 

That said, I do want to be clear that paying tithing to a politically-active religious corporation which intentionally perpetuates and benefits from white-supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, eugenics, colonialism, imperialism, and anti-queerness is not anti-racist or anti-imperial. Especially when that tithing is meant to ensure your individual salvation as the cost of so many others’ quality of life. 

So, I guess just a reminder that this work’s primary focus isn’t to prove to Mormons that Mormonism is bad, but to counter the white-supremacist educations and half-histories we all grew up learning (Mormon or not) that we might be able to be accountable or to be response-able and collectively work to build a world in which many world’s fit. This is an invitation to deepen that work. (Remembering that “decolonizing the mind is only the first step”