





***Update on Tuesday, January 21st, 2020***

I’ve had an immense amount of feedback on this blog post that went live 24 hours ago, all of which I am truly appreciative of. Thank you everyone for your thoughtful remarks and calls to move this discussion forward, and I understand the frustrated tone of some who felt I’d missed the mark. Based on what I have heard, I decided to edit this post and respond to these comments.

1. I originally put the photos of four prominent Latter-day Saint black women as the main image. I didn’t mean to imply that they were somehow involved with the post at all. I simply wanted to share women who had been a great resource to me personally, because I live in a place (Utah county) that doesn’t provide me very regular companionship with black women. I have appreciated so much hearing about their lives and perspectives in books, social media posts, podcasts, and even movies. I wanted to share them as good examples, before I told a story about a white man’s racist teachings (who I was also providing ample links to news articles and resources about). I wanted to include the names and information of black women who I respected, and put them at the very top as a way to have them come before the rest of the story. I understand that this was not how they were received, and the last thing I want to do is miscommunicate my admiration for these women, so I’ve replaced it with a stock photo of BYU.



2. I wrote about my fondness for Brother Bott and his class from the perspective of my younger self, when I accepted everything he said without a second thought. I want to clarify that I have changed my feelings dramatically in the past two decades, and after hearing more stories yesterday (especially one of a young woman who did try to raise concerns about him up the chain of command a few years before I was there, but was shut down repeatedly), any lingering feelings of compassion for Randy Bott and his becoming the church’s scapegoat have diminished significantly.



3. Finally, I want to clarify that while I do hold the church and those with authority to write and preach doctrine to the entire church to a higher standard than a BYU professor, Randy Bott should not be excused from his racism simply because he wasn’t forced to stop teaching it by anyone at church headquarters. Knowing that at least one brave woman in the nineties tried to stop him with no success reminds me that just because I didn’t see anyone censuring him doesn’t mean that no one did. (And those who did took on great personal risk and stress to do so.) Randy Bott is responsible for what he said. It doesn’t matter that he had been taught incorrectly, that he hadn’t been forced to stop, or that it was well received. It was still wrong, and he was wrong. Strangely enough, I was worried about not being hard enough on myself for accepting racist teachings as a young person, but then felt like it was unfair to lay total blame at Randy Bott’s feet for his own teachings as an adult and former mission president. But we were both wrong – him for teaching it, and me for listening and agreeing. I sincerely don’t want to be that blindly obedient teenage girl anymore, but if I am holding myself accountable, I should hold him accountable as well. And he should actually be much more accountable than the teenagers in his class, because he was a person with standing in the community and relative power as the instructor. Randy Bott was aware of what he was teaching and sending off to the rest of the world in the form of thousands of missionaries, and nothing excuses his errors in judgement, especially when they persisted for decades.

I acknowledge where I was wrong, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to re-think these things. I welcome any and all feedback. Below I have left my original post intact, so that the comments left in response to what I said don’t seem out of place, and so that hopefully others can learn from the same process I have.

January 20th, 2020

I started at Brigham Young University in the fall of 1999, just before the turn of the century. As a new freshman at a church owned university, only one thing captivated my attention and passion as much as freshman boys – and that was the prospect of serving a mission. I’d decided at age 16 that I would serve, and from that moment forward I listened to every talk and motivational speech directed at the young men as if it was meant for me, too. (As a side note to this story, I didn’t serve a mission after all. I was dating my husband at age 21 and got married instead.)



But at age 18, I didn’t know that future yet. Instead, I watched boy after boy in my freshman ward open his mission call in the lobby of our dorms (with his family on speaker phone from wherever they lived). On Sunday nights I would also go to something called “Tunnel Singing”, where students would gather at 9 pm under a bridge near the Marriott Center to sing hymns together. About halfway through the singing, they’d take a break and let everyone who’d received a mission call during that week announce where they were going and when they reported to the MTC. After cheers and applause, we’d sing a rousing version of “Called To Serve”, and I was almost always choking back tears by the end because it felt so amazing to be a part of something so special. It was almost always teenage boys announcing their calls back then (and I was jealous), but every once in awhile a 21 year old sister would announce hers. When she would do that my chest would burn with love and respect for her, and all I could think about was how badly I wanted to be exactly like her. I could not wait to turn 21.



At the beginning of my sophomore year (at age 19), I decided to attend the wildly popular Missionary Prep class taught by Brother Randy Bott. It felt like every boy from my freshman ward had taken that class, and I’d attended a couple times the year before just to see what it was like. And for Teenage Abby, it was AMAZING. It was the best class I had ever been to at BYU. The instructor was funny, passionate, extremely knowledgeable, and his classes were packed. Every seat was taken plus standing room next to the walls sometimes. I clearly wasn’t the only one attending the class who wasn’t officially registered for it.



I went to every single class that fall semester, even though I wasn’t getting credit for it. I was on the edge of my seat and took comprehensive notes. I bought his book from the BYU bookstore. I tried to follow whatever he suggested in preparation for a mission. I didn’t even hate the lesson where he talked about girls not needing or being encouraged to go on missions, because I was sure it didn’t apply to me. The next semester I went ahead and signed up for the class for official credit and happily sat through every lecture a second time.



I loved that he would always open the floor for questions, and I remember specifically asking him once, “Could Jesus have been a woman? No one else could have done what he did, I know – but is “Savior of the World” a priesthood calling? Or could our savior have been a woman, if *she* had been the one who volunteered?” This was literally the only time Brother Bott disappointed me. He didn’t answer my question directly at all. Rather, he talked for a minute about the role of women and something else forgettable and then said, “Your real question is this, I assume – am I going to end up eternally pregnant having babies forever?” I remember thinking, “Wait, what? That was not my question AT ALL. Did you even listen? That’s literally the furthest thing I can think of from what my question actually was!” And then he quickly asked for the next question from the crowd without checking to see if I was satisfied with his response. I just shrugged internally and assumed it was too hard of a question and I’d stumped him (so score one for me!).



Other than that one puzzling moment, BYU Abby was never let down by this great professor. And on this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I can also remember his lesson on race and the priesthood very well. For those who are not familiar with Randy Bott (or his very public ordeal over his teachings about race), let me fill you in on what he taught.



I sat in his classroom (I still remember where I was sitting that day, and which chalkboard he was writing on) and watched Brother Bott draw a ladder on the board.



Brother Bott explained that not giving black men the priesthood before 1978 was a kindness to them. “If you climb to the top rung of a ladder and fall off, you’ll get hurt very badly. However, if you climb only a step on the bottom and fall off, it’s not nearly as bad.” He animated the climbing and falling with his hands in front of the board. “Black people were not ready for the priesthood before 1978 because of centuries of slavery, lack of education, racism, etc, and thus they were allowed to only climb the first rung – by getting baptized into the church. If God had let them climb all the way to the top with full priesthood ordination and temple endowments before they were prepared, they could have fallen all the way down to become Sons of Perdition.”



I internally shrugged my shoulders again and thought, “Okay, sure. That makes sense.” I sat through this lesson twice, once each semester.



That might’ve been the last of it for me, but over a decade later in 2012 his teachings suddenly hit national news when Mitt Romny was running for president. A Washington Post journalist interviewed Brother Bott and asked for an explanation about the priesthood ban on blacks. Here is an excerpt from that article, (which you can view in whole here):



“God has always been discriminatory” when it comes to whom he grants the authority of the priesthood, says Bott, the BYU theologian. He quotes Mormon scripture that states that the Lord gives to people “all that he seeth fit.” Bott compares blacks with a young child prematurely asking for the keys to her father’s car, and explains that similarly until 1978, the Lord determined that blacks were not yet ready for the priesthood.



What is discrimination?” Bott asks. “I think that is keeping something from somebody that would be a benefit for them, right? But what if it wouldn’t have been a benefit to them?” Bott says that the denial of the priesthood to blacks on Earth — although not in the afterlife — protected them from the lowest rungs of hell reserved for people who abuse their priesthood powers. “You couldn’t fall off the top of the ladder, because you weren’t on the top of the ladder. So, in reality the blacks not having the priesthood was the greatest blessing God could give them.”



These comments stirred up quite the controversy, with online outrage abounding, and students even planning small protests.



In response Terry Bell, the Dean of Religious Education at BYU said, “The comments attributed to Professor Bott do not reflect the teachings in the classroom at Brigham Young University.” (Which CLEARLY was not true – I heard them taught more than once to a packed crowd of students with my own two ears!)





Brother Bott quietly retired from BYU to serve a mission shortly after this all happened, and the church also issued a statement:



“”The positions attributed to BYU professor Randy Bott in a recent Washington Post article absolutely do not represent the teachings and doctrines of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” the statement said. “BYU faculty members do not speak for the Church. It is unfortunate that the Church was not given a chance to respond to what others said. “The Church’s position is clear — we believe all people are God’s children and are equal in His eyes and in the Church. We do not tolerate racism in any form.”



In an interesting turn of events, my longtime friend, neighbor, and soon-to-be-bishop of my ward, turned out to be Brother Bott’s nephew. Somehow in all the years we’d known each other I hadn’t made that connection until this news story. My husband asked him about it at church in Elder’s Quorum, and the nephew had just shook his head a little and said, “Oh, Uncle Randy shouldn’t have said all of that – he knows better.”

I thought, really? Did he know better? Because I didn’t know better. Nobody in that class that I sat through twice at BYU objected to him teaching it to us. He taught it to THOUSANDS of students, and nobody took complaints to the head of his department and made him stop teaching it. Brother Bott was not some unknown teacher that nobody had ever heard about. He was a campus wide superstar! (For proof that I’m not exaggerating, go watch the first fifteen seconds of this very funny, very viral Divine Comedy sketch here (made by the same people who would later create the popular Studio C program). The song is a parody of “California Girls” by Katy Perry and the very first line says, “I know a place…where we’ve got way different celebrities…”, and they flash a picture of Dieter Uchtdorf and then of RANDY BOTT. Those two guys were about equally popular during his heyday at the university.)

For even more evidence, here is a Randy Bott praise-filled news article from the Deseret News article in 2008.



At one point, he was the most popular professor in the country on the website RateMyProfessor.com.



Everybody used Randy Bott as a scapegoat, and yes, his teachings were totally racist. But somehow I don’t think it was fair to throw someone with zero authority under the bus when he was only repeating what he’d also been taught his entire life. Had anyone with authority ever attempted to correct what he was teaching? From this outsider’s perspective, it doesn’t appear that anyone did.

I wish we could say now that these racist ideas are finally behind us in 2020. However, just last year my 12 year old son came home from church and said, “Mom! My teacher said something today that sounded so racist. She said that black people came from Cain and Abel. Because like, Cain killed Abel, so God cursed him with black skin – and that’s where black people come from. I couldn’t believe she was seriously telling us that, but she was!”. He couldn’t stop laughing about how absurd it all sounded to him, and repeated it over and over again to my husband and I.



First, I was so secretly thrilled that my kid was laughing at the ridiculousness of something so obviously wrong, since I had heard those things growing up and never thought twice about them. But secondly, I was annoyed that this stuff was still happening, and I didn’t even know what could be done about it. His teacher was a very friendly and outgoing woman in the ward, and she’d just recently been in the Relief Society presidency. What should we do? My husband decided he wanted to talk to the bishop about what happened, and made an appointment (with the same bishop who is Randy Bott’s nephew, coincidentally!). He did, and the bishop agreed to discuss the issue with the teacher. He reported back to my husband that she’d apologized and said she was just trying to keep the class interesting for the kids. (I don’t know if a correction was ever made in class or not, but my son never reported hearing one.)

I get it. It’s hard to keep kids focused and learning without teaching new and unique things they haven’t heard before. I don’t blame her. And honestly – again, like Brother Bott – she was teaching things SHE had been taught by her favorite teachers at church for decades. She is extremely active in the ward, loves learning, and centers her life on the gospel – and yet for all of her participation she’d missed any announcement from the church that that teaching was outdated and racist.

Is it Randy Bott’s fault or my son’s primary teacher’s fault that these errors persist- or is it the fault of church leadership failing us? If such a prominent and vocal member of the church as Randy Bott missed the memo, is it any surprise that a white primary teacher in one of the whitest wards in the church missed it as well? We have no control over what happens at the top, but what are we doing as a church community (especially white people, like myself) to fix these problems? And what if the first question asked of us on the other side isn’t “Did you ever dress immodestly or try alcohol?”, but rather, “Did you do anything to stop racism in your community?”



I hope that next time my son hears racist teachings he stands up and objects, rather than just coming home and laughing about it afterwards. And I hope I never absorb a racist idea ever again, just because of the trust I have in the source its coming from. Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and here’s to a better future for all of us, together.

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