Events unravelling in the Mormon Church and its splitter groups in the US and Canada in the last couple of years, can provide us with great opportunity to appraise the dominance of cultures, traditions and values in our societies. I will use these events to explicate the differences between the so-called “white privilege”, “racism” and “prejudice”.
In the US a prominent polygamist, Tom Green from the state of Utah, was sentenced to five years in prison recently for fathering 25 kids with 5 different women.
Last week, another controversial figure, Warren Jeff (55), the leader of Texas based Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints was sentenced to life imprisonment for defilement and fathering children with underage girls that his church claimed, he was lawfully married to.
In Canada, Winston Blackmore and James Oler of Bountiful, British Columbia were arrested in 2009 and charged with marrying 20 and 2 women, respectively. The Crime of polygamy in Canada carries up to five years in jail once convicted. Cases against both Winston and James were dismissed on technical grounds by a Judge on the premise of gross professional misconduct on the part of the prosecutor involved with the matter. Tom, Warren, Winston and James are all members a break away Mormon Church.
Both US and Canada have outlawed polygamy. This has deep roots in the evolution of these societies from pre-industrial stage to its contemporary capitalist tendencies and relentless struggle by women. Here, most relations are purely economic relations. People only relate to the other in as far as there are foreseeable opportunities for benefit or advantage. Money and only money tie families and friends together or separates them, bitterly - thus defining social relations.
Such tradition definitely contrasts with our own African setting, where our societies are more intimate, socially and quite egalitarian in many realms. People relate and support each other purely on principles of reciprocity and respect for posterity. Polygamy was socially sanctioned and valued in many ways; it was the measure of success; multiple marriages served the purpose of linking discrete groups. Marriages served the purpose of reconciliation or social construction between societies that have had long standing enmity. In that essence, multiple marriages by a man served security interests in many ways; the more sons one has, the more guarantee he has for his family and property; the more girls, the more wealth accruing from dowry. Many wives, children and grandchildren also implied ready labour source, wealth and satisfaction.
Given the above, US and Canadian polygamists could flee to Africa to claim for protection from persecution, in the same way same sex (gay) individuals and political refugees have fled Africa and are accepted in these places. Our problem is that we have been dispossessed by dominant discourses to condemn polygamy in the same manner as we see here in US and in Canada.
The imperative of this story is to understand what has been presented in Critical Social Perspective as the “white privilege” but at times misconstrued to mean racism or prejudice. I think as a scholar, it is very important to discern these terms so as to delineate our social discourses from stereotypical perspectives.
The constant denouncing of our cultures and social values for me fits with the purview of the “White Privilege”. Theories of white privilege, posits that the dominant white culture view their social, cultural, and economic experiences as a norm that everyone should experience. This is different from racism and/or prejudice which advances that the advantaged position of the dominant group must be maintained at the expense of others. This explains to the most, why most of our cultural, social and even political experiences have always been condemned and downgraded for many years at our own complaisance.
In my view, understanding the white privilege as that which belies all forms of bigotry and global inequities, including the calibration of “acceptable” international standards of export, justice, mannerism, education, religion and so forth, would help us enormously in rebranding our cultural, social and religious values without relinquishing them.
END.
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