An Appeal for Black Exodus
Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash.
Image description: A neon red exit sign against a black background with a red arrow pointing to the right.
In the Spring of 2020, my community in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints studied chapters 18-24 in the Book of Mosiah in the Book of Mormon. It is a curious case study on how the Lord helps the oppressed deal with their oppression. In the Bible as in the Book of Mormon, we have two stories highlighting the oppression of two groups of people. Both groups were in bondage and facing physical and emotional abuse. They couldn’t do much about it as they were outnumbered and outgunned. Both groups, unable to fight back or reason with their abusers, submitted to their subjugation and prayed to the Lord for help. This led to their deliverance in the form of an exodus.
That spring, my church community read these stories surrounded by yet again, the news of Black death. This time, the death of a young man named Ahmaud Arbery. In the last five years, we’ve seen literally hundreds of headlines about unarmed Black men being gunned down by police officers and white vigilantes under questionable circumstances. There have been few arrests, even fewer convictions – I can count the latter on one hand – and no significant reform as a result of any of the killings. Each one hurts, but this one hit different. As an incident captured on video where the victim is an unarmed Black man posing no threat to anyone and the killers are armed civilians, it might be the most glaring example of the intoxicating power of whiteness in recent memory.
Somehow, those white men who killed Ahmaud felt justified in chasing him down while he was in the middle of a jog, commanding him to stop while brandishing firearms, and subsequently killing him when he ignored them, despite having no evidence of him committing any crime, no threat posed by Arbery, and no authority to do any of those things. What power other than whiteness made these men feel comfortable with any of the decisions they made that day? What power other than whiteness allowed the authorities to not just lie to Arbery’s family about the circumstances surrounding his death, but also implicate him in a crime that he didn’t commit? And what power other than whiteness led the man who leaked the video to genuinely believe, reportedly, that it would absolve them of the murder ? These men wielded their whiteness like a badge that is premised on the idea that they deserve their power, that Black life is expendable, and that Black life is theirs to control. This is the same force that powered slavery, Jim Crow, and continues to power the prison industrial complex. In short, Arbery’s death was an especially rude reminder that our transition from slavery to Jim Crow to the present day wasn’t so much progress as it was white supremacy shifting into a more comfortable position.
Returning to the two liberation narratives from that week’s Book of Mormon reading, there are a few things worth noting: The first is that neither population was oppressed all that long before God delivered them, relatively speaking – three generations at most. Black America has been dealing with it for 16. Though I suspect time wasn’t the primary variable at play in their deliverance, I find it somewhat comforting to know that we at least meet the time requirement for deliverance and then some, assuming there is one.
The second thing is that the Lamanites, the oppressors in Limhi’s narrative, made an oath that they would not kill Limhi’s people, yet they took liberty to harm them in other ways. After confronting Limhi’s people and losing, the Lamanites got mad at them and decided to go into their city and physically abuse them (Mosiah 21:3). This kind of interaction-–operating within established parameters to oppress—is very familiar to Black America. For example, after the abolition of slavery, white America couldn’t legally enslave Black people so they wrote the Black Codes. With them, America could restrict the freedom of Blacks, get them to work for low wages, and arrest them for vagrancy, which would inevitably lead to convict leasing, i.e. neo-slave labor. That is just one of many examples that demonstrate how simply changing the name or methods of an oppressive system does not necessarily mean progress, particularly if the engine behind that system remains the same.
The third observation is that the Lord’s solution to the problem was not to continue to try to reason with their captors or try to fight them. The solution in both cases was a non-violent escape to a place free of oppression. Limhi’s people were dwelling in a land that his ancestors had built, but one that the Lord told his ancestors to leave. I don’t imagine it would be easy to leave a land built with the labor and sweat of your ancestors just for your enemies to take it, but after failing to reason with them and defend themselves, what other options remained?
The fourth thing that I noticed is the lack of apparent divine involvement in the people of Limhi’s exodus after Ammon arrived. Limhi’s people had been praying for deliverance. What they got was a group of scouts led by Ammon and sent by Mosiah to find Limhi and his people. At that point, Limhi’s people had the necessary tools for escape. They organized, developed a plan that exploited the weaknesses of their captors, and followed Ammon to freedom. We’re accustomed to lots of divine intervention in the Exodus narrative, but in Limhi’s story we find the least. There isn’t even an apparent provocation from the Lord to get out. Even still, the people prayed for deliverance and upon Ammon’s arrival, they had everything they needed to get it. The rest was up to them.
Lastly, I noticed that the place both groups were led to, the land of Zarahemla, was the same place their stubborn ancestors had come from. It was their intended home. The idea of home – a place where we can dwell and operate in peace without fearing for our health and safety – has rich symbolism in the Black American tradition. Probably the most common and significant theme in the invocation of that symbol is that “home” is not here. And further, before “home” meant heaven or glory or paradise, it meant the literal land from whence we came.
Pondering this in the midst of the continual mess in America, it begs the obvious questions: Is it really worth fighting for equality and liberation within the parameters of a system that was built on denying us these very things? Or do Black people need to get the hell up out of here?
I am aware of how the Book of Mormon narrative progresses, specifically the integrated utopia in Fourth Nephi. And I know that one of the most explicit principles of Christ’s New Testament church is not just an end to otherization, but a full diversification and integration. Christ’s people are intended to function as a community where no one is privileged above another due to earthly constructs.
That said, the exodus narratives in both the Bible and the Book of Mormon indicate that there is a time for separation and oppression is the reason behind all of them: The Israelites from the Egyptians, these two stories in Mosiah, and two more exodus narratives earlier in the Book of Mormon – one of God telling Nephi to separate from his brothers (Second Nephi 5) and another of God telling Mosiah to flee out of the Land of Nephi (The Book of Omni). In every exodus, the ability to live in peace according to their will and pleasure was threatened, much like Black folks in the Americas. In fact, as I explored social media the week of Arbery’s death, I saw several posts that named simple activities (riding a bike, going to a bachelor party, sitting on their own porch, walking through a park, etc.) that Black people could no longer do without the threat of violence. There was a name etched next to every single activity of someone killed by law enforcement officials or vigilantes for doing that very activity. Needless to say, it’s a long list and I have too much confidence that it will get longer.
If that wasn’t enough, in every American institution, 400 years later, Black Americans still suffer from massive discrimination. White supremacy never went anywhere. It persists in spite of our best efforts. It has been intellectually debunked by our best and brightest, we’ve mobilized against it, and have drawn attention to it our entire existence in this country and yet, here we are. If history is any indicator, so long as we’re in a country that was built on and maintained by white supremacy, it will continue to find its way into our lives.
It is in that spirit that I propose we consider the Israelites and the Nephites.
It is in that spirit that I propose a Black Exodus: a physical withdrawal of Black souls from the United States and into a new space where we can establish a new and open institution rooted in active anti-racism rather than the othering, subjugation, pretense, racism, and racial capitalism of white supremacy.
I have far more confidence in our ability to build this new society than to work within one built on our dehumanization. Though I don’t want to give racists the satisfaction of doing exactly what they always tell us to do every time we protest injustice, I find myself in a position where I’m out of better ideas and frankly, tired of defending my right to simply exist.
But I also find something brilliant, poetic, and almost humorous about such a suggestion. The cruelest irony of whiteness is how much it needs us; it depends on us by devaluing and dehumanizing us; without Blackness, whiteness has no power, no meaning, no identity, and no life. Whiteness is a parasite. Our presence has been so fundamental to American life that America as we know it would eventually cease to exist. And in the most prophetic and poetic of ironies, Black folks would at last recover what white supremacy has stolen from us – our dignity, our freedom, and our peace – while anyone clinging to whiteness loses the same. So shall the scripture be fulfilled that “many that are first shall be last; and the last first.”
The Lord has delivered His people before and takes the side of the oppressed. Why wouldn’t He deliver us if we did our part? “Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel, then why not every man”? The path to civil rights has been too exhausting and too violent and I want my people to live in a world where the recognition of basic human rights is a principle rather than our highest aspiration.
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