In this session, Darron Smith shares the ways in which being African-American, progressive, and LDS pose unique challenges in the Mormon-dominated institutions of Utah higher education. Smith spends a lot of time in classrooms directly confronting the notion that blacks were and still are under a divine curse. His paper uses anecdotes about con-fronting religiously-based racist ideas, and explores, in particular, the resistance of LDS students to counter-hegemonic discourses.

Darron Smith, Michael J. Stevens