Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Year Pologna podcast.

I'm your host, Lindsay, and tonight I'm delighted to talk to a very distinguished award-winning scholar, Paul Reeve.

Paul, can you say hello?

Hi. I'm glad to be with you.

We need you to brag about yourself a little bit and talk about what you do. You're one of, like I said, one of the most distinguished scholars in Mormonism. Well, that's very nice of you.

So I'm a professor of history at the University of Utah, Simmons

Mormon Studies professor at the University of Utah. In 2015, Oxford University Press published

my book, Religion of a Different Color, Race, and the Mormon Struggle for whiteness, which deals with the history

of race and Mormonism, mostly the 19th century, but also a final chapter that looks at the 20th

century and the 21st century.

I think one of the things that's unique about you too, Paul, is as you're a white

scholar writing about race and yet your work across the board has been publicly, like,

accepted and celebrated because your work is so good. I mean, we're going to plug the book

a little bit, or at least I am for you.

We're going to link to it. It's something that everyone needs to read, because not only is it

illuminating from a historical perspective, but it really reframes things. One of your main

the thesis is in the book is that Mormonism is seen as a race itself. Is that fair to say?

Yeah, that's right. There is, I think, you can see the formation of a racial identity for Mormons by outsiders very early on. And I think it

begins with Mormons just being labeled Mormonites initially.

And then you sort of think about how races get made or constructed is the academic term for it,

but just how they get made.

And outsiders start to ascribe a variety of assumed group characteristics onto

...