“He [Should] Have Been Treated Differently”: My Family’s Struggle For and Against White Privilege

Abstract

This paper outlines my Latter-day Saint ancestors’ struggle during the nineteenth century for the privileged status of whiteness and my family’s struggle during the early twenty-first century against systemic racism—a struggle that came to a head in June 2019 when my youngest brother, Jeremy Sorensen, was shot and killed by a white man who was not subsequently tried. Relating the experiences of my ancestors and of my immediate family, this paper demonstrates the devastating effect of racism in not only its intentional, explicit form, but also—and more importantly for this discussion—its unintentional, implicit form. This paper considers so-called colorblindness as an example of unintentional, implicit racism that perpetuates the disadvantages and disproportionate deaths that the black community in the United States continues to experience.