The claim that the Book of Mormon is racist is a common refrain among our critics, some of their most potent ammunition to destroy the interest of investigators and sow doubts in the faithful. But they’re wrong.

The Book of Mormon isn’t racist. And in this article I prove it by taking a detailed look at the symbolic and literal interpretations of the Lamanite curse and “skin of blackness” to demonstrate that it not only isn’t racist, it has nothing to do with race at all. The Book of Mormon, when understood in its proper context as an ancient document reflecting the language and ideas of people whose culture and understanding of the world was fundamentally different than ours, is very clearly not racist. When someone sees it as racist they are only demonstrating their ignorance of the document itself and projecting our own modern problems onto it.