Email to a friend

Human Rights Law

Code-Talking Racist Vampires and Mormon Propaganda

By Alexa (index)

Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez (one of my very favorite chick lit authors; what about it, muchachos?) has asked a provocative, disturbing question on her blog: Is Stephenie Meyer Racist?

Furthermore, is she also hard-selling Mormon talking points in her astonishingly popular young adult Twilight series?

As many of you know, the final book of Stephenie Meyer's popular vampire series came out this weekend, breaking sales records with 1.3 million copies flying off the shelves in the first day. Thousands of reviews and articles about the book are floating about, and not one of them touches on what I believe to be the most dangerous and overlooked element of the novels: Racism.

This seems so glaringly obvious now that AVR has pointed it out that even I can't believe after reading the Twilight series and Meyer's latest, for grown-ups debut The Host how insidious it bees.
ASR posted a follow-up here.

The fundamental message of Meyer's books, I believe, is that of selflessness and moral courage, at least in the first two books. I believe Meyer's strong Mormon faith (she is a practicing Mormon and a graduate of Brigham Young University) influenced her writing in a good way here, in helping her to craft thoughtful storylines that dealt with complex moral/religious issues.

That said, there is an underlying racism to the books that deeply disturbs me. I believe this is also the influence of Meyer's faith - a faith I saw in action when I had breakfast with her at the White House as part of the National Book Festival two years ago. (Meyer would not drink coffee, because her religion forbids the use of caffeine, for instance.)

Of primary concern for me is the treatment of Meyer's main Native American character, Jacob Black. He is presented initially as a sweet, normal teen boy from the Paiute Reservation, but we soon learn that he is a werewolf, and that werewolves are the enemies of vampires. The vampires, at this point in the story, are shown to be European in origin, and as pale as pale can be - and friends to Bella, our human protagonist.

And Bella, you guessed it, chooses the (white) vampire over the (brown) werewolf.

Here's the real kicker:

But you must consider that in the Book of Mormon 2, 5:23, God is said to have placed "the curse of black skin" upon the Lamanites, in orer to make them unattractive to the Nephites. The precise word used is "black," the name Meyer chose to give her dark-skinned Native American character. The Laminites, meanwhile, are described in the Book of Mormon as being a wild, ferocious, plundering, robbing, and murdering people, and God punishes all Nephites who marry them by cursing their children with dark skin, too.

The Mountain Meadows massacre describes the Mormon Militia's slaughter in stark terms:

Brevet Major Carleton [illustrator]: "[ ]one too horrible and sickening for language to describe. Human skeletons, disjointed bones, ghastly skulls and the hair of women were scattered in frightful profusion over a distance of two miles." "the remains were not buried at all until after they had been dismembered by the wolves and the flesh stripped from the bones, and then only such bones were buried as lay scattered along nearest the road."

This is fictionalized in Meyer's The Host as the invasion and hostile occupation of earthly human bodies by creatures who occupy the "host" bodies by force and superimpose their superior Lamanite souls upon the helpless humans.

AVR:

Interestingly, in this final book, Bella not only ends up spurning the dark-skinned boy. She also ends up married and pregnant - at 18. Squeaky-clean, eh? God forbid Bella have, say, decided to hold off on boys, monstrous and otherwise, until she got, way, her chemical engineering degree. How fascinating that in the "good, clean" books of Stephenie Meyer, racism, teen pregnancy and teen marriage are celebrated, and not a single mainstream reviewer I have read seems to have taken notice.

I held out hope, until this last book, that the gifted Mrs. Meyer might actually do the truly moral thing, and make Native Jacob good, in order to take polite issue with a pathetically misguided Mormon teaching.

Sadly, she did not.

This is disappointing. And, to my mind, dangerous, given the extreme popularity of the books.

As Meyer is compared in every magazine and on every news program to JK Rowling (a writer I believe actually has excellent moral messages, though her books - surprise, surprise - are reviled by the very same parents who adore Meyer), and as we prepare for the first of her vampire novels to hit the big screen as a movie, we must ask ourselves whether we as a nation, and as parents, will continue to embrace an author who uses her formidable talent to present thinly-veiled racist teachings taken from her church. Should we be so quick to reward Meyer for her denigration of a significant portion of her audience by continuing to hail these books as mere "squeaky-clean" vampire stories?

I believe we should not. They are more than that. They are, like the most effective propaganda, wolves in sheep's clothing.

Werewolves, in fact.

Asi. Who knows the effect of this superimposed false morality on young, impressionable minds? I remember the books I read as a kid and how the library was the world to me. (Yeah, I was the dorkette who hated Saturday because there was no school - so?)

I want to congratulate ASR on taking this brave stance and speaking out against Meyer's whisper in the million-sellers strategy, coming to a cineplex near you later this year:

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on August 21, 2008 (boomark / email).