It’s up to viewers to evaluate and reach their own conclusions. The point of the questions, she says, is to reveal the real attitudes and beliefs that people on campus have when it comes to race and equity. It was what she expected when incoming freshmen Paytin Curran, who is white, says, “No.”įor the most part, Weaver notes, the Black Menaces try to keep their opinions out of the videos. With the next person who answers, though, Weaver has a harder time concealing her reaction. Filming is Sebastian Stewart-Johnson and at far right is Kennethia Dorsey. (Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Rachel Weaver reacts to responses about immigration as the Black Menaces film a TikTok video at BYU in Provo on Friday, April 8, 2022. And his reply surprises her, acknowledging that he has privilege. She stretches a microphone out to ask the first person who walks by. Weaver is convinced white students won’t think it does. Several buildings around them, too, were named for LDS leaders who held slaves or opposed civil rights.Īs they scroll through a list of their ideas together, crowding around the screen of one phone in a plastic purple case, they settle on this: “Do you think white privilege exists?” “He supported slavery, you guys,” he says. Shepherd wants to focus on something positive, like Black accomplishments: “We should ask students to name something a Black person invented.”īyrd wants to draw attention to where they’re standing, in the square named for Brigham Young at a school that also bears his name. They stand outside with the “Y” on mountain to their backs and red bricks under their feet in Brigham Square, debating what question to ask next.
“I had no idea how far we could reach together.” The power of questions “I thought I was famous then,” he laughed. Stewart-Johnson jokes that once on his personal TikTok account he got 7,000 views. Shepherd said the account was Stewart-Johnson’s idea because he’s always wanted to be TikTok famous. Weaver, Byrd, Dorsey, Kylee Shepherd and Sebastian Stewart-Johnson have now created more than 70 videos together. “We knew we had to keep exposing these problems,” she said. Kennethia Dorsey, another member of the group and a junior, said they decided to build off of that. People were sharing it across social media, and it ended up with 25,000 likes and nearly a half million views. That first TikTok video originally got 5,000 likes when it was posted. Wilcox later apologized, but the comments caused pain to many who are Black in the faith.
“Maybe instead of asking why the Blacks had to wait until 1978 to get the priesthood, we should be asking why did the whites and other races have to wait until 1829.” Maybe they’re asking the wrong questions, Wilcox suggested. Was Brigham Young, the faith’s second president, “a jerk,” he said they often ask him, or were early Latter-day Saints “prejudiced”? In the recording, Wilcox said he gets questions from members who wonder why Black men didn’t get the priesthood until 1978, when church leaders lifted their ban. 6, Brad Wilcox, who is also a religion professor at BYU, was recorded giving a talk at a fireside for congregations in Alpine. The first video the group posted was spurred by the viral comments of a high-profile, white Latter-day Saint leader about Black members of the faith. (Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) A student answers a question for Kennethia Dorsey of the Black Menaces, at BYU in Provo on Friday, April 8, 2022. The responses from white students asked to identify an iconic picture of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Black boy who was lynched in Mississippi and helped spur the civil rights movement, are cringeworthy, stumping most who can’t say who it is. “I don’t,” a girl says, starting to apologize. They ask white students if they have any Black friends. They ask white students what they learned during Black History Month.
The power of the videos, Weaver said, is that they show the difference between what white students overlook or ignore and what Black students experience. The two-minute videos they post of the responses are meant to be unfiltered, to document the answers without comment. They go around campus with an iPhone, asking mostly white students questions about race and marginalized communities in person-on-the-street style interviews. With their account, they intend to expose the attitudes they come across every day. “It might seem provocative to some, but it’s just that most people don’t know what it’s like being Black at a church-owned institution or even a majority white institution.” “We’re highlighting the reality here for people like us,” said senior Rachel Weaver, who is one of five students who run the TikTok account.