It was a great honor to have Juvenile Instructor do a roundtable on Race and the Making of the Mormon People.

Below is the beginning of my response.

Each of the roundtable’s comments/critiques focuses on one or both of two of the major interventions of my book: the first is to theorize “whiteness” and “race” more broadly; the second is to theorize the “archive.” And my response—or, better put, self-critique—is to remind us (me!) not to think too literally about race or the archive. That is, the book tries (intentionally) to have it both ways: that race and the archive are “real”—as in literal, tangible things and/or experiences—as well as “metaphors”—as in literary signifiers of signified (imagined/constructed) things.

Read the rest here.