Glancing through the May Ensign

[Fiyero]

Did any Caucasians attend General Conference?

[Indy Coug]

I didn't.

[Fiyero]

And looking at the centerfold: there are 62 members of the 1Q70 and 22 in the 2Q70?

[hostile]

And looking at the centerfold: there are 62 members of the 1Q70 and 22 in the 2Q70?

I read it for the articles.

[Jarid in Cedar]

I read it for the articles.

[Color Me Badd Fan]

I just looked at the first 50 pages of the edition. There were 34 pictures of attendees of conference wherein you could tell the race of the person photographed and I didn't count wide shots with dozens of people in them. Of the 34 pictures, 12 of them featured white people (and one picture looked like a mixed family).

So Fiyero, as usual, you're wrong. White people did attend conference, they were a third of the crowd.

[myboynoah]

I don't get the point of this discussion. Now that more church membership is found outside the U.S., I think it is safe to assume that a good portion of that membership is not white (maybe as much as 40%). Increasingly growth will come from nonwhite regions and populations. It only makes sense for a worldwide organization intent on growth to have it's publications try to reflect and reachout out to those current and potential members. How reassuring it must be for those members who can only dream of actually attending a GC to see faces like theirs in such publications.

This will only become news when the Davis Country Mormon Newsletter contains similar pictures.

[Color Me Badd Fan]

I don't get the point of this discussion. Now that more church membership is found outside the U.S., I think it is safe to assume that a good portion of that membership is not white (maybe as much as 40%). Increasingly growth will come from nonwhite regions and populations. It only makes sense for a worldwide organization intent on growth to have it's publications try to reflect and reachout out to those current and potential members. How reassuring it must be for those members who can only dream of actually attending a GC to see faces like theirs in such publications.

This will only become news when the Davis Country Mormon Newsletter contains similar pictures.

You don't think it's amusing that the church has its own paparazzi hiding out in trees to capture the rare minority attending GC? >95% of the crowd at GC is probably white yet in the first 50 pages of the Conference Ensign 2/3 of the pictures show minorities. The Ensign would have you believe that the crowd at GC resembles a cross section of people you'd find in a Social Security office in Los Angeles.

We all know exactly why the church is doing it. It's PR and there's nothing wrong with the motivation. However some, like myself, find the blatancy pretty funny.

[Jeff Lebowski]

You don't think it's amusing that the church has its own paparazzi hiding out in trees to capture the rare minority attending GC? >95% of the crowd at GC is probably white yet in the first 50 pages of the Conference Ensign 2/3 of the pictures show minorities. The Ensign would have you believe that the crowd at GC resembles a cross section of people you'd find in a Social Security office in Los Angeles.

We all know exactly why the church is doing it. It's PR and there's nothing wrong with the motivation. However some, like myself, find the blatancy pretty funny.

Makes me chuckle, too.

The video coverage by KSL TV was similar, if not worse.

[UtahDan]

I remember many years ago, probably 1997 or so, BYU's front page had the head shots of three students. Two were black and one was latino. It was up for a while. I knew the two black students and knew that they weren't students any more. So I emailed the web monkey for that site and told him I thought it was pretty disingenuous to pretend like their were lots of black and latino students at BYU, particularly when I knew that two of them weren't there any more.

I would never do such a thing now, but interestingly he shot me back a very thoughtful email about the desire to be more diverse and wanting to show minorities that BYU was a safe and welcoming place for them. He never said anything about it, but he also took down the pictures of the two people who were no longer students almost right away and replaced them with head shots of white students.

[myboynoah]

You don't think it's amusing that the church has its own paparazzi hiding out in trees to capture the rare minority attending GC? >95% of the crowd at GC is probably white yet in the first 50 pages of the Conference Ensign 2/3 of the pictures show minorities. The Ensign would have you believe that the crowd at GC resembles a cross section of people you'd find in a Social Security office in Los Angeles.

We all know exactly why the church is doing it. It's PR and there's nothing wrong with the motivation. However some, like myself, find the blatancy pretty funny.

Having spent enough years of my life in wards where white Americans are the minority, I have a sense for what it means to non-white/non-Americans to see "one of theirs" represented at GC. Until we see more of "theirs" speaking from the stand, I'm happy they can at least see themselves in our publications.

It's a general conference of a worldwide church. Why wouldn't we want to emphasize that point?