The whole article is very interesting, but here is some flavor.
Much has been written about the unprecedented wave of Islamophobia currently sweeping the United States, with Muslim Americans are falling victim to an ever-increasing number of threats, assaults, and attacks on their houses of worship. The groundswell of hatred has appalled and confused many on the Left, with some wondering how a nation such as the United States — which enshrines religious freedom for citizens in the First Amendment to its Constitution — could ever create an environment that openly oppresses a single faith group.
When former Massachusetts governor and devout Mormon Mitt Romney announced his campaign for president in 2012, political pundits were quick to note his most visibly apparent feature: his blinding whiteness. Tumblr blogs showcased the candidate’s popularity with white people, songs declared him “the whitest white man in the USA,” and cultural commentator Lee Siegel, writing for the New York Times, crowned Romney as the “whitest white man to run for president in recent memory.” In almost every case, his faith was listed as a chief indicator of his extreme Caucasian-ness.
“…there is no stronger bastion of pre-civil-rights-America whiteness than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” Siegel wrote. “Yes, since 1978 the church has allowed blacks to become priests. But Mormonism is still imagined by its adherents as a religion founded by whites, for whites, rooted in a millenarian vision of an America destined to fulfill a white God's plans for earth.”
“Outsiders suggested that Mormons were physically different and racially more similar to marginalized groups than they were to white people,” Reeve writes. “Mormons were conflated with nearly every other ‘problem’ group in the nineteenth century — blacks, Indians, immigrants, and Chinese — a way to color them less white by association.”
One of the more famous examples was a report submitted to the U.S. Senate in the 1860s by military doctor Roberts Bartholow after he visited Utah, where a community of Mormons was in active conflict with the federal government. In his report, Bartholow cited physical traits of Mormons he met such as “striking uniformity in facial expression” — supposedly (and inexplicably) the byproduct of plural marriage — as evidence that their population constituted a new, inferior race.
“[Mormons wear] an expression of countenance and a style of feature, which may be styled the Mormon expression and style; an expression compounded of sensuality, cunning, suspicion, and smirking self-conceit,” his report read. “The yellow, sunken, cadaverous visage; the greenish-colored eyes; the thick, protuberant lips; the low forehead; the light, yellowish hair; and the lank, angular person, constitute an appearance so characteristic of the new race, the production of polygamy, as to distinguish them at a glance.”
