Oprah Asks FLDS Members If They're Taught Racism; They Lie To Her Face

On today’s episode, Oprah personally visited the Yearning for Zion ranch in Eldorado, TX. When asked, Willie Jessop denied that church members are taught that nonwhite people are evil. We have proof to the contrary.

It seems like every time these people are questioned by the press, they are lying through their teeth. The same goes for Betty Jessop (no relation to Willie Jessop, although who the hell knows because FLDS family trees look more like braids), whose mother Carolyn escaped from the sect with her children, only to have Betty return to the compound, of her own volition, four years later. In this clip, Betty tells Oprah that she doesn’t know any females who were married under the age of 16, despite the fact that it’s well documented that during the raid, 12 underage girls who were removed from the ranch were married, more than half of them already mothers.

Last May, Oprah had Elissa Wall on her show, the star witness in the trial against Warren Jeffs, that ultimately led to his conviction. She was forced to marry her first cousin when she was 14, despite her begging not to. Throughout her two-year marriage to the man that Warren Jeffs assigned her, she was raped repeatedly. Elissa wrote about her experience growing up within the FLDS, becoming a child bride, and how she escaped in the book Stolen Innocence.

I’ve read the book, and distinctly remember passages about how she, and all the other children in her FLDS school, were taught to regard black people as evil. Here, she talks about her brother—who was kicked off the compound as a teenager—was living in the secular world, and had moved in and had a child with a black woman:

The mother of his child was African-American. Hearing this came as a huge shock to me, although today I am embarrassed to admit it. All I could think of were Warren’s words from Alta Academy that nonwhite people were the most evil of all outsiders. His racist remarks and hate-filled bigotry were a routine part of the classroom experience at Alta Academy, and from them, I had developed a prejudice about anyone whose skin looked different from my own. I had been told that my brother was damned to hell for even associating with Whitney.

Warren Jeffs recorded his teachings and sermons, and eventually, FLDS members were no longer allowed to listen to secular music, because as he explained it, when you do so, you are “enjoying the spirit of the black race,” an activity he says will “rot the soul and lead the person to immorality, to corruption, to forget their prayers, to forget God.” They were instead encouraged to listen to his tapes. Here are some passages from those recordings:

You see some classes of the human family that are black, uncouth or rude and filthy, uncomely, disagreeable and low in their habits, wild and seemingly deprived of nearly all the blessings of the intelligence that is generally bestowed upon mankind.

So I give this lesson on the black race that you can understand its full effect as far as we are able to comprehend. And that we must beware, if we are for the prophet, for priesthood, we will come out of the world and leave off their dress, their music, their styles, their fashions, the way they think – what they do, because you can trace back and see a connection with immoral filthy people.

Today you can see a black man with a white woman, et cetera. A great evil has happened on this land because the devil knows that if all the people have Negro blood, there will be nobody worthy to have the priesthood.

If you marry a person who has connections with a Negro, you would become cursed.

Oprah said that she couldn’t leave the ranch without asking the women one very important question: What’s with the hair?