Editing Second Nephi (section)

=== Dark skin of the Lamanites a curse===
{{main|Lamanites}}
2 Nephi 5:21 describes the Lamanites as being cursed and marked with a "skin of blackness" because of their unbelief in order to make them less attractive to the Nephites. In 2 Nephi 30:6, the Lamanites are promised to become "pure and delightsome" (a passage that was "white and delightsome" before 1981). In a book about Mormon conceptions of race, sociologist [[Armand Mauss]] writes that modern secular readers see these passages as referring to race, and interpret them as reflecting the 19th-century racism of the day. Mauss argues that "white" was "almost always" a synonym for pure and clean in the Book of Mormon's original text, but acknowledges that these verses informed the prevailing image of Lamanites as savage Indians who ought to be assimilated among mid-19th-century Latter-day Saints.{{sfn|Mauss|2003|pp=116–118}} Mauss calls for a nonracist interpretation of the verses in 2 Nephi. Since the Nephites and Lamanites are both descended from Lehi, he argues, their main differences are cultural, not racial. 2 Nephi 26:33 states that "all are alike unto God," specifically referring to "black and white, bond and free."{{sfn|Mauss|2003|p=213}} Mauss interprets it as a "repudiation of racism in divine affairs."{{sfn|Mauss|2003|p=127}} In another book on race and the early LDS Church, Max Mueller writes that this purported universalist idea is "rooted in the limitations of whiteness as a universal racial category, a reality of which the Book of Mormon itself seems to be aware."{{sfn|Mueller|2017|p=35}} In his ''Annotated Book of Mormon'', [[Grant Hardy]] writes that modern readers are justifiably distressed by the Lamanites being marked with a dark skin. Hardy writes that skin color does not prevent the Lamanites from exceeding Nephites in righteousness, and the curse comes with a promise that their lineage will be preserved, while the Nephites eventually die out.{{sfn|Hardy|2023|pp=79, 96}}