Race and Social Justice XIII: Race, Religion and Cultural Humility (Re-post)
This post was originally published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform on September 25, 2016. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site.
”Historians are dangerous and capable of turning everything topsy-turvy. They have to be watched.” ~ Nikita Khrushchev
By Matthew C. Whitaker, Ph.D.
I have a Black Jesus t-shirt and I wear it regularly. This will be particularly true during the upcoming Presidential election and holidays. Not because Jesus’ race is relevant to me, but because it is for others. Specifically, his alleged Whiteness seems to be an immoveable pillar, upholding the racial and spiritual identity, and voting patterns, of millions, and this conflicts with his racially transcendent legacy and racial progress. My t-shirt, therefore, is an open invitation to onlookers to rethink who Christus is, and why so many cling more to his Whiteness than his will. You should see the looks I get when grocery shoppers see all Black, 6’4” of me, adorned with a brown-skinned, afro-sporting Jesus, pushing my cart through the produce aisle. The reactions vary from tear-inducing laughter to rage. “That’s really funny dude,” one young White man proclaimed. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself. That shirt is sacrilegious,” said a finger-waiving White woman. “Why” I asked? “Everyone knows Jesus doesn’t look like that,” she railed. “Jesus is White.” “I know no such thing,” I rejoined. She then pulled a prayer card out of her purse and held it up to my face. “See? This is what Jesus looks like.” “Like Jared Leto,” I asked? She stormed off. I headed toward the tomatoes, grateful for the religious education my mother and grandmother provided, which serves as a bulwark against the type of ignorance and damaging Euro-centrism people of color are bombarded with daily.
Jesus, even as he is portrayed in the Adult Swim television show, is more relatable to me and many others, notwithstanding the show’s drug use and foul language, because Jesus is portrayed as a dark-skinned, weed-smoking, vagabond, renegade, outlaw, blaspheming, cult leader, with a prison record and messiah complex. He is more at home “spreading love and kindness” among ne'er-do-wells in Compton, California, than he is among sanctimonious and “acceptable” authority figures who affirm his teachings rhetorically and reject them in practice. He sounds and looks more like the Jesus I was introduced to at home.
I was raised in a Christian family in which the Protestantism of our Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church seemed to be tethered to our every thought and action. The New Testament, particularly the Synoptic Gospels of Jesus Christ, were given to me as The Word and our road map to eternal salvation. I came to believe that Jesus is, “The Way, The Truth, and The Life.”
My struggling single mother sent me to a private Roman Catholic School Monday through Friday, however, to “give me the best education possible,” and to envelope me in the caring arms of my stern, yet nurturing teachers, who were formidable and venerable nuns of the first order. It was at St. Matthew’s School, on Phoenix, Arizona’s west side, where I learned of “transubstantiation,” the veneration of the Virgin Mary, and the “communion of saints.” The $70.00-a-month tuition may as well have been $700.00, but my mother, who worked as many as three jobs, found a way to pay it, and when she couldn’t, Vice Principal Sister Elaine, responded more like the benevolent Jesus, despite her militaristic deportment, than yet another hardline bill collector. Ma and Sister Elaine didn’t see this as a sacrifice per se, but an investment in my future and that of our Christian family.
I loved our charismatic worship songs and sermons at Shiloh on Sunday, and I cherished the synchronicity and pageantry of Roman Catholicism in mass every Wednesday. Even though my grandmother criticized what she considered redundant kneeling during Catholic masses, their so-called heretical worship of idols in the form of statues of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus, and Catholic’s alleged “disinterest in the Bible and deification of priests and Popes,” she suppressed those concerns in lieu of the shared Protestant and Catholic belief that Jesus is the “only begotten Son of God,” and that through belief in him we’re guaranteed “everlasting life.” Likewise, the nuns often spoke fondly of the “joyous noise” we Baptists “made unto the Lord,” while speaking derisively, in hushed tones, of our lack of solemnity and reserve. Somehow I negotiated it all, becoming what I refer to as a “Batholic.”
Despite the passive aggressive doctrinal jabs that my family and nuns threw on occasion, I thought that the two leading communities of “believers” in my life saw the world through shared Christian lenses, albeit lenses resting in distinct frames. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Our lenses not only rest in different frames, they are tinted in different colors, greatly affecting the ways in which we not only see religion, but that which most creeds claim to be concerned about, good and evil, justice and injustice, and by extension, joblessness, poverty, homelessness, disease, violence, dehumanization, and hopelessness.
I came to this realization after viewing the hit television mini-series, Jesus of Nazareth in 1977. I overheard my mother and grandmother commenting on its inaccuracies following its conclusion. The nuns, on the other hand, celebrated the landmark series as a Christian triumph in an increasingly secular world, and Shiloh’s flock touted the show’s authenticity. So what was the problem? Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary and reared by his faithful parents under the brutal specter of Roman occupation and persecution. He suffered unconscionably through “The Passion,” died, and was buried, followed by his resurrection three days later and the fulfillment of God’s promise to Israel and, ostensibly, all of his children, through the purchase of our salvation by means of his mortal sacrifice. Notwithstanding the fact that I knew that Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, other faiths, Agnostics, and Atheists, do not subscribe to these beliefs, was I missing something?
“Yes,” my deceptively militant mother said,” you’re overlooking the fact that Jesus and his fellow Israelites were not White.” “The Bible,” she intoned, “tells us in the Book of Daniel that the hair of his head is like pure wool and his arms and feet are the color of polished brass. This movie stars a White man [British actor Robert Powell], with an English accent, pale skin, blonde hair (as a child), and bright blue eyes. Does he look like the ancient Palestinians I’ve taught you about?” “Ah, No.” I replied. “The ancient world, from which our faith emerged, was not White, no matter how much they want to diminish our worth by pretending that it was.”
Ma was onto something, but when I asked the men at my barbershop why Jesus is always portrayed as White, things got really interesting. “Because White people believe they’re God, that’s why,” one elder snapped before I could catch my breath, “and they made the God they claim to worship in their own image, so that by forcing us to worship their God, we actually began worshipping them.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Yeah, we wasn’t Christians in Africa before White people came, or Muslims before the Arabs came for that matter,” a young, suited, Black man with a large afro and mod glasses said. “We practiced African religion, and after Arab and White men gave us Muhammad and Jesus, we lost our freedom on earth for the their promise of freedom when we’re dead. How convenient for them is that?” This was a question many Black people were asking when I was a child. Even Ebony magazine, as early as 1969, was in the midst of a “Quest for A Black Christ,” although many mentally colonized Black people at the time wanted to shut the Black magazine down for depicting a Black Jesus. What was it that Harriet Tubman is alleged to have said? “I freed a thousand slaves but could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.”
Not only was my mother right, but the brothers at the barbershop were on to something too. It’s certainly beneficial for the oppressor to have those they subjugate worship a God that resembles and acts like them. Indeed, as Harlem Renaissance writer, Zora Neale Hurston, reminded us, “Gods always behave like the people who make them.” This would explain the evolution of the notion of “usury.” The term originally described the charging of interest of any kind as immoral (Deuteronomy 23:19-20 and Luke 6:35), but has since been opportunely diminished or sacrificed altogether at the altar of “principled” interest rates. Almost no one views the latter, “capitalizing” on another’s misfortunes or needs, as un-Godly or anti-Christian, even as they charge fees and cash checks fortified by usury, while ornamenting themselves with symbols of the liberality of the Judeo-Christian.
This would also explain the Apostle Peter calling upon slaves and servants to submit to [their] masters and “obey in all things” in Colossians 3:23-24, or perhaps I am “taking this out of context” or “referring to an older version of The Word” as some have alleged. What I do know is that American slaveholders loved to read this scripture to their enslaved Africans and overpowered Native peoples. Not only was it said that God condoned chattel slavery through “the mark of Cane,” he supposedly called upon his followers to “kill the Indian and save the man.” These pronouncements were all delivered and codified by White religious and secular leaders since the Roman Emperor Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea (325 AD) that enshrined Jesus as the Christ for millennia to come.
It isn’t a surprise then that critical thinkers, such as comedian Chris Rock, have argued “a black Christian is like a black person with no memory.” Theologians and scholars such as James H. Cone, through “Black liberation theology,” have undressed the suspicion that Blackness and Christianity are antithetical. Still, history has shown that Jesus became White as a product of White supremacy and was promptly used to justify it in the oppression, not liberation, of people, especially people of color. Even American colonization, the associated massacre of Indigenous peoples, the expansion of slavery, the Mexican-American War, the destruction of Reconstruction, and Jim Crow segregation were justified through notions of “Manifest Destiny” and “providence,” with graven and painted depictions of a White “surfer-dude” Jesus often overlooking it all.
In fact, as Jonathan Merritt writes in The Atlantic, “the myth of a white Jesus is one with deep roots throughout Christian history. As early as the Middle Ages and particularly during the Renaissance, popular Western artists depicted Jesus as a white man, often with blue eyes and blondish hair. Perhaps fueled by some Biblical verses correlating lightness with purity and righteousness and darkness with sin and evil, these images sought to craft a sterile Son of God. The only problem was that the representations were historically inaccurate.” Many church leaders knew that they were incorrect at the time and many more continue to embrace these images as truth. “Modern Western Christians,” Merritt argues, “have carried these images over into their own depictions of Jesus. Pick up one of those bright blue “Bible Story” books in a Sunday school classroom and you’ll find white Jesus waiting for you, rosy cheeks and all. Or you could survey the light-skinned Jesus in any number of modern TV or film portrayals, including History Channel’s hit series The Bible.” Never mind that “the scholarly consensus is actually that Jesus was, like most first-century Jews, probably a dark-skinned man,” Merritt insists. “If he were taking the red-eye flight from San Francisco to New York today…he might be profiled for additional security screening by TSA.”
In fact, the science of forensic facial reconstruction has provided renderings that would make the racial profiling and harassment of Jesus, were he to visit recent racist and xenophobic American political rallies, quite likely. Merritt goes on to remind us that “in Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘Advice for Living’ column for Ebony in 1957, the civil-rights leader was asked, ‘Why did God make Jesus white, when the majority of peoples in the world are non-white?’ King replied, ‘The color of Jesus’ skin is of little or no consequence’ because what made Jesus exceptional [was] ‘his willingness to surrender His will to God’s will.’ His point, as historian Edward Blum has noted, is that Jesus transcends race.”
This may be true in theory, but it’s not true in practice. Not only does race matter, Jesus’s race matters. Why? Making him White has been a key component of maintaining White privilege and supremacy. Many of our worldviews are profoundly influenced by European’s literal whitewashing of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Our very understanding of power and privilege, persecution and resistance, whether political, socio-economic or cognitive, is often influenced by something as seemingly innocuous as what color we believe Jesus is, or any number of powerful historical figures were.
For example, when I ask many children of African descent to name the greatest civilizations forged by people of color, few if any of them will say Egypt. When I ask them about this dynamic Nile River society, they often say “Egypt is in the Middle East” or “Egyptians were White.” This is what having the ruling class write and portray history has done. It has led, inexorably, to White people developing a collective messiah complex and inferiority complexes among people of color, who are often wholly unaware of it. These people of color, in turn, disown their ancestors, who built one of the most sophisticated societies in human history, because they do not believe that said forebears are tethered to their the past in any way. This is understandable when Cleopatra (1963) is still thought to look like Elizabeth Taylor, and Nefertiti is portrayed by the likes of Sigourney Weaver (Exodus, 2014). When it comes to the ancient world, Hollywood’s cinematic chorus can be summed up in three words, “what Black people”?
How do we increase self-love, self-esteem, confidence, educational achievement, employment opportunities and earning potential among people of color, if we are continually told that we are nothing more than servants and sycophants for the great civilizations of old, including those that have been remade in White people’s image? Most Americans believe that the notion of freedom itself began not in Africa, from which humans emerged, or in wondrous Indigenous societies of the ancient world, but from Greco-Roman philosophers, European peasants, and American revolutionaries such as our own slaveholding Thomas Jefferson. People across race lines ingest millions of explicit and implicit messages, from birth, that portray people of color as the bumbling, amusing, violent, obsequious, sidekicks to White God-like figures who save the world from barbarism and iniquity. These are the veiled memorandums that Black people receive when we peruse magazines, read books, take in a movie, and yes, go to church.
So in an era in which many Black activists chafe at White resistance to Black Lives Matter missives, we must understand that the Jesus who is propagated by Eurocentric iconography, and upheld by an a-historical adoration and so-called colorblind clergy, is more Brad Pitt than Palestine and Jennifer Lawrence than Judea. This, in turn, makes proving our value a massive undertaking. In other words, billions of people worldwide fail to see our humanity, let alone the God in us. Thus, our uttering “Black Lives Matter” is viewed with contempt not simply because we are accused of not valuing “all lives,” but because we often defend our humanity by hitching it, indirectly and often unconsciously, to something for which White people claim entitlement to and imminent domain over; the intersection of humanity and Godliness in the form of a person, Jesus, the Christ. Yes, for many White people “Black Lives Matter” is literally and figuratively blasphemous. If all lives matter, let alone Black lives, why then are White representations of goodness and God on earth, contrary to historical truth, almost universally rooted in Whiteness?
White people, the global minority, have memorialized themselves by normalizing Whiteness, first through military conquest, and then through spiritual occupation. Muhammad Ali captured the phenomenon with derisive humor in 1971, when he recalled asking his mother several important questions, including “why is Jesus white with blond hair and blue eyes? Why is the [portrayal of the] Lord’s Supper all white? ‘Mother, when we die, do we go to Heaven?’ She said, ‘naturally we go to Heaven.’ I said, ‘Well, what happened to all the black angels?’ ‘They took the pictures’” she said.
Ali reminded us, in ways that only he could, that White people have exerted tremendous control over the way our past is perceived, and the way our past is perceived greatly affects our present social, political and economic reality. People of color have long been seen as irrelevant and disposable. White people, on the other hand, were purportedly made in God’s image. So it should come as no surprise that we are the victims of racial profiling, physical assault, and death at the hands of those who are charged with protecting us. Neither should we be surprised by the rise in xenophobia and naked White nationalism and racism, because “making America great again,” means making America White again, and making America White again means, in part, maintaining a theology rooted in the deification of Whiteness, while feigning “colorblindness” throughout the Whitification process.
Given the “browning” of America, such spiritual eugenics may prove to be futile, or perhaps not, because when canons no longer convert and homogeneity is a political relic, the failure of average White folk to see the God in us, will still inform their sense of superiority and undermine the emergence of what King called the “beloved community.” White Jesus is viewed as the ultimate trump among “race cards,” giving those who hold it a false and unnecessary sense of security; a feeling that their own personal White Jesus will deliver them from the hedonistic and underserving clutches of the “new majority,” which is, in fact, nothing more than the old one. Indeed, it was a community of color that set Judeo-Christianity in motion, the one that produced an ancient Palestinian, a person of color with brown skin and woolen hair, who encouraged us to love unconditionally and whose rendering I wear proudly on my favorite t-shirt, and it will be communities of color, with our White allies, who will usher us into the next stage of our development. So when you see a Black Jesus t-shirt, know that for the believer and non-believer alike, it means absolutely nothing…and everything.
Cover Photo Source: dybiz.com
Dr. Matthew C. Whitaker is the Founder and CEO of the Diamond Strategies, LLC, and is also an award-winning educator, author, community engagement specialist and motivational speaker. He founded the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, winner of the 2014 Arizona Diversity Leadership Alliance Inclusive Workplace Award, at Arizona State University, and his work can be followed on Twitter at @Dr_Whitaker and @dstrategiesllc.