Hey, Christians: Show Us a Black Jesus!
Back in 2013, Fox News’s Megyn Kelly asserted with confidence that “Jesus was white.” In response, black author Leonce Gaiter followed this belief to its logical conclusion:
Megyn Kelly said that Jesus was white. The son of God, she said, was a white man. It logically follows … that God his father was white as well.
That’s it in a nutshell — the mother lode of the white supremacy that governed this nation for most of its history, the mother lode of the white supremacy that still keeps the steeled toe of its jackboot on our throats. A white God is the poison pill buried in the creamy cannoli of Christianity. God is white. Man is made in God’s image; and thus white men are Godly. The rest of us are those over whom God’s reflections (white men) rightly hold dominion.
It won’t do in response to this to lecture Gaiter on the complex theology of the Incarnation, the conception of Christ, or the relationship between Father and Son, because most Christians don’t really think that deeply. He is right that western Christianity has almost always imagined “God” — as Father or in Trinity — as having the same white race as Jesus. For the majority of Christians, God is white.
Remember that for Christians, Jesus is God and to see Jesus is to see God. Whether or not Christians believe that God literally has white skin is besides the point (officially, they do not): God is Jesus and Jesus is white in every way that matters. The proof is in the ways Christians depict Jesus/God.
I looked at the websites of the top five Christian denominations by size in America, looking for an image of Jesus. If an image of Jesus was not on the homepage, I then searched for “Jesus.” Here are the first images I found and they are all representative of each site’s wider corpus.
The Roman Catholic Church
Southern Baptist Convention
United Methodist Church
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons)
Church of God in Christ
Four out of the five examples here show a white Jesus. The fifth, from the predominately African-American Church of God in Christ provides a bit of a Rorschach test and may be the exception that proves the rule. Is it jarring to see a black Jesus? Was Jesus a sub-Saharan African?
The answer, at least as far as we can conclude from history, is no. Jesus was a Palestinian Jew and probably had the olive-brown skin we would associate with Middle-Easterners today. He was not an African but neither was he a European and so black Jesus should be in no way more jarring than white Jesus. And yet for Megyn Kelly and the majority of American Christians, I suspect it is.
This is white supremacy. It is white supremacy not because it rises to the level of the KKK but because it favors — consciously or not — a Jesus with white skin. To be clear, all these denominations are working in their own way to combat racism. They would also of course admit that Jesus of Nazareth was not actually a northern European in the way these images suggest…and yet, in all cases, their church’s first public image — and the majority of subsequent images and icons — is of a white Jesus.
American Christianity has inherited a Euro-centric corpus of art that in most cases today is not used with racist intentions but nonetheless continues to be a “poison pill buried in the creamy cannoli of Christianity.” Diversity of race in the depictions of Jesus would have a huge effect in rooting out racist assumptions in American Christianity. There are good ethno-neutral and ethno-realistic paintings of Jesus out there: mainstream churches have a responsibility to start using them.
But not only that: if we are to say that Jesus was not white but that it is fine to sometimes depict him that way anyway (after all, art can rightfully reflect the image of the artist), then all churches must also begin using images of a black Jesus from time to time. To not do so is white supremacy.
