Enough Justification
The suggestion that Jesus would have been dark-skinned (black in the
admittedly non-scientific racial taxonomy of the United States), is about as blasphemous to most Christians as anything one could say. Of course, no one wants to admit their indignation at the notion, so they typically couch it in ecumenical platitudes like "it doesn't matter what Jesus looked like; it only matters what he did." OK, fine. I'm down with that. Although not a Christian, I've always been one who thought Jesus said and did some pretty exemplary stuff, unlike what so many of his modern disciples say and do. So then, if it doesn't matter what he looked like then why not make him black?
I have asked this question when giving speeches on racism at religiously
affiliated colleges, and let's just say, there's nothing like it if you're looking to see how fast you can get folks to start clearing their throats. Again they insist, "no you don't understand, it doesn't matter what he looked like, it's what he did." And again I repeat, O.K., fine, if it really doesn't matter then let's make him black, just for a year. Then you can change him back again if you really want to. No biggie.
No dice, and no takers. We go round and round, as white folks check their watches and try to figure out how they can leave the room without seeming to be rude.
But let's be clear: the white iconography of Jesus that predominates in this culture makes absolutely no sense, except as an artifact of a white
supremacist worldview. First off, the earliest representations of Jesus,
Mary, and Christ's disciples appear in the catacombs of Rome, where the first Christians, known as Essenes buried their dead. All of these portrayals picture a dark-skinned Messiah. In addition, during the time of Roman Emperor Justinian II, the Empire minted a gold coin that pictured Jesus. This coin, which today can be viewed in the British Museum, shows a man with clearly non-white facial features and tightly curled hair, consistent with the description of Christ offered in the Book of Revelations, wherein it is noted that Jesus had hair like wool, feet the color of burnt brass, and resembled jasper and sardine stones: both of which were brown in color.
And don't forget, according to Biblical lore, when Jesus was born, Herod
sent search parties out to find him and slay him as an infant. To hide the
Christ child, his family absconded with him to Egypt, and if there is one thing we can be absolutely sure of, it's that one would not have been likely to try hiding an Aryan baby and family in pre-Arab Egypt, of all places. This was, after all, a society of dark-skinned Africans (as evidenced in their own hieroglyphs); one that had referred to itself as Kemet (the Black land), for thousands of years, and themselves as "Kemetcu" (the black humans). The "father" of modern history, Herodotus, himself acknowledged as much when he said "the Egyptians, Colchians and Ethiopians have thick lips, broad nose,
wooly hair and are of burnt skin." Elsewhere, he actually referred to them as "black." If Jesus had been white, Mary and Joseph would have put him on a slow boat to Canada, not trekked to Egypt where finding them would have been like shooting fish in the proverbial barrel.
For those of you still reading, you'll either be laughing or fuming: if laughing, it's because you realize how silly the whitening of Jesus has been in this culture, and yet, how wedded we really are to that imagery; if fuming, well, it's because you think that somehow I'm being sacrilegious, or absurd. But I'm just reading what the good book says, and applying a little common sense and anthropology to the process.
If you want to really see absurd, go pick up Volume One of the Robert
Maxwell Bible Stories Series, which I assure you is sitting on a table in your doctor's office right now. There you will find Adam and Eve depicted as if the Garden of Eden had been in Norway, despite the fact that Biblical scholars all agree the Garden -- whether viewed as a literal place or as a fictional metaphor -- was bordered by two rivers, the Biblical description of which only fits that of the Blue Nile and White Nile: neither of which, last time I checked were to be found in Scandinavia.
Some may ask what the point of all this is though frankly, it ought to be
obvious. So long as our culture pictures Adam, Eve, Moses, Jesus, Mary, the Apostles, and even God "himself" as fair-skinned folk, despite the obvious preposterousness of such representations, we will continue to plant the seeds of racial supremacism in the hearts and minds of millions of people..
After all, to believe that divinity is white like you leads one to easily assume that others are somehow less complete, less than human. If God supposedly made man in his image, and God is always portrayed as a bearded white man (kinda like Santa without the suit), how hard a leap is it -- especially for children whose introduction to religion is always nine-tenths forced propaganda anyway -- to assume that persons of color are somehow not full and equal "children of God?"