Toxic Concepts I (Un)Learned from Church - White Jesus, Colorblind Savior

This post is a part of a larger series, which can be viewed here.Toxic Concept: Jesus' cultural context doesn't matter.(read: Jesus didn't have a color)(read most often as: Jesus was White)

“The Christian Church has tended to overlook its Judaic origins, but the fact is that Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew of Palestine when he went about his Father’s business, announcing the acceptable year of the Lord.”― Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited

Last week, I saw the Fences movie for the second time. It was my favorite play when I studied Theater and I cannot overstate how amazing Denzel Washington & Viola Davis were in that film. However, one thing that I could not miss came through the set design. Just above the sink where Rose (played by Davis) would peel potatoes and wash dishes was a rendering of White Jesus.Yo...This was such an interesting set choice because in my lived experience (and you might be able to argue that in the experience of many Black Americans), White Jesus is a part of the walls of many of our elders' homes. Not all. But enough to have been chosen as a part of the set design for Fences.In my own upbringing, White renderings of Jesus moved like a ghost in the subtext of my religious heritage.Now, to be clear, my parents are committed to our cultural heritage. In other words...They told me about where Jesus was born, pointed to it on a map. They made it clear that given his sociocultural context... Jesus was not White. My parents aren't theologians.Neither am I.However, most of my friends are theologians. They say the most brilliant things I've heard and that is not debatable. :) On one such occasion, I reposted a thought from Dr. Ashon Crawley which directly discussed the social impacts of imagining Jesus as White.In a manner of min...seconds, someone piped in with a case for White Jesus, Colorblind Savior. My first (internal) response? "Chile... my ancestors did not die for this". *Rolls eyes and rubs templesI've known, deeply and intimately, the ramifications that primarily White Jesus, Colorblind Savior has. When I got to college, I attempted involvement with campus ministries. Campus ministry at a predominantly White institution often means... welll... predominantly White theological understandings. I don't want to mince words here: it was, overall, a demoralizing experience.When Jesus wasn't being rendered as White, He was off - busy telling me... through them... that my own culture & ethnicity did not matter - under a gross misinterpretation of the Galatians 3:38 text. It wasn't until years later, when I read Howard Thurman's 1948 text "Jesus and the Disinherited", that I realized just how much Jesus' own sociohistorical and cultural contexts made a difference. Or that I realized just how harmful and dishonest rendering Jesus as primarily White is.To render Jesus as White is to say that the various times He was referred to as Jesus "of Nazareth" can be erased right out of the text... right out of what his lived experience was... It means missing out on how hard they TRRIIIIIEEED ITTTTT in the book of John 1 (verses 45 & 46):

⁴⁵ Philip found Nathanael and said to him, “We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.” ⁴⁶ Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (NSRV)

And you don't get the "try" if you don't get that Nazareth held its own social location. As did Jesus.The toxicity of the White Jesus concept is that it allows Jesus' personhood to be invoked right along efforts of American conquest & the subjugation of people of color - the purposes for which the social construct of Whiteness was built upon in the first place. Putting a construct of Whiteness onto Jesus is certainly convenient when you're trying to justify a notion that the Divine affirms the genocide, stolen land / resources, and enslavement of people of color. Pft.Put in other terms by Dr. Crawley:

"i sometimes forget and ask myself what would white evangelicals do if they finally realized, in earnest, that jesus was not a white man. but then i remember: white evangelical christianity has already rejected the biblical jesus. they do not believe he was a palestinian jewish man, they believe he was white with sometimes blond hair. and such a rejection of his personhood - he certainly would be a POC in modern parlance, though it's an anachronism of sorts - but such a rejection, the continued need for him to be white, goes hand in hand with the continued need for him to be capitalist, sexist, homo- and transphobic. white evangelical christianity remade jesus into an image that would allow for conspicuous consumption, for manifest destiny, for the genocide of indigenous peoples, for the enslavement of black peoples.what we're noticing now with folks like paula white and vicki yohe are simply the extension of a quiet displeasure, a sorta disdain and contempt with difference itself. it ain't new. but folks are gonna have to choose if they're gonna sing with them still (like travis) or make a different kind of stand"

In my own life, I've found the concept to be toxic because in addition to all of this... the notion of primarily White Jesus, Colorblind Savior is demoralizing. It denotes a ghastly racialized lack of imagination: that the imago Dei - the image of God - can be found in people of color. It denies that the Divine exists, yes, even outside of the construction of Whiteness. When it is suggested that Jesus had no color at all, it is a gross erasure of his humanity AND the humanity of those who come from his sociocultural context.I've seen how conceiving Jesus as primarily White allows us to continue building up  and excusing away Christian conferences that are the antithetical to intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1995). It allows us to ignore how our current political landscape has employed White Evangelical Jesus & White Evangelical Christianity towards further subjugation: the stripping of reproductive rights for women, the taking of sacred lands via pipelines, and as Kieryn Darkwater so eloquently describes... all under the guise of  "Taking Back The Country For Christ" .So let's all be clear:

"Jesus was an actual person.That means he had an ethnicity, nationality, and cultural background. Because all people who walk the earth do"

And this sociocultural location was as a Palestinian Jew.The quoted text above were words I literally had to say to someone. Just a few days ago. In 2017. And so, this notion bears repeating.For more on this topic, see John Pavlovitz's post, "Dear Jesus, You’re Fired From American Evangelical Christianity" (2017) and read you some Howard Thurman (like literally everything... anything).This post is a part of a larger series, which can be viewed here.