What Colors is Jesus, Black or White?
By Kwame Akbar Lumumba
face=Times New Roman color=#0000ff kwamealumumba@yahoo.com
Not long ago I went to see the movie ‘The Passion of the Christ’ that was produced by Mel Gibson, the actor. I went out of curiosity, to see why it had created so much controversy. I wanted to watch it with an open mind, in order not to criticize it from a religious viewpoint. After watching the movie for two hours, almost everyone in the theater was crying because of the way the characters in the film whipped Jesus for so long and so hard. By the way, I’m a very emotional person; I cannot stand injustice in whatever form or against anyone of any color. However, I did not cry during the movie. I started to question my faith, especially since I grew up in the Catholic religion, seeing the image of Jesus as a nice looking white man with blue eyes and long blond hair. I asked myself, ‘Why, Kwame, did you not cry about the whipping that Jesus received in the movie?’
The beating that Jesus received in this movie was so horrible that I thought the director of the movie had overdone the beating part. I did, after all, feel disgust and I didn’t think so much graphic violence was necessary in order to make people believe the story.
To continue: I did not cry at all while watching the movie and I started to question my own faith and then I thought that I didn’t cry because I had the mental image of the story as being all lies, or another way for white folks to continue to make black, and non-black, people believe that Jesus was a white man who sacrificed his life for me as a Black man. All of these thoughts were running through my mind while I watched the movie.
Well, the following week I watched ‘Roots’ for a millions times, the TV series which was based on the book written by Alex Haley, whose aim was to show the world where we came from and how we got here. During the whole series, I couldn’t stop crying. I cried from the beginning of the series until the end, which was episode number six. Again, I started to question myself: Why did I cry while watching ‘Roots’ which depicted a bunch of black folks they captured in Africa, brought them to America, forced them to work hard, and treated them worse than the Jesus in the movie was treated? Why did I cry for people who look like me and have the same skin color as mine, and I couldn’t cry when watching ‘The Passion of the Christ’, where they were beating Jesus Christ who – I had been taught – died for me and all the other black people?
For many years I have been trying to fathom the real intentions of whoever it was who came up with the idea of portraying Jesus as a white man. For what reason has the Roman Catholic church and the many other Christian denominations continued to show us and make us believe that Jesus was white? Did they do that as a way to make us, the Black race, feel even more inferior? Did they, and do they, portray a blue-eyed, blond-haired, long-nosed, handsome white man as the Jesus that I have been made to look upon and see as my savior in order to make me believe in the ‘superiority’ of the white race and reject my African heritage?
I know there are a lot of people who are afraid to attack this issue. Some of them fear to question this issue because they do not want to lose friends, alienate members of their family, and lose membership in their church. The idea that this good man who claimed to be the son of God must have been white is medicine that I have difficulty swallowing, even though I was unintentionally grew up in the Catholic religion, made my first communion in the Catholic church, and was brainwashed by those white racist priests that Jesus was a good white man. At the same time that they were praising the white Jesus, they continued to preach that the Haitian religion, Vodun, and the Muslim religion, which is the religion of many Africans on the African continent and in the diasporas, were evil, with a capital E. Each time I have raised the question of the true color of Jesus to so-called Christian people, they immediately come back with the statement that Jesus had no color, and they blame the Catholic religion for generating the idea that Jesus was white.
I understand that there is confusion when the question comes up about Jesus’s true color. I know that Baptists and other denominations believe he was white because that was how he is represented in most of the world’s historical art. There are a few liberated Black American men and women who know from the Bible that Jesus had feet of burnt bronze and hair like lambs’ wool, and those people have paintings of a black Jesus hanging in their living rooms. And there are a few Black churches that show Jesus as black. Beyond that, most people, including Blacks, believe that Jesus was a good looking white man with blue eyes and long hair. Therefore, according to what has been taught them, anything that looks white has to be ‘good’ and anything that looks black is ‘inferior’. And this is why so many black people, including many Haitians women and men in the community and in Haiti, bleach their skin and straighten their hair, because they think it will make them look like those ‘beautiful’ white people!
This is why as a liberated black man, I refused to cry when, in the movie, Jesus was being beaten so cruelly. I did cry when I watched the ‘Roots’ series, because the story of ‘Roots’ is more real to me than movies by, for and about white people. When I watch the ‘Roots’ series, I truly see myself in them. I see my mother, my father, my children. And I see white people, who look just like the Jesus they want me to believe is my savior, killing and raping black mothers and children and beating and killing black fathers and sons during the Middle Passage and the days of bondage in the so-called New World.
Was presenting Jesus as a white man a calculated error created by the white man, or is it true that Jesus was really white? If it is not true, why do we continue to accept the notion that we must worship the image of a white Jesus? If, as mentioned above, white Christians really believe that Jesus had no color, why do they portray him as white? The next question that I want to address is: If Jesus really was white, then we black people have been worshiping the wrong prophet for Blacks. And, if Jesus was black, why has he made us endure five hundred years and counting of aggression and suppression from white men? If Jesus was a black man, why has he let this conspiratorial white world continue to destroy the children of Africa? This is a debate which I will continue to address in my next article on this subject. Until then, we need to try to find out the true color of Jesus. If you have an opinion, pro or con, on this story, please send me your email @ kwamealumumba@yahoo.com.
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Allah UAkbar |
Topic: What Colors is Jesus, Black or White?
