“Every race of people since time began who have attempted to describe their God by words, or by paintings, or by carvings, or by any other form or figure, have conveyed he idea that the God who made them and shaped their destinies was symbolized in themselves, and why should not the Negro believe that he resembles God as much so as other people? We do not believe that there is any hope for a race of people who do not believe that they look like God.” (Turner [1898] 1971, 176).[i]Hsu San Ch’un, Christ the Universal Savior[i]
What happens when you cannot identify yourself with the image of your savior? What happens when your savior is used to control and suppress you? Many people who are not white commonly deal with the first question today. Whether purposefully different or not, images of Jesus that are not white exist and give worshippers a sense of identification with the image. While other races have probably dealt with the second question, African Americans in America are the ones that have answered the question the loudest.
In answer to both questions, worshippers will often make a new image of Christ that conforms with their idea of a savior. In Visual Piety, David Morgan says that people still need to be able to recognize the image of Jesus, so most images of Jesus have something in common with the common images of Jesus so that the audience will be able to recognize the image as their savior. [ii]
Fred Carter’s Jesus Praying in the Garden[ii]
The similarities help the audience identify the subject, but the difference help the audience identify with the subject. Jesus is no longer pictured as some passive white man who watches the afflicted but does not act. Jesus is pictured as active, doing something to help his people. He is no longer pictured as an ally to the oppressor but instead, an ally to the oppressed.
There were many motivations to creating a black Jesus. A black Jesus would help rid the sense of shame and self-hatred that was prevalent during the civil rights movement.[iv] The motivations that came about during the civil rights movement are the ones that this section will focus on.
“And yet, as the trickster of the trinity, Jesus’ purity, symbolized by whiteness, condemned racializing ideas of the divine. The black Jesus may have appeared as white in imagery and symbolism, but he became a black southerner in the act of suffering; an oppressed slave, a victim of a crucifixion-lynching, a poor migrant, a fellow-sufferer on the front lines of civil rights battles.” [v]
For some, it was not a movement to make Jesus literally black; it was a movement to make Jesus someone that wasn’t used against them to justify slavery. It was an attempt to make Jesus into someone who understood their plight by emphasizing the teachings and actions of Jesus that supported their belief. For others like Malcolm X and Albert Cleage, Jesus was actually black. There was no attempt to make him that way, he just was by his genetics supported by study that supported their claims, a black man. James Cone supported this theology.[vi]
Malcolm X was a Muslim and believed that Blacks who worshipped a white Jesus were perpetuating their oppression.[vii] He was friends with Albert Cleage, who agreed with him that Jesus must be black. For Cleage, this was because the real Jesus must have been black. In his mind, black Americans were genetically related to Jesus Christ through blood.[viii]
A third theologian had a different perspective than either Cleage or Cone. For James Deotis Roberts, Jesus could identify with everyone and was therefore a universal God.
In conclusion, images that people do not identify with can be changed so that people do identify with them. When problems arise within and audience and an image can no longer meet a particular audience’s needs, new images and ideas take its place and help support the idea and religion of the original man. People deal with a racially different Jesus by making him their own, which may or may not have happened with the ancient first images of Jesus anyway.
[i] Paul Harvey, “Jesus in American Culture,” In The Blackwell Companion to Jesus, edited by Delbert Burkett, 394-409, (West Sussex, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2011), 404.
[ii] David Morgan, Visual Piety, (Las Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 35
[iii] Ibid., 37
[iv] Kelly Brown Douglas and Delbert Burkett, “The Black Christ,” In The Blackwell Companion to Jesus, edited by Delbert Burkett, 410-26, (West Sussex, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2011), 410.
[v] Paul Harvey, “Jesus in American Culture,” In The Blackwell Companion to Jesus, edited by Delbert Burkett, 394-409, (West Sussex, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2011), 403
[vi] Kelly Brown Douglas and Delbert Burkett, “The Black Christ,” In The Blackwell Companion to Jesus, edited by Delbert Burkett, 410-26, (West Sussex, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2011), 416.
[vii] Ibid., 414
[viii] Ibid., 420
Images of Jesus 