Hi everyone! I stumbled upon an article that talks about a perspective on the color of Christ that I don't think we've talked about in our class discussion too much. In a Youtube video, a young woman explains why she thinks that imagining Christ as white is not only historically-inaccurate, but it is oppressive and wrong. I found this interesting because in class we have talked about how a black Jesus can be viewed as liberating, but not how the direct contrast of this would be that a white Jesus would then be oppressive. I think that in this case it is as if the woman is saying that the depiction of a white Jesus and a black one are like two opposing forces.
What do you guys think of this? Are her arguments valid?
The link to the Huffington Post article that contains the video is here.
This article is very interesting. I particularly liked how the author discussed that white people use religion to justify their immorality. Because the dominant figure in society is a white Jesus, people use this image of Jesus to condone their wrongdoings since they associate with and are similar to a divine and sacred being only because they share the same race. I found it very ironic that whites are connecting religion, which emphasizes love, acceptance, and morality, to cruelty, which is the complete opposite of religious values and beliefs. These two concepts are complete contrasts, which demonstrates that the whites' argument to justify their brutality is weak and erroneous. These people should not be using religion to pardon their history of discrimination and prejudice toward minorities. When whites use a white Jesus to justify their authority and unethical treatment, this white image is definitely oppressive. However, if white people want to worship a white Jesus in order to better connect to this divine figure and better understand the faith, then it is acceptable. This reveals that people often associate white with powerful, controlling, and manipulative people, which is not at all what Jesus stood for, so people often have issues and hesitations with accepting a white Jesus, so it may seem oppressive.
ReplyDeleteI would also say the group which is the dominant narrative at any given time will tend to want symbols of power to be in their image. What is more powerful to a culture than its' most dominant religion?
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