Race, Religion and Cultural Competency Paper Example

I have a Black Jesus t-shirt and I wear it regularly, particularly during the forthcoming Presidential election and holidays. Not because Jesus' race is relevant to me, but because it is for others. Specifically, his alleged Whiteness seems to be an immoveable pillar, upholding the racial and spiritual identity, and voting patterns, of millions, and this conflicts with his racially transcendent legacy and racial progress. My t-shirt, therefore, is an open invitation to onlookers to rethink who Christus is, and why so many cling more to his Whiteness than his will. You should see the looks I get when grocery shoppers see all Black, 6'4" of me, adorned with a brown-skinned, afro-sporting Jesus, pushing my cart through the produce aisle. The reactions vary from tear-inducing laughter to rage. "That's really funny dude," one young White man proclaimed. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself. That shirt is sacrilegious," said a finger-waiving White woman. "Why" I asked? "Everyone knows Jesus doesn't look like that," she railed. "Jesus is White." "I know no such thing," I rejoined. She then pulled a prayer card out of her purse and held it up to my face. "See? This is what Jesus looks like." "Like Jared Leto," I asked? She stormed off. I headed toward the tomatoes, grateful for the religious education my mother and grandmother provided, which serves as a bulwark against the type of ignorance and damaging Euro-centrism people of color are bombarded with daily.

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Black Jesus, even as he is portrayed in the Adult Swim television show, is more relatable to me and many others, notwithstanding the show's drug use and foul language, because Jesus is portrayed as a dark-skinned, weed-smoking, vagabond, renegade, outlaw, blaspheming, cult leader, with a prison record and messiah complex. He is more at home "spreading love and kindness" among ne'er-do-wells in Compton, California, than he is among sanctimonious and "acceptable" authority figures who affirm his teachings rhetorically and reject them in practice. He sounds and looks more like the Jesus I was introduced to at home.

I was raised in a Christian family in which the Protestantism of our Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church seemed to be tethered to our every thought and action. The New Testament, particularly the Synoptic Gospels of Jesus Christ, were given to me as The Word and our road map to eternal salvation. I came to believe that Jesus is, "The Way, The Truth, and The Life."

My struggling single mother sent me to a private Roman Catholic School Monday through Friday, however, to "give me the best education possible," and to envelope me in the caring arms of my stern, yet nurturing teachers, who were formidable and venerable nuns of the first order. It was at St. Matthew's School, on Phoenix, Arizona's west side, where I learned of "transubstantiation," the veneration of the Virgin Mary, and the "communion of saints." The $70.00-a-month tuition may as well have been $700.00, but my mother, who worked as many as three jobs, found a way to pay it, and when she couldn't, Vice Principal Sister Elaine, responded more like the benevolent Jesus, despite her militaristic deportment, than yet another hardline bill collector. Ma and Sister Elaine didn't see this as a sacrifice per se, but an investment in my future and that of our Christian family.

I loved our charismatic worship songs and sermons at Shiloh on Sunday, and I cherished the synchronicity and pageantry of Roman Catholicism in mass every Wednesday. Even though my grandmother criticized what she considered redundant kneeling during Catholic masses, their so-called heretical worship of idols in the form of statues of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus, and Catholic's alleged "disinterest in the Bible and deification of priests and Popes," she suppressed those concerns in lieu of the shared Protestant and Catholic belief that Jesus is the "only begotten Son of God," and that through belief in him we're guaranteed "everlasting life." Likewise, the nuns often spoke fondly of the "joyous noise" we Baptists "made unto the Lord," while speaking derisively, in hushed tones, of our lack of solemnity and reserve. Somehow I negotiated it all, becoming what I refer to as a "Batholic."

Despite the passive aggressive doctrinal jabs that my family and nuns threw on occasion, I thought that the two leading communities of "believers" in my life saw the world through shared Christian lenses, albeit lenses resting in distinct frames. I couldn't have been more wrong. Our lenses not only rest in different frames, they are tinted in different colors, greatly affecting the ways in which we not only see religion, but that which most creeds claim to be concerned about, good and evil, justice and injustice, and by extension, joblessness, poverty, homelessness, disease, violence, dehumanization, and hopelessness.

I came to this realization after viewing the hit television mini-series, Jesus of Nazareth in 1977. I overheard my mother and grandmother commenting on its inaccuracies following its conclusion. The nuns, on the other hand, celebrated the landmark series as a Christian triumph in an increasingly secular world, and Shiloh's flock touted the show's authenticity. So what was the problem? Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary and reared by his faithful parents under the brutal specter of Roman occupation and persecution. He suffered unconscionably through "The Passion," died, and was buried, followed by his resurrection three days later and the fulfillment of God's promise to Israel and, ostensibly, all of his children, through the purchase of our salvation by means of his mortal sacrifice. Notwithstanding the fact that I knew that Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, other faiths, Agnostics, and Atheists, do not subscribe to these beliefs, was I missing something?

"Yes," my deceptively militant mother said," you're overlooking the fact that Jesus and his fellow Israelites were not White." "The Bible," she intoned, "tells us in the Book of Daniel that the hair of his head is like pure wool and his arms and feet are the color of polished brass. This movie stars a White man [British actor Robert Powell], with an English accent, pale skin, blonde hair (as a child), and bright blue eyes. Does he look like the ancient Palestinians I've taught you about?" "Ah, No." I replied. "The ancient world, from which our faith emerged, was not White, no matter how much they want to diminish our worth by pretending that it was."

Ma was onto something, but when I asked the men at my barbershop why Jesus is always portrayed as White, things got really interesting. "Because White people believe they're God, that's why," one elder snapped before I could catch my breath, "and they made the God they claim to worship in their own image, so that by forcing us to worship their God, we actually began worshipping them." I couldn't believe what I was hearing. "Yeah, we wasn't Christians in Africa before White people came, or Muslims before the Arabs came for that matter," a young, suited, Black man with a large afro and mod glasses said. "We practiced African religion, and after Arab and White men gave us Muhammad and Jesus, we lost our freedom on earth for the their promise of freedom when we're dead. How convenient for them is that?" This was a question many Black people were asking when I was a child. Even Ebony magazine, as early as 1969, was in the midst of a "Quest for A Black Christ," although many mentally colonized Black people at the time wanted to shut the Black magazine down for depicting a Black Jesus. What was it that Harriet Tubman is alleged to have said? "I freed a thousand slaves but could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves."

Not only was my mother right, but the brothers at the barbershop were on to something too. It's certainly beneficial for the oppressor to have those they subjugate worship a God that resembles and acts like them. Indeed, as Harlem Renaissance writer, Zora Neale Hurston, reminded us, "Gods always behave like the people who make them." This would explain the evolution of the notion of "usury." The term originally described the charging of interest of any kind as immoral (Deuteronomy 23:19-20 and Luke 6:35), but has since been opportunely diminished or sacrificed altogether at the altar of "principled" interest rates. Almost no one views the latter, "capitalizing" on another's misfortunes or needs, as un-Godly or anti-Christian, even as they charge fees and cash checks fortified by usury, while ornamenting themselves with symbols of the liberality of the Judeo-Christian.

This would also explain the Apostle Peter calling upon slaves and servants to submit to [their] masters and "obey in all things" in Colossians 3:23-24, or perhaps I am "taking this out of context" or "referring to an older version of The Word" as some have alleged. What I do know is that American slaveholders loved to read this scripture to their enslaved Africans and overpowered Native peoples. Not only was it said that God condoned chattel slavery through "the mark of Cane," he supposedly called upon his followers to "kill the Indian and save the man." These pronouncements were all delivered and codified by White religious and secular leaders since the Roman Emperor Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea (325 AD) that enshrined Jesus as the Christ for millennia to come.

It isn't a surprise then that critical thinkers, such as comedian Chris Rock, have argued "a black Christian is like a black person with no memory." Theologians and scholars such as James H. Cone, through "Black liberation theology," have undressed the suspicion that Blackness and Christianity are antithetical. Still, history has shown that Jesus became White as a product of White supremacy and was promptly used to justify it in the oppression, not liberation, of people, especially people of color. Even American colonization, the associated massacre of Indigenous peoples, the expansion of slavery, the Mexican-American War, the destruction of Reconstruction, and Jim Crow segregation were justified through notions of "Manifest Destiny" and "providence," with graven and painted depictions of a White "surfer-dude" Jesus often overlooking it all.

Conclusion

In fact, as Jonathan Merritt writes in The Atlantic, "the myth of a white Jesus is one with deep roots throughout Christian history. As early as the Middle Ages and particularly during the Renaissance, popular Western artists depicted Jesus as a white man, often with blue eyes and blondish hair. Perhaps fueled by some Biblical verses correlating lightness with purity and righteousness and darkness with sin and evil, these images sought to craft a sterile Son of God. The only problem was that the representations were historically inaccurate." Many church leaders knew that they were incorrect at the time and many more continue to embrace these images as truth. "Modern Western Christians," Merritt argues, "have carried these images over into their own depictions of Jesus. Pick up one of those bright blue "Bible Story" books in a Sunday school classroom and you'll find white Jesus waiting for you, rosy cheeks and all. Or you could survey t...