Was Jesus Christ Black? By Michael D. Roberts March 2002: By the mid-1960s, the whole of America was plunged into one of the most turbulent periods of its entire history. At the core of the festering racial time-bomb was a loud clamoring for fundamental changes, not only in Black-white relations, but also for an examination of those things that the Black community had come to accept as normal and factual. This, of course, was a direct reaction to the years of cultural stultification and historical exclusion that was practiced relative to Black History. Moreover this thirst to examine and conceptualize history from a Black perspective was driven by the historical portrayal of Blacks as an inferior race of people whose contribution to world development was practically nil. Religion, as a foundation for spiritual belief, was therefore one of the places that Black intellectuals and thinkers would have to start since the Black community had been conditioned over 400 years to accept Christ of the Christian religion as white and blue-eyed. But for many years anyone who dared to buck the status quo was sternly reminded that to even criticize biblical teachings was committing a sin and sacrilege at the same time. So for many years Black scholars gave religion as wide berth and only penned soft, wide and safe conclusions about how Blacks could break their embrace of white religious ideology. But as the Black Power explosion erupted in the 1960s into a new wave of Black consciousness, Blacks began to question versions of their history that white society had prepared for them. So accompanying this yearning for knowledge, and a new pride in "Blackness," was a deep anger against a system that had long denied then equal opportunities. The mid-1960s Black explosion was accompanied by a corresponding Black violence. In the midst of all this sections of the Black Church joined with its white counterparts and denounced the violence. Admittedly, some Black theologians took a progressive stance and while they condemned the violence as counter-productive, they never sought to explain its origins. Preaching that Black rewards were to be had in heaven, and the pacifist line of "turning the other cheek," that Malcolm X call a "wishy-washy" philosophy, both white and Black religious thought sought to cool Black anger and tensions by asking them to pray to a white God for deliberation and to defer rewards here on earth for greater promised ones in heaven. Within this context the very notion of the color of God as it related to the Black race could not be side-stepped any longer and for the first time Black religious intellectuals, including Dr.Martin Luther King,Jr., had to come to grips with it. One of the very foundations of Black subordination and the ideological basis for white racism and chauvinism, the very doctrine of Eurocentric religion,and what it force-fed Blacks during 400 years of captivity, had to come under the microscope at last. But the issue of the "Blackness of God or Christ" was not a new one. In 1920 Marcus Mosiah Garvey questioned why it was that whites defined God in their color, Chinese in their likeness, and Indians in their image, while Blacks were forced to worship an image of God more in line to Caucasian likeness. Indeed, some progressive Black scholars had tried to come to grips with the issue for some time in an on-again-off-again fashion. The reasons for this was that many Blacks, intellectuals included, believed in the version that their white masters had given them and that it was deemed heresy to question "the will of God" in these matters. The Civil Rights Era shattered this position asunder and while Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would have been happy to let it slide, Malcolm X thrust the issue squarely in the debate. Malcolm's attack on the "white man's" religion served to indict this religious position as being a conduit to perpetuate white racist values. In addition, white religion's use of white symbolism suggested a sense of white superiority, and an accompanying Black inferiority. In essence therefore, the symbolism served to equate whiteness with goodness and purity and Blackness with evil, sinfulness and depravity. Black theologian, Albert Cleage, a close associate of Malcolm X, stated categorically that Christ was Black and that the Messiah was born of a Black woman. He argues that Christ's bloodline, from Mary his mother, bears concrete proof of Christ's Blackness. Cleage says that since Mary was an Israelite of the tribe of Judah, which was a non-white Black people, in the same sense that Arabs were Black people and Egyptians Black people, Mary could not have given birth to a white child. Further, Cleage supports his claims to Christ's Blackness, by stating that the tribe of Judah was a "mixture of Chaldeans, Egyptians, Midanites, Ethiopians, Kushites, Babylonians and other dark peoples, all of whom were already mixed with Black people of Central Africa." It was Cleage who argued that since God created man in his own image, then "we must look at man to see what God looks like...if God created man in his own image, then God must be some combination of Black, red, yellow and white...we must think of God as Black." But beyond the ongoing debate about the genealogy of Christ, is the fact that for many progressive Black theologians, like Cleage, the most enslaving feature of the Black Church is the worship of a white Christ. Malcolm X was also of the opinion that as long as Black people kept worshiping a blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus, then they will never be free of the shackles of white racism and oppression. "Black people cannot build dignity on their knees worshipping a white Christ. We must put down this white Jesus which the white man gave us in slavery and which has been tearing us to pieces." - Malcolm X. Dare we presume a Black Christ? Undoubtedly this debate will continue and both the Black and white church will find common ground and say that the real issue is not the color of God or Christ but in the belief of salvation. This politics of accommodation has retarded a full examination of this issue for many years since the Black church has been reluctant to deal with it. Both religious institutions condemned Black violence during slavery and up to the Civil Rights era. While they deplored the "un-Godly tactics," calling the violence the "work of Satan the Devil" they both condemned white violence against Blacks and the violence of racism, Jim Crowism and discrimination in an ad hoc fashion that lacked consistency and conviction. By failing to explain the root causes of Black anger and violence the white church and white religion denied Blacks the right to self-defense, the same rights they loudly champion today as being part of the Constitution of white folks. It was therefore in the context of the weaknesses of both religious institutions that Malcolm X's statement "by any means necessary" was pounced upon and labeled as inflammatory and inciting violence among Black people. They said that there was no such basis for this action in the "Christian Church." But the assumption that such a statement was "un-Christian" was and is clearly very baseless. What Malcolm meant was that violence was not to be ruled out as an alternative means to fight the violence of white racism. And lastly, by making Christ Black, it identified him with oppressed Black folks. For in all of religious history Christ had always sided with the poor, the downtrodden and disenfranchised. His ministry was one of liberation. Since Blacks have been on the receiving end of white racism, it stands to reason that Christ, not only identified with their plight but became their image and likeness. There is sound reason to believe that Jesus Christ was Black.