When Jesus was Black

How do Black painters face the messiah’s race?

For two millennia, Christians lived with the daily assertion that Jesus is white. Only now do I reflect on what a shameless grab for power this has been.

I’m thinking about the various efforts to make counter-statements, to imagine Jesus as Black. There’s a number of notable examples, like the crucifix at Regis University by Jan Van Ek, a white woman.

I’m interested in the history of Black artists and “Jesus.”

What do you do in the face of a religious tradition that sees the Creator as so openly aligned with European power and ‘Whiteness’?

After the American Civil War, many slaves kept on worshipping the white Jesus. The Black painter Archibald J. Motley Jr. seems to be reflecting on this situation in Mending Socks, a 1924 portrait of his grandmother, who had been a slave. A crucifix with white Jesus is displayed behind her.

The prompt might be to ask: Had this slave been freed…spiritually?