First posted at ForHarriet.com
The domestic terrorism unleashed at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (Mother Emanuel) last night in Charleston, South Carolina, “the Holy City,” starkly displays the hypocrisy of U.S. Christianity. According to the Pew Research Center, 70.6% of U.S. citizens identify as Christian. If in fact, nearly two-thirds of the people of this country who purport to be disciples of Jesus Christ, the Messiah, stood for LOVE there is no way in hell that the murder and oppression of African Americans would be anywhere near acceptable and well-tolerated.
Reza Aslan, scholar and author, asserts that it is okay to envision and appropriate Christ as reflective of one’s own ethnicity. Possibly, but the Revelation of St. John describes Jesus, the Risen Savior, as having feet of burnt bronze and white wooly hair.Even so, to assert that the historical Jesus, the embodiment of your supposed Savior, is anything but a Northeast African Palestinian Jew and of dark skin, you are wrong. Should you hold on to this mischaracterization of Jesus you would become a liar, and again, a hypocrite. Why is the historical Jesus’s ethnicity important? Because this is the physical personhood of the transcendental Being you purport to adore, worship, and hold sacred. How can this be when you despise black bodies? How can this be if you deny who Jesus really was? How can this be when you do not love black people?Europe knows that Jesus was an African and even venerates the Black Madonna to this day. Add yet another layer to U.S. hypocrisy.Without question, the failure of the 21st century Church to rise up in mass against the contemporary rash of police brutality and manifest xenophobia and oppression against African Americans is beyond problematic. It is sinful.
I must ask, how is the murder of the bible study attendees at Mother Emmanuel at the hands of a hate-based terrorist any different from the murders of unarmed, innocent African American women, children, and men at the hands of wanton law enforcement officers who have annihilated lives, and violated citizens’ human and legal rights? Context of course, yet, the value of each life lost is unequivocally equal: each is invaluable.
Black Lives Matter, perhaps none more that Jesus Christ who bore the sins of the world. An appreciation of Jesus in his Africanness holds the liberative opportunity that racists, bigots, xenophobes, and white supremacists so desperately need. This fallacious notion of a white embodied deity has supported the enterprise of the ideology of white supremacy to humanity’s detriment. It has created the type of psychosis that has bred cold-blooded hatred of African peoples worldwide.
To see Jesus as his African self can help whites that have been socialized to fear and hate people of African descent. Jesus, the Northeast African Palestinian Jew could help dispel the sociopathology that has been imposed on some white people. This denigrating psychological and intellectual mindset has put African Americans at grave risk of danger yet again in America, the supposed Sweet Land of Liberty. Christians must stand on the proclamation that #BlackLivesMatter or else your religion is indeed lost, even dead. Apathy and hypocrisy have killed it.
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