Race Warriors Decry ‘White Jesus’

In their attempt to politicize everything along racial lines, race warriors are now denouncing traditional Christianity as an invention of white people seeking to dominate and control “people of color” (POC).

Writing for the Blavity website, billed as “the Buzzfeed for black millennials,” race warrior Danni Roseman proclaims her progressive alienation from Christianity after being “bombarded with images of this sandy-brown-haired, blue-eyed, White man”—namely, Jesus Christ.

In her angry essay titled “My Beef with White Jesus,” Roseman lashes out at missionaries and preachers, and all who have propagated the myth of White Jesus. All their preaching is just one more instance of “White people telling minority peoples what to say, and how to behave,” she states.

“By beating individuals into submission, and calling it love, White Christians have brainwashed, and whitewashed generations of POC’s traditions,” she announces. Never mind that for most black Americans, those traditions are intimately linked to the black community’s long-standing ties with the Christian Church.

For race warriors like Ms. Roseman, everything—even religion—is first and foremost about race. (She also has serious issues with Jesus’ being a “man,” but says she will deal with that at another time.)

By “White Jesus,” Roseman means “the commercialized and whitewashed version of Christianity that has been used to colonize, exploit and pacify minorities and people of color for hundreds of years.” According to this logic, the thousands of black Christian leaders and clergy in the U.S. and elsewhere are nothing more than collaborators in a subversive plan to keep blacks under the boot of whites.

The only option for a true race warrior is to abandon Christianity as an ineffective instrument for liberation of POC.

“It’s obvious,” Roseman writes, “White Jesus is not the answer to POC gaining equality, respect and acceptance in this world no matter how lightly we tread, how peacefully we protest, or how enthusiastically we pray, sing, and worship.”

“The more I read, and study, and question, the harder it’s becoming to reconcile my relationship with Christianity as it is today,” Roseman states.

It’s not just Jesus who is too white, but Christianity itself.

“My main qualm with Westernized Christianity,” she declares, “is that it has been used for hundreds of years as a measuring stick to determine—but mostly negate—the humanity of minority peoples.”

And so, Roseman says who is “taking a step back from White Jesus and all his radical henchmen” because she has basically lost faith in him as a savior—at least according to her categories.

Of course, while divorcing herself from Jesus, Roseman assures readers that she will continue “cultivating spirituality,” which will help to “challenge myself to unlearn things I once accepted as gospel.”

The more today’s race warriors gain sway in contemporary public discourse, the further America strays from Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “dream” of a color-blind America and the more racially antagonistic society becomes.

Blavity claims its mission is “to add more balance to the way Black people are represented in media and culture.” If Ms. Roseman’s essay is an example of that “balance,” one shudders to think what extremism might look like.

Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter  Follow @tdwilliamsrome