What’s Wrong with Black People?
Updated: Feb 20, 2020
I grew up in an era where formal institutions taught that “Black is beautiful”, “the Black race is a mighty race”, “I am Black, I am proud, I will stand out in any crowd”. Marcus Garvey, Bob Marley and other black-conscious, political figures were prominent icons who were aired frequently through the radio and television waves. Through sermons and school lessons, Black Pride was engraved in our heads. It seemed to me that my generation was the one that was destined to reclaim “Blackness” from its fallen state and put it back on the pedestal that it deserved. That was what the schools, churches and other institutions led me to believe.
Yet, monochronism has never been the Jamaican way. Our motto "Out of Many, One People" reveals our disposition to embrace many different ways at the same time. So, while the message of Black Love was being spread, “black” continued to be a curse word, a disgrace, an omen. "Black"; that rich, bright, vibrant, hue was being lifted like crayon from a coloring book and used as a measurement and litmus test for evil. In every facet of the Jamaican society, this same "Black" that was a beacon of pride was also a sign of doom.
The same mouths that haughtily proclaimed "I am black, I am proud", also accused that "Nothing Black is good."
In Jamaica, we never used the Brown Paper Bag Test to determine whether a person's complexion was light enough for them to be deemed worthy of goodness. Yet, it was well known that wealth and good jobs were for people whose skin pigment reflected as little blackness as possible. No need for a paper bag. On our island, reggae music speaks louder than paper bags and the Dance Hall makes the rules more impenetrable than paper. For years, a minority voice in the Dance Hall have carried the message of Black Pride. However, the undeniable and deafening sound of the Dance Hall which bombards our ears is that darker complexioned individuals are less desirable than lighter complexioned people. Business booms in this kind of environment where the same persons saying "Black is Beauty" are also purchasing skin bleaching creams and heavy chemical soaps to be make themselves more desirable.
In recent years, many Jamaican churches have redoubled their efforts to address this issue of colorism. I no longer live in Jamaica but where I live, many churches have taken a similar initiative to address the issues of racism and racial inequality. Racism and colorism are not the same thing but I believe that the root causes of both of these "isms" are similar. In this article, I explore the impact the church, in its interpretation of “Blackness” and “Whiteness” has contributed to the inequalities that we see in mainstream society. If we can see how we are complicit in causing or furthering a danger, then we can cause change by first changing ourselves.
As a child, when the pastors or teachers spoke about Biblical, human, characters, I automatically assumed that these characters were Black. It never occurred to me that they could be any other complexion because that was the context of my world. Apart from the missionaries who visited us once a year, I didn't see or know any persons who were not black. Even if I wanted to, I couldn't conceive that the Bible ever spoke of non-Black persons. It was simply inconceivable to my little mind. When the pastor explained that the Romans and soldiers who killed Christ were white Europeans, I struggled to paint a mental picture of this scene. In other words, for me, being human was synonymous with being Black.
It doesn't however mean that I could not conceive of white beings. Whenever we talked or read about God or angels or any heavenly creatures, I always pictured them as white. When I knelt to pray, I was praying to a white God. When I thought of heaven, I thought of a place filled with white and light. Some of these childish perceptions came from the pictures of Jesus that hung in most houses. Jesus was depicted as a white skinned man, with blue eyes. He had a bright, red heart with thorns wrapped around it and a cross protruding from it and he had a halo over his head. A picture can speak a thousand words and that picture of Jesus solidified in my young mind that Jesus was a white man.
Another reason for thinking heavenly and supernatural beings were white was that all the people I knew were natural, earthly, human and black. It stood to reason that any beings that were super-natural, unnatural or unordinary were likely to be non-black. I guess nonhumans could have been any color except black but coupled with the paintings of Jesus, I was pretty sure that they were white. Humans were Black, dieties and other non-human entities were white. That was the way, the Bible came alive to me.
It was not until my Seminary days, when a teacher suggested that Ham might have been one of the first people to engage in an interracial relationship that I started to examine my views more closely. In seminary, I also heard suggestions that Moses may have been engaged in an interracial relationship by marrying the dark-skinned Cushite woman. These claims were preposterous me. How did the word "interracial" even enter the discussion? We were talking about the Bible here and that means that if Ham and Moses married human wives, they married Black women. Sure, they might have engaged in inter-tribal relationships but they certainly did not enter interracial alliances. How could they? All the humans in the Bible were Black people. At this stage of my life, I could now perceive that white people were in the Bible. Yes, the Romans were white but they didn't come on the scene until the New Testament. So no interracial or dark vs. white skinned scenario could have occurred between Moses and his wife or Ham and his wife.
When the Bible mentions that the Cushite woman had dark skin, this sounded to me as my grandfather telling my grandmother that she had the most beautiful, soft, dark skin. He is not distinguishing the color of her skin from his, he is simply saying that her hue is more radiant. Many white poets have written of the fair, white, skinned maiden. The mention of the maiden's skin tone does not establish a contrast of skin hues with that of the poet's.
This discussion in our Seminary class, made me aware that there were people who believed, contrary to me, that there were Black and White human characters in the Bible and in particular that the main characters in the Bible were white. In fact, their view was that while the Moses and Hams and all the Biblical leaders were whites, the non-chosen tribes were of a darker complexion. I was perplexed. Perplexed and annoyed.
As part of my ministerial training, I taught in an ecclesial setting. One Sunday, I was teaching a class of students aged 10 or younger. All but one pupil was black. We were talking about angels and the students were given coloring books and crayons and told to color the angels. The black pupil wished to color his angel black or yellow, to which another student objected, pointing out that angels had to be colored white. They got into an argument and as they argued, I remembered that I also grew up with the mindset that angels were white. As the students made their points, and the white student claimed to be closer in resemblance to angels and to God than the Black student, it dawned on me that I had subconsciously associated white with superior/heavenly beings and relegated black to inferior and earthly beings. Until this white student adamantly purported her whiteness as being more akin to Godliness than her black classmate, I never understood how blackness and whiteness were intimately tied to a hierarchical structure in the church and in our belief system. That day, I asked myself the question: If God who is the highest and best can only be white, what did that mean about Black people?
Further opportunities to explore how the church has treated blackness and whiteness occurred throughout my seminary journey. In one of my classes, the teacher displayed a painting on the screen and claimed that it depicted a passage in Revelations. She explained that the painting showed all the saints who made it into heaven on the one hand and all the people damned to hell on the other. As it turned out, all the people in heaven were white, and were wearing white attires while the people in hell were black. I grew even more uncomfortable with this narrative which linked Blackness to ordinary or hell and linked whiteness to extraordinary and heaven. It was becoming clear to me that internalizing this narrative would have deleterious effects on my faith walk.
I started to rethink, re-evaluate and critique the various self-held and societal notions about heaven, purity, cleanliness, hell, sin and dirtiness. I started my introspection by acknowledging that although I thought I grew up in a church that purported Black Pride, I had relegated Black and all things black to a realm beneath the divine and I had reserved heavenly spheres for non-blacks. In other words, I had limited the capacity and dimensions of Blackness.
Secondly, I realized that I had internalized the views that white symbolized cleanliness, purity, Godliness and Black symbolized dirtiness and sin. I retraced my childhood to find out where I had picked up these faulty ways of thinking. It was not hard to find the reasons- for one, the media is and has always been froth with negative images of Black. In adult movies, Black people are depicted as monsters or evil characters. They are weak, always the first to die, to become traitors or to fall by the way. Roles of heros or heroines, of valiant and noble characters are almost exclusively white roles. Cartoons depict evil characters as either dressed in black or as black people/anime. Princesses, knights and morally sound characters are always white. Even the evening news (deemed to be a credible source) portray criminals as being predominantly from the black race. I got to the stage where I realized that if a suspect was white, the chances of seeing that suspects face on TV was zero to nil. The white face is never placed in conjunction with criminality. Criminality is deliberately associated with the black face.
In the guise of a literary technique, books refer to blackness and darkness as symbols of omen, wrong doings or evil. In fact, even in our interpretation of the Bible, white is often associated with good and black/dark with evil. Recently, I was in a group and we were examining the Genesis story. One participant pointed out how good the day and light was and how bad the night and dark was. Thankfully, the attentive teacher steered us in the right direction by showing us that the Bible says that when God created the day and the night, He said that they were both good. Humans and society have imposed negative interpretations on the night/darkness.
From the time I was born, without realizing it, I have been bombarded with images suggesting that black and blacks are inferior and white and whites are superior. Colorism and racism saturate the environment everywhere. Inequities flow from these societal constructs. The churches are not mere bandwagonists of these isms and schisms, they are also instigators.
At present, we are living in an age in which many people and Christian groups in particular, seek to advocate for the equality of the races. I am fully aware that “race” is a social construct. However, color is not. People have different skin colors. While we might all belong to the same race, we do not have the same skin tones. Therefore, the claim by some that “I don’t see color” is ridiculous and even disrespectful. If we are not seeing colors, we should have our eyes tested. Colors exist. They are real. More importantly, if we refuse to acknowledge people's skin tones, we are ignoring a crucial part of those persons' identity. My proposal to those who would seek racial equity is that a good starting point is to acknowledge that people have different skin colors. Get our lens fixed and start by seeing people in their totality otherwise we will be guilty of seeing people as if they are trees.
Secondly, it does not further the cause to say "Whether we are black, blue, purple of any other color, God cares for us". When we say this, we are simply being dismissive of the issue because for at long as I have lived, I have never met blue or purple people. They don't exist so don't create a group of non-existing people and throw Blacks into that group along side them. That is rude and insensitive.
It is important for any group advocating for racial equality to understand that the racially mistreated are not advocating for a melting pot which takes away the uniqueness of their race or color. In other words, Blacks don't want their blackness to be "unseen" or to be warped into blue or purple or some other meaningless color. Blacks are advocating for blackness to be reclaimed and recognized as worthy and good. They are seeking to uncover and reveal the truth implicit in the Creation story, that is; when light and dark were created, God saw them both as good. They were good in and because of their uniqueness.
These advocates must be apprised of the fact that racial inequality cannot be achieved through quick and cheap investments. It will take lengthy, painful, and expensive overhauls of church structures and traditions to achieve such equality. On a very basic level, such overhaul must begin with the various artifacts, visual and performing arts that are on display in our worship spaces. Take for instance, the depiction of God as a white man, such depictions are everywhere in story books, on walls, in movies etc... These must be taken down because these depictions contradict God’s command which states “You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth.” (Ex. 20:4) I do not mean to recommend that God is aloof or inaccessible to humans but I do mean to say that God is beyond anything the human mind can imagine. The moment we try to capture the physical essence of God we have started to make God in our likeness and in so doing we limit God to our own physical parameters as if to do so gives us a better claim on God than those who are unlike us. The challenge then is to find other ways to describe God without likening Him/Her to human images, especially if in doing so we suggest that God is akin to certain races more than others.
Questions that these church advocates must ask are: Are the churches ready to find other ways to describe sin other than using words such as “blackness” and “darkness”? Are churches ready to revise and perhaps omit some of the beloved Christian hymns from its hymnals? For example, can our Christian faith continue to be strengthened in song without singing that Christians must be washed whiter than snow or that "One day when sin was as black as could be"?
I have a personal gripe with these songs and proses. I am black. God made me black. God did not make a mistake. Being black is not synonymous with being sinful. I do not want to be washed until I am whiter than snow. The way I see it, if I bought a black dress and something white, say toothpaste or flour fell on it, the black dress would become dirty on account of the white flour. It would be dirty and ruined because I never intended for it to have white toothpaste or flour on it. In the same vein, if I bought a white dress upon which some unwanted black or red or blue matter spilled, the dress would lose its value. I am not saying that when white matter is combined with black matter it makes for an unsavoury combination. I am talking about any unwanted, unintended and deleterious matters which make a pure thing impure. Blacks were created and intended to be blacks and whites to be white. Persons of mixed race are also designed by God's will to be the way they are. The color of one’s skin is no mistake or indication of a fallen state rather these differences reveal the creativity of our Creator who delights in our uniqueness. So Black people singing that they want to be washed whiter than snow misses the mark greatly. It would make more sense that they sing “wash me and I shall be darker than ebony”. In other words, we should be asking God to make us a truer reflection of who He/She created and intend us to be.
For Blacks, being washed unto “whiteness” is to be “whitewashed”, and to wish that all darkness turn to light is to miss the importance of having both. So, the next time we sing these songs or watch these movies or look through these Bible Story books, let us ask ourselves these questions: "Why is God always depicted as white?", "Why has darkness been described in negative terminology?", “Why do Black people need to get washed/whitened in order to be a better version of themselves?” Ask ourselves, “What’s wrong with black people?” The church that can honestly ask and answer these questions is the church that is ready to tackle the issue of racial inequality.
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