Someone shut down a discussion--and potential veneration--by stating, "Jesus wasn't White." Which I could easily grant, especially for the sake of argument. But what does "White" mean? How dark would He have to be, before this Marxist-adjacent person would adore Him as God? Or at least allow the discussion to progress? Was it simply a way to invalidate all White perspectives?
It seems to me that the universality of Jesus and the gospel message is a threat to certain kinds of essentialism. If there were value in say, "de-centering Whiteness," it would have to be in drawing out the richness of a cultural expression, and adding it to that which is universal. If there is therefore no access to the universals, or no relationship between the universal and the particular, then nominalism, solipsism, and relativism has won. On the other hand, part of the offense of Jesus is that he dared to take on a particular human nature, in a particular place, at a particular time. Nevertheless, He asserted that his message was and is universal and binding upon all.
Practically speaking, Jesus could have become incarnate in modern-day Beijing, or Istanbul, or Compton, CA. If I commit myself to the worship of Jesus, and the worldwide expression of that, I commit myself to the counterfactual possibility that any one of those cultures could have belonged uniquely to Our Lord (and Our Lady). The Holy Family is not ashamed of any place, or any culture. This is the beauty and the power of the Incarnation: He became one of us, and in so doing, He embraced all of us. May we not be so eager to throw bricks that we miss the Love that is more than skin-deep.
Comments
I think two things are worth noting: (1) God knew what he was doing when he had a mixed-race man write On The Incarnation. (2) Many voices in the discussion of 'White Jesus' don't accept the 7th Ecumenical Council, so they are not to be trusted at all on matters of religious depiction.