White like Me—not!

(This is actually meant to be an article. I wrote it sometime last year Dec. EG White was an prominent early Seventh-day Adventist, who is believed to have received prophetic messages from God, and who was a prolific author.)

It has been a while since I was moved to anywhere near tears by reading a book that mentioned Sabbath and Jesus. But the tears were timidly jerked by a most unlikely of authors. Sure, if it had been a dramatic devotional by one of Adventism’s prolific writers, or even the stalwart of our hallowed hall of literacy, EG White, nobody would be surprised. But the author in question is, as far as I can tell, not a church person. He is a Jew, a liberal, a social activist, an anti-racist. His name is Tim Wise, and I was reading his book White Like Me on a recent flight to the States.

Mr Wise had been to Bermuda for a series of workshops, one of which involved church leaders. I had helped setting up that workshop, and beside meeting the man also purchased his book, in which he unapologetically admits how White privilege has helped him throughout his life. He describes various examples in both his own life and the lives of friends and family. I read that while flying over the very society he was describing. And as a non-US citizen, although white too, I felt somewhat distanced, even aloof, and not just because of our cruising altitude. After all, this was the States he described, this was not my experience growing up in Germany.

I felt uncomfortable enough as a white male to sympathise with the book, yet detached enough not to get too uncomfortable, until I got to pages 53-54. Up till then I had writhed in sympathy with Tim Wise as he described a discussion with mostly white students about the colour of Jesus. I felt even a bout of mild moral superiority to those unenlightened students. Until, that is, Tim Wise, the non-Adventist, spoke about Maxwell’s Bible Stories. The holy grail, the sacred cow, of children’s literature, we had the German translation at home. But the images were the same, and it was those that Wise lamented, not the stories themselves. And suddenly it rushed over me like a cold shower: the conviction that I, too, had been part and victim of the system of White privilege. I remember those images of my childhood: Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (or garden of Sweden as Wise quipped in a talk) looked decidedly white European, and so did everyone else, including the Saviour. That is what formed my early, initial worldview. At that moment I was more closely involved with the subject of his book than I had thought possible.

So here in a few sentences Tim Wise punched my cautious pastoral mind without even knowing it. When he talks about Maxwell’s Bible Stories, I’m sure he doesn’t realise that those are pieces of prime Adventist literary real estate. And he finished the section of by using a well-known word which catapulted this very non-Adventist passage straight into the centre of my Adventist world: “Sabbath”:

[W]hy is [Jesus] always portrayed [...] as a white man? [...] Why represent Adam and Eve as if they were from Norway [...], as is done in the infamous and ubiquitous Arthur Maxwell Bible Story books for kids that are to be found in pediatrician and OB-GYN offices across the country? [...] [I]f you have to represent these folks for some reason, why not make them black?
[...]
What does that say, I asked, about privilege? About the power that whites have? [...] What does it say about institutional white power that whites are able to visually represent the creator of the universe, and the one many of them consider to be his son and the savior, as if they were no more distant from one another than first cousins? And what kind of comfort does that fraud, that spiritual con job, give to little white children who get to believe, because their Bible Story Book tells them so, that they are closer to God, physically speaking, than 90 percent of the planet’s inhabitants? And how might the entire world change if white people were forced to deal with the truth and see the truth hanging on their church walls every Sabbath?
(Tim Wise, White Like Me, Soft Skull Press, New York, 2005; p.53-54)

With my Adventist, non US-citizen bubble gone, I sat exposed to the message from the book. And I began to face it. I wish that more white men and women took courage, burst their bubbles, and faced the reality of our privilege, a privilege that we did not work for or established, but that was bestowed upon us by being categorised “white”. However, the more likely reaction to this, and other like-minded articles, is: “But what is wrong with it? We’ve always had these images. Nobody has had a problem with them…”

So let us examine the question “What is wrong with it?”

For a start, Jesus was not white. There, we might just say it as it is. We (white people) need to start to accept and publicly state the fact that the historical Jesus was not white like us. This dawned on me in my late teens or early twenties. But images of the white Jesus that had been fed into my mind, and the minds of countless others, are hard to erase. If someone asked me for my gut reaction to the word “Jesus”, the image that comes to mind is that of a European, often sickly looking and clinically depressed, for that is what Jesus tends to look like in many pictures. I have had a strong reaction to those kinds of images some time ago, so much so that I have folded all the illustrations in my copy of Desire of Ages because I could not stand them any longer. So, number one, it’s historically wrong.

Secondly, it is morally wrong. The depiction of a white Jesus (as well as all the other major Bible characters), deprives the vast majority of the Earth’s population visual justice, as Tim Wise notes above. Whites have forged history and mindsets for centuries, including Biblical imagery, and simply usurped them, and that was wrong. It was wrong to turn the Saviour into “one of us” and then use that image as a teaching aid when dealing with non-whites. The message that has been sent is, “white is better, see, even Jesus was white”. But not only does it deprive non-whites visual access to the Saviour, it deprives whites access to reality by locking them from infancy into a manufactured bubble of whiteness (and superiority) which includes the Saviour. Of course we did not create it, but by maintaining it we continue the wrong and so become guilty of it.

And guilt is one of those things that white folk (like me) are very afraid of. Of course, I can not be held responsible for the wrong that people of my great-great-grand father’s generation did. The Bible clearly teaches that everybody has to account for his and her own actions (Ez. 18:5-20). But, if I knowingly maintain an evil, either by active support, or by passive consent, I share in its guilt. That’s why the white Jesus image has become a moral issue for me—and, by reading this, so it has for you.

Of course, these paintings were done many decades ago, when “we didn’t know better”. I cannot do much about what happened around the time of my birth in the mid-60s, or before. But what hit me, as I sat in my economy seat, was the fact that when I read it, in December of 2007, this is still a reality, and that most of my white brothers and sisters in the pews and in the offices either do not realise it, or, worse, deny its existence. What made me put down the book with a sudden conviction and a mixture of depression and rising anger, was the fact that books with these illustrations and images are still on the shelves of our book stores, and that nobody has had the fortitude to address that wrong.

The bottom line is that we have not allowed the Gospel to change all and every aspect of our sinful existence. Instead of letting Jesus change us into His image, we (white people) have perpetuated the sin of changing Him into our image. Our faith is just an extension of our culture, rather than our culture becoming an extension of our faith. In other words, we have coloured Jesus according to our worldview, with our colours, instead of allowing Jesus to colour our worldview with His colours.

When Jesus is allowed to totally change us, when He is allowed to transform all of our mind (Rom 12:2) including our worldview, when we allow Him to create a new humanity in us–one that runs on different priorities and values than the old one–, when He will keep us in the world but we are no longer of it, in other words, when we are cut loose from the system that we grew up in, e.g. white privilege, then we can truly show the world that Jesus really is the answer. But if we are the same as before with just a Christian veneer, we basically say that there is an area of humanity that Jesus cannot take care of.

And what is wrong with a black Adam and Eve, other than the fact that that is what they looked like (go check your Genetics 101)? What is wrong with a black, Arab Moses, David, Peter, John, Mary, and Jesus? My white brothers and sisters, we will not lose anything other than a historic wrong, and that is worth losing. If our identity is found in the real Jesus—the uplifted Saviour and High Priest—, we don’t need a pseudo one to keep us happy. It is high time to rectify these images. If, on the other hand, we continue to cling to them, we demonstrate that Jesus has not been able to completely transform our minds, for we still hold on to the visual extension of a sinful past.