“This color isn’t white. It’s ecru,” Karen screamed at the hardware store’s paint specialist manager.
Yesterday, conservative Christian commentator, Eric Metaxas, called Jesus “white” and the Internet freaked out, buckling under the weight of Beth Moore’s hysterical screeching.
How dare he. How awful. So racist. You get the point.
But the question of exactly why this is a controversy has been overlooked, just as explanations for why his assertion is wrong have been absent.
Is Jesus not “white”? Well…of course Jesus is white, depending upon your definition.
First, let me point out that discussing something as subjective as skin color is as asinine as arguing about whether that hue is ecru or eggshell. The personal, subjective opinions about what makes someone “black” or “white” or “brown” or camouflage is an argument best reserved for First Grade crayola contests. The entire discussion is anti-biology and a leftover of Stone Age pseudo-science.
Really, we should all be ashamed of ourselves for having to discuss skin color. If the world we live in classifies a redneck with a farmer’s tan as “white” and an Indian as “red” then we’re as bad at biology as we are naming colors. But, this is the world we live in when Critical Race Theory loudly denounces Martin Luther King’s dream of a color-blind world. It’s currently a dystopian reality of race-baiting hostiles hell-bent on dividing the world over melanin count.
But if you’re insistent on knowing Jesus’ skin color, let me mansplain this to you:
Jesus is not Caucasian (and neither did Metaxas imply such a thing, nor does anyone else I’m aware of think it). Nobody thinks Jesus hailed from northern Europe. Obviously, Metaxas was not using the term “white” to imply that Jesus was Anglo Saxon.
Jesus is Semitic, which *has* been considered “white” or “olive-skinned” since long before Christ was made incarnate (sorry, race-baiters, that’s the fact). Of course, this also means Jesus didn’t have blue eyes and golden locks, either.
Whether or not Jews are classified as “white” is a complicated one, but only because “white” has come to refer to more than skin color. As Dave Schecter – a Jew – in the Atlanta Jewish Times pointed out, “It’s complicated.” Chiefly, the complication is due to the “social implications” of being white and has nothing to do with actual skin color.
Historically, the term “olive-skinned” was used to refer to Jewish people to distinguish them from darker-skinned neighbors. It is a color on the “human skin color spectrum” (yes, such a stupid thing actually exists – see below).
That term, “olive-skinned,” refers to those who hover around the Type III range of the Fitzpatrick Scale, a a numerical classification schema for human skin color. These “types” refer to those who respond to the sun by “tanning” easily. And yes, according to the “science,” Jewish people can get a good tan – as any fans of the golden-skinned Jewish supermodels like Gal Gadot or Bar Refaeli already know.
“Brown” people (Type V) and “Black” people (Type VI) don’t respond this way to the sun. This is contrasted with Type I (think Jim Gaffigan) and Type II people who cannot tan, but instead burst into flames at the sight of the sun and only burn. Again, thank “science” for these mostly subjective qualifications.
In the United States, for example, most people characterized as “white” rank Type II to Type III on the human skin color spectrum…the same as most ethnically Jewish people.
Common sense tells us this. Think of a Jewish person you know. How would you describe their skin color? Would you classify them as “white,” “brown,” or “black” (if you had to use Cromagnon descriptions)?
Would you not call Mark Zuckerberg white? What about Albert Einstein? Barbara Streisand? Joan Rivers? Jerry Seinfeld? Ben Shapiro?
Of course, no one would balk at calling most Jews “white.” If they showed up at a Black Lives Matter rally they’d be told to get to the back.
Ironically, Critical Race Theory (the most liberal view, an offshoot of Marxism) considers Jews “white” because they generally thrive in any given society and therefore have a “white privilege” that repeals their minority classification (the same goes for Asians).
Dumb, right? Well, that’s the liberal view that these folks espouse every other day of the week when they’re not talking about Jesus or trying to build a coalition of Democrats (then, fewer people are classified as white than ever before).
The reason the Woke Religionists freaked out at Metaxas’ suggestion is that they have been referring to Jesus as a “brown-skinned Palestinian refugee” for a decade or so.
Of course, Jesus was not “brown,” Palestine is not a country (and never has been), and their use of the term “refugee” implies Egypt was in a different Empire than Israel (it was not).
The reason they insist on making Jesus a “person of color” is because of a heresy invented by James Cone called, “Black Liberation Theology,” in which they insist Jesus was black (metaphorically more than literally, but some folks don’t pick up on nuance).
The dogpile on Metaxas wasn’t because they care about the hue of Jesus’ skin tone. It’s because they view “whiteness” as being sinful on account of their minds being raped by Critical Race Theory. Because of the influence of James Cone’s Black Liberation Theology and the Liberation Theologians in South America during the last half of the twentieth century, it’s essential their Jesus-idol manufactured by the Commie-Christian Left identify with the marginalized and downtrodden.
Essentially, the fight over Jesus’ skin color has racist roots – but not by white supremacists, but black nationalists, Frankfurt School Marxists, and Critical Race Theorists.
Truth be told, Jesus’ skin color – which was probably darker than mine and lighter than Poncho Villas – is 100% irrelevant to who he is as a Savior. As a carpenter, his “olive skin” probably had tan-lines, the universal benchmark for being “white.”
So while Jesus certainly didn’t have blonde hair and blue eyes, calling him “brown” or “black” is an over-correction of the wheel. He was neither or those things, unless we apply those terms to Jesus in a way that we apply them to everyone else on the planet.
But the outrage mob has missed the *entire point*. Jesus was the “Son of Man.” He represents all mankind from EVERY tribe, EVERY tongue, and EVERY nation.
What makes Christ’s sacrifice efficacious for us is his blood, which is the same color as any other man’s. We should all be fine – hypothetically – with a white Jesus, a black Jesus, a brown Jesus, a yellow Jesus, a red Jesus, supposing his biology reflected these colors. But at a certain point, we have to stop worrying about his skin color because we aren’t toddlers trying to draw Jesus with crayons.
Focusing on the skin color of Jesus, whether you prefer him on the “white side” of the color spectrum or the “brown side” is a woeful distraction from the fact that he was turned inside out for us.
