On Race

G: I don’t mean to pry, I was just wondering who this white woman is on the cover of my book?

C: You’re not going to believe me.

G: No?
C: It’s either your mom, Monica, or it’s you.

G: I’m… I’m an African man… mom was a Berber… I don’t understand.

C: When the Church shifted Europe-ward, and then over here to America—the saints of the Church got whitewashed... most everything did, really.

G: I can understand that, people want to be able to relate to those they read… I’ve even seen pictures depicting Jesus in a wide variety of ways—like this one you keep around.

C: Yeah, in some ways that depiction of Jesus is a reaction to the blond haired blue-eyed Jesus we see so many places.

G: So… they portray me as white… but no one actually thinks I was white, do they?

C: They do. I mentioned that you were African in a sermon a while back and an African American woman came up to me afterwards nearly in tears. She’d went through Catholic school her whole life and thought the Church Fathers were all white. Realizing a bunch of you were African was really special, even liberating, for her.

G: Really?

C: Yes. The way we, even in the Church, interpret race is so heavy with history… Africans and Natives were seen as not having souls, which meant they could be owned as property and have their property taken.

Then when they were converted, and often re-converted, to Christianity the faith was used as a method of control.

Later, when Darwinism was first being explored people assumed European humans were a higher order of species.

Blacks were discriminated against in education and told they were innately stupid

… so being told the guy who thought through the faith, and whose theology had the greatest impact on Western Christianity, is African… can be profoundly liberating.

G: You moderns are so strange.