I have spent most of my adult life dealing with people who look like me telling me that I was “too Black,” or “too pro-Black.” This has come from mostly Black people who were uninformed about their faith and/or duped by White people who convinced them that whiteness was the standard to aspire to in their faith and their Blackness was to be either diminished or erased.
This notion of a person being too much of how God made them has been trending on social media lately. Somebody posted, “Don’t be so pro-Black that you become anti-Christ.” Biblical and social brainwashing is real.
Let me first remind the people who look like me what a large segment of White Christian nationalists and White evangelicals think about them. A Utah pastor by the name of Brian Sauvé said—and I paraphrase from a podcast—that “Black people would be welcome to join his church as long as they did not practice Black culture.” He further stated that “Black culture is evil, murderous, violent, and bestial; Black culture people steal, kill, destroy, and they look like Satan. Black culture people are sinful to the core, have a high rate of fatherlessness, sexual immorality, and molest children at high rates.” He then said that “in every criminal statistic, Black culture people excel.”
This man represents the insane, sick ignorance and hate of far too many White evangelicals who put their whiteness above their Christianity. It also represents the impact of racism and White supremacy that has indoctrinated some Black people with self-hate. It is the epitome of what Omowale, better known as Malcolm X, said when he prophetically declared, “I say, and I say it again: you been misled, you been had, you been took, you been hoodwinked, bamboozled, led astray, run amok.”
You cannot be too much of who and what God made you to be. I was born Black because that is how God created me in this present world. I only use these terms “Black” and “White” because of the current circumstance of White hegemony that we live in. Any intelligent person knows that White and Black are mere social constructs created by wealthy White men to separate poor Whites from poor Blacks by making poor Whites believe they are better than poor Blacks in order to keep control of their wealth and power and not share that wealth and power with poor Whites or poor Blacks.
But I digress. It would be a scandal and a sin for anybody to try and change the culture and ethnicity that they were born with. As I stated above, I was born a Black man in America, and I chose to become part of the Christian faith. My ancestry, my ethnicity, and my so-called racial heritage are a part of my lineage and therefore essential to how I experience the world and practice the faith.
Jesus the Christ is described in Scripture as having “hair like lamb’s wool and feet the color of burnt bronze.” Jesus was born, lived, crucified, and resurrected in the North African region of Palestine, and when he was a toddler, his parents immigrated to Egypt to hide him from Herod. You cannot hide a blue-eyed, blond-haired, narrow-nosed child in Black African Egypt unless that child’s Blackness allows them to blend in.
There is no such thing as being too “pro-Black,” period. If anything, we are not Black enough. Our African identities are so powerful to these wicked people that they systematically set out to rob us of our names, our languages, and our culture because they saw the greatness in our people. That is the very reason our history is being erased right now. Those mutilators of the flesh through violence beat into many of us that Whiteness, White languages, White history, and White people were the standard so that we would produce the ignorance of some skin folks who would obtusely say, “Don’t be so pro-Black that you become anti-Christ.”
Jesus said, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” That means for Black people to be as Black as you can, to love your African Blackness every day of your life, because you cannot love others or love God truly unless you love and celebrate your heritage and lineage with everything you have.
Jesus Christ never denounced his African Jewishness, and therefore, I will not yield my African Blackness either.
Be encouraged, be authentic, and stay woke. Uhuru Sassa!
(The Rev. Dr. John E. Jackson Sr. is the Senior Pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ-Gary, 1276 W. 20th Ave. in Gary.)