Kelly: Jesus and Santa are white

Pretty much everyone in America has heard what Megyn Kelly of Fox News said about Santa Claus and Jesus. Here's the money quote:



Okay, sure. Only old white men watch Fox News, not kids, but never mind.

In related news, God is white. Everyone in the Bible is white. The Easter Bunny is white, and so is the Tooth Fairy.

Also, presidents are white--legitimate presidents, anyway. Popes are white. Movie and TV stars are white--except Oprah. Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela weren't white, but they were conservative patriots, which is like honorary whites.

Basically anyone good or important is or was white. These people made the world what it is today, which is civilized and white.

Just a joke?

As America mocked Kelly mercilessly, she tried to explain herself:

Megyn Kelly doubles down on ‘white Santa’: I did it for the kidsAfter Kelly sparked outraged on the Internet and became fodder late-night comics, she responded to the controversy on Friday.

“I offered a tongue-in-cheek message for any kids watching,” she explained. “Humor is a part of what we try to bring to this show, but sometimes that is lost on the humorless.”In other words, she went with a classic excuse: "My racism was just a joke."

If it really was a joke, wouldn't a proper response be: "Obviously, Santa is a fictional character and could be any color--black, brown, or whatever. And Jesus, as a Middle Eastern Jew, probably was dark-skinned, not white. I was just joking about their being white, and especially about its being a verifiable fact.

"Sorry I didn't make it clear that I was sarcastically saying the opposite of what I meant. Clearly Santa and Jesus aren't verifiably white and their skin colors are not any kind of a fact."

Below:  White Jesus, black Jesus, and our best guess about what the historical Jesus looked like (if he existed).



Doubling down on racism

Conservative racists doubled down on Kelly's racist claims:

Libertarian Radio Host: Santa Is White Just Like MLK Was BlackLibertarian radio host Neal Boortz on Monday defended Fox News' Megyn Kelly's insistence that Santa Claus is white, Buzzfeed reported.

"I'm sorry. Santa Claus is white, okay? Deal with it," Boortz, who was filling in for Herman Cain on his radio show, said after a caller asked about the controversy surrounding Kelly's statement.

"I'm gonna scream and complain because Martin Luther King is always portrayed as black," Boortz added.New Mexico teacher chides black student for costume because ‘Santa Claus is white’A New Mexico teacher was disciplined this week after the parent of one of his students complained that he had told his black son that Santa Claus is white.

According to Michael Rougier, the parent, the unidentified teacher approached his ninth-grade son, Christopher, who was wearing a Santa hat and fake beard and said, “Don’t you know Santa Claus is white? Why are you wearing that?”The teacher probably added that the boy could play an elf (slave) or reindeer (animal). Brown roles for brown people, right?

As for Boortz, King was depicted as black because he was black. Santa Claus and Jesus are fictional characters who have fictional skin colors. The two cases aren't comparable.

Some conservatives pointed to St. Nicholas, the supposed source of St. Nick aka Santa. Nice try, but wrong:



As a native of Asia Minor, Nicholas's skin was brown, not white. As church depictions of him indicate.

Archie knows best

If real people don't understand Jesus and Santa, perhaps we can rely on fictional characters.

For instance, the worst bigot in TV history agrees with Megyn Kelly:



Fortunately, Santa himself showed up to set the record straight:

‘Black As Hell’ Santa Appears on SNL to Address Megyn KellySanta explained to viewers that it’s really much easier if everyone thinks he’s white–after all, he can’t get the toys delivered if he keeps getting pulled over, can he?

Santa ended with a request: when you see him in your house, don’t call the police.

Conservatives dream of white Christmas

What the controversy about white Jesus and Santa tells us about the conservative mindset:

It’s wrong to worship ‘white Jesus’

By Susan Brooks ThistlethwaiteJesus, Christians believe, is God-with-us. Thus, when someone insists Jesus was “white,” the theological implication is that God is white.

In fact, doesn’t God, in our cultural stereotype, look a lot like Santa? Old white man with a long white beard?

A great illustration of this point happened on Wednesday night when Megyn Kelly declared on her Fox News showthat both Santa Claus and Jesus were white.

Jesus and Santa are enormously powerful images for Americans and it is not surprising, as the U.S. is becoming ever more racially diverse, that there would be a visible contest over whether Jesus and Santa are white.

This is the frontline of our struggles over what it means to be an American and a person of faith today. Racial prejudice has actually increased since the election of Barack Obama, as an AP News Poll taken earlier this fall shows. This is due, I believe, to an increase in racially polarizing rhetoric since President Obama’s election, and it is both culturally and religiously harmful.

Kelly’s comments were elicited by a piece in Slate, “Santa Claus Should Not Be A White Man Any More,” by Alisha Harris. Harris writes movingly about the dominant culture white Santa and its effect on her as a kid.

But Alisha Harris’s childhood experience should be disregarded, according to Kelly, because it is contradictory to dominant cultural and religious norms. “Just because it makes you feel uncomfortable doesn’t mean it has to change, you know?” she added. “I mean, Jesus was a white man too. He was a historical figure, that’s a verifiable fact, as is Santa—I just want the kids watching to know that.”

Santa, of course, is a fictional character based on the 4th century Saint Nikolaos of Myra who lived in what is now Turkey.

Jesus, however, was an historical figure and he was not “white.”Dreaming of a White Jesus (and a Real Santa): Reflections on Conservative Derangement

By Tim WiseTo be perfectly honest, I find it quite shocking that anyone would be, well, shocked, by Megyn Kelly’s recent insistence on her FOX show that Santa Claus and Jesus are both white men, or even—and perhaps this is the bigger point—that Santa Claus is real. After all, when one works for a news outlet devoted to the daily propagation of fiction, fabricating such nonsensical details as these can’t exactly be seen as a deviation from an otherwise reality-based norm. These are people for whom man-made climate change isn’t happening but the “War on Christmas” is. People who will no doubt soon proclaim said war to be clear evidence of growing anti-white hatred, given the “verifiable” whiteness of the holiday’s two primary figures, as Kelly put it late last week.

Oh, and yes, I know, she has tried to rationalize her comments, to explain them away as a joke, a mere stab at open mic night perhaps, presuming for herself the mantle of a comedian—a profession for which she is no more qualified than the one she currently inhabits. She was just kidding, and oh yeah (as even she admits), she spoke too soon when demanding that “Jesus was white,” so, ya know, sorry about that one! It is at this point that dear Ms. Kelly should probably be reminded that one cannot, in moments like this, have it both ways: it cannot be both a joke, and at the same time, something you meant so literally as to then necessitate a retraction on the Jesus part. It’s like a criminal suspect saying they didn’t shoot the other guy, and anyway, it was self-defense.

No indeed, humor doesn’t require correction when the subject matter turns out to be absurd, because absurdity was the point. Retraction is for self-professed news people when they get the facts wrong, as she did. She was just supposing that none of her audience would notice, or care, as none of her guests did that day: people who sat there smiling all around, and raising nary a syllable of objection when she said that Santa “just is white.” One wonders if such silence would likewise have obtained had she chosen to proclaim equally rational positions, such as the “verifiable fact” that the Easter Bunny just is fluffy, or that the Tooth Fairy, just is the most beautiful winged creature in the known Universe.

Now don’t get me wrong, if there were a Santa Claus, there is very little doubt that he would have to be white. After all, no black man could manage to work only one day out of the year and not be called lazy; and surely no black man could get away with breaking into millions of homes, even if he was bearing presents. Some cop or neighborhood watch captain would surely have taken him down long ago, convinced that the red suit he was wearing signified gang colors. So, and let me be the first to admit it: in a world where Santa actually existed, along with unicorns, pixie dust and the Lorax, Megyn Kelly would have a damned good point. Note, this is how one can make a joke about Santa being white, without reinforcing white racial normalcy: but of course no FOX personality would choose to make the joke this way, because such a joke would require, first, an acknowledgment of the reality of racial profiling and anti-black racism, neither of which conservatives can afford to countenance. This is why conservative race humor isn’t funny, just racist; please take note of it. Thank you.Wise's point:What this means for most white people is simple enough. Even though no anthropologist or historian of first century Galilean Jews—which is to say Palestinians—would believe that Jesus could have been white, if that’s the image in the stained glass of one’s church, or on the Christmas card sent to you by your great-aunt Millie, well then, what do anthropologists know anyway? What is science compared to what makes us feel better? Indeed, this is the irony of Megyn Kelly’s rant last week: while she was lambasting an African American essayist who had argued that a white Santa was insufficiently inclusive—by telling her that “just because something makes you uncomfortable doesn’t mean it has to change”—the fact is, it is Megyn Kelly and white conservatives the world over who apparently need Jesus to be white. Which is why they changed him so as to make him such, even though many of the earliest depictions of him hewed more closely to the logical and historical truth. This truth is one that, it should be noted, has been explicated clearly by forensic anthropologists based on the available period-specific evidence, in their reconstructions of the face of Jesus. Suffice it to say that their scientifically more compelling image is one that would not only be rejected by most whites (and surely most who rely on FOX for their news), but would likely provoke them to deep and abiding anger.

Which brings us to the far more important point: namely, why do white people apparently require white heroes, icons and saviors? Because we quite obviously do. Surely one cannot think it coincidence that Jesus has been so rendered ever since Christianity came to be used in the service of European supremacy? Surely one cannot find it a capricious and fanciful whim—or mere artistic contrivance—that would cause Michelangelo, Mel Gibson and thousands more between to envision Jesus as essentially one of ours? Likewise, and on a far less serious note, do we really believe that Santa has “always been white” as Limbaugh put it—or as Kelly herself did in her defense, when referencing films like “Miracle on 34th Street”—because there were no darker actors capable of chortling “ho ho ho,” and rubbing their prodigious bellies?

No indeed, there are no coincidences here, and however much Megyn Kelly now wishes to play victim, proclaiming herself the unjust target of “race baiters,” such a conceit is rich and even precious coming from her: someone who spent several hours a few years back hyping an entirely nonsensical story about the New Black Panthers, and how they were intimidating white voters at a polling place in Philadelphia in 2008. And this she did, even though in all the hours of coverage she could produce not one actual voter at the precinct who claimed to have been intimidated (and indeed, there were none), and although even the leading conservative on the Civil Rights Commission, which investigated the charge called it much ado about nothing.

Megyn Kelly is not the victim. And it is not race-baiting to suggest that there might be something troubling about the racialization of Jesus as a white man, or that there might be something even more troubling about a grown and well-paid news figure insisting that Santa is anything. Whether one wishes to address it or not, there is a reason these icons have been rendered white, especially Jesus. It would hardly have done, one supposes, to allow the more historically accurate Jesus to predominate in the church paintings, as Europe branched out, seeking to conquer the globe in the name of money and power and land, proclaiming the inferiority of the darker types all the while (and most ironically, their spiritual inferiority). It would have been decidedly more difficult, one might imagine, to enslave and brutalize and rape and murder the black and brown, if those who did the deed had then to enter their churches on the Sabbath and pray to a savior whose visage bore an uncanny and haunting resemblance to the man they had just lynched the night before, as the Romans had done on a cross with another brother so many years before.

To make the savior of the universe (at least in Christian eyes) a white man is to make possible, literally, the enslavement of brown and black peoples, the evisceration of still others and the conquest of their land in the name of white superiority. These historic crimes are almost unthinkable in a society where truth and historical accuracy were valued more than white skin. Which is to say, when conservatives insist Megyn Kelly’s comments—and the beliefs of millions—that Jesus was white are only a matter of personal preference without consequence, they write and speak as if history didn’t happen. But it did, and it matters, however painful it might be for white people to face.Comment:  The point about Jesus and Santa isn't to prove their race. It's that conservatives feel the need to "own" them, the Founders, God, et al.

By claiming that God, Jesus, Santa, and anyone else they consider an authority figure are white, they're claiming the supremacy of whiteness. They're claiming white Pilgrims, Founding Fathers, pioneers and cowboys, et al. made America great. That is, whiteness made America great. or simply white is great.

For more on the subject, see White Students Complain About Race Talk and GOP Claims Racism Ended.

White Jesus enabled European conquest

No, Jesus wasn’t a white dude

But you won't hear that on the popular miniseries "The Bible"

By Chauncey DeVegaDespite the “common sense” depiction of Jesus in the (white) American popular imagination, the historical Jesus Christ is not a white surfer dude with blue eyes, long flowing hair, and tanned and toned skin.

When I was an undergraduate and forced to take a series of religious studies classes as part of a core requirement, I was exposed first-hand to how volatile such a basic observation can be to some Christians and others who identify with that faith tradition. Our professor was discussing how the Bible is a historical text that has been edited and changed to reveal the prevailing political and social norms of a given time. I asked a question about the Civil Rights Movement and how black folks tried to use the text for purposes of political inspiration and motivation in the face of great adversity.

This transitioned to a followup question where I asked, “What color was Jesus?” Having just seen the movie, Malcolm X, I was curious as to the professor’s response. He looked around and plainly said that Jesus Christ was not white or European. He would likely be a medium-complected Jew with brown or darker skin.

Check and mate: thus my followup, “Could one reasonably say that Jesus the historical figure was black?”

Our masterful professor looked around in a contemplative manner and said, “Depending on who you ask, and in what context, one could say that he could be considered ‘black’ in a society like America where whites have been so color conscious and race obsessed.” You could have heard a pin hit the floor as gasps of anger erupted from the white (and some black and brown) students in the class.

Some students actually tried to get this professor fired. He was saved by a few things. First, his research claims, historiography on the matter, and credentials were impeccable. He had tenure. And he was white. It is quite likely that a black faculty member making such a basic claim would have had far fewer protections.

In these discussions of faith, some would likely object that race doesn’t matter. Who cares what color the historical Jesus is/was?

Here, the color of Jesus Christ matters while simultaneously being of little import. Thus, a paradox. If the color of Jesus Christ is unimportant, why then the objection to the question and a resistance to changing the images to be more historically accurate? Moreover, such a basic question about the lie that is white Jesus, is often deflected and redirected into one which ends with the power of the white racial frame enabling those invested in its distortion(s) of reality arguing that anyone, especially a person of color, asking such things must be a black “racist” or anti-white.

If a Christian is a true believer why would they have difficulty reconciling their faith with such a superficial thing as changing the historical lie that is white Jesus into one that is more accurate, a man of color, whose message would be unchanged? Would it really be that hard for some white Christians (and others) to kneel before a black or brown Jesus Christ? Are the psychic wages of whiteness so great as to distort a person’s image of God?

These matters of race, religion and politics remain potent even in 21st-century America. See how President Obama’s presidential campaign was almost destroyed by Reverend Wright and the white conservative bogeyman known as “black liberation theology.”

Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo’s White Jesus were iconic images that enabled European colonialism and imperialism. In these grand projects of global white power and conquest, “Christian” became synonymous with free, white and civilized. “Heathen” meant that whole populations could be subjected to extermination, enslavement and exploitation.

The current and most popular image of Jesus as created by Warner Sallman in 1941 depicts the former as a white “American.” Here, American exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny, and rise as an Imperial power were ordained as being one with Jesus, and a blessing from God for a country whose elites imagined it to be a “shining city on the hill.”Comment:  How to test conservative Christians for racism: Portray God, Mary, and Jesus with dark-brown skin. If this bothers them, they're racists.

For more on the subject, see Conservatives Deny "Black Jesus," Genocide.

Below:  White Jesus, black Jesus, and brown Jesus. The third version is probably what he actually looked like.

Conservatives deny "black Jesus," genocide

Anti-racist activist blames Catholic Church for slaughtering American Indians in speech at Catholic University

By Timothy DionisopoulosRenowned anti-racist activist Tim Wise claimed that the Catholic Church is in part responsible for the slaughter of Native Americans in a speech funded by and hosted at a Catholic university on Wednesday.

“The Church was directly implicated in slaughtering the indigenous people on this continent,” said Wise, in his speech at Providence College, a catholic university in Providence, Rhode Island.

“The Church was directly implicated in the conquest of the Southwest,” he continued. “It was directly implicated in sending indigenous children to boarding schools to strip them of their culture, to cut their hair, to kill the Indian and save the man for Jesus.”

In the same speech entitled, “Beyond Diversity: Challenging Racism in an Age of Backlash,” Wise argued the church should render images of Jesus Christ as black for one-year in order to help Christians consider the notion that [humans] “are not race.”

“I will consider this notion that we are not race when we decide to make Jesus black for a year,” said Wise. “Just a year.”

Naturally, Tim Wise himself offers more on the story:

Hearing No Evil: The Amazing Obtuseness of Campus Conservatives

By Tim Wise[H]er friend and conservative colleague’s question—actually it was a statement—was even more interesting. She claimed that I was “anthropologically reductionist” (one of those word casseroles that we learn in college and that some sadly deploy just to show how smart they are), for even noticing something like race. She, on the other hand, in the throes of a deeper (and Scriptural) enlightenment merely saw “people” when she looked around, not colors, and especially “people made in the image of God.” Cue the harps and Vienna Boy’s Choir.

In response, I told her first that such a sentiment was lovely, but, I thought naive. Mostly because even if we accept the notion that we are all merely individuals made in the image of God, the fact is, our identities as whites or people or color, men or women, straight folks or LGBT, have mattered, and have resulted in advantages for some and disadvantages for others. In other words, we can’t treat people as abstractions, removed from their social context and consider that justice. If racism has had consequences—which of course her black friend refused to admit, so no doubt one can understand her confusion—then one must deal with that, and attempt to rectify the injustices that have brought us to this point, not merely gloss over them in the name of some colorblind ecumenism, thereby leaving in place all the unearned advantages obtained by some and unearned disadvantages visited upon the rest. She was, in short, guilty of viewing individuals using a dictionary definition of the term, when what we actually experience in this world in the lives we lead, is an encyclopedic version of ourselves, far more complex than either the dictionary, or certainly the Bible might lead us to believe.

But what I also said—and which apparently created such a firestorm—was the part where I noted that however nice it was to prattle on about people being made in the image of God, that even there, we have a problem in this culture, given how we have created the image of that God to match whiteness. In other words, we have made God white, and Jesus white, as could be seen on any number of crucifixes (or is it crucifi?) around this Catholic campus, including one that was hanging right behind my head while I spoke: a lily-white, Europeanized savior, devoid of any relationship to what first century Jews would have looked like. Until my questioner was prepared to deal with that, and why we had done that, and what it meant, she really was in no position to lecture me about my anthropological reductionism or anything else.

One would think that any reasonably educated person would realize that the whitening of Jesus was an act of white supremacy, undertaken down through many centuries for the purpose of inculcating western and European domination. Constantine, after all, said that the cross was the sign under which he would conquer, not liberate, the world. My comments are not remotely contestable by rational people. But in the eyes of Providence College conservatives, they were heresy of the highest order.

And so today I discovered that someone in the crowd apparently provided a video of my talk to well-known white nationalist (as in, openly so), and Providence resident, Tim Dionisopoulos, and that he had written about it and uploaded it to the web. Therein, Dionisopoulos took special umbrage at my discussion of the white Jesus issue, as if my comments were the height of craziness. And he made special note of the part where I joked that the school should make Jesus black for a year, just to show that his color “really doesn’t matter” (which is what white Christians always tell me when I bring up his whitening, as if to suggest I shouldn’t make a big deal of it). Apparently, some folks think I was being serious and that my comment (obviously intended to lampoon their own unblinking devotion to his pasty whiteness on their campus crosses) suggested some kind of anti-Catholic bias.

The videographers also found it shocking, just shocking that I would suggest the Catholic Church (and really, Christendom more broadly), had been deeply implicated in the genocidal mistreatment of indigenous peoples throughout the Americas. This revelation comes as no surprise to anyone who has studied the history of native peoples, or the church for that matter; indeed, even the Church no longer denies it, though they rarely deal honestly with its implications. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, for instance, has itself noted the history, however bloodlessly as such:Catholicism’s spread to Native people across the United States resembles in many ways the settling of the country itself. From the earliest days French and Spanish missionaries who came to this world newly discovered by Europeans came as extensions of the colonizing powers. The approach was, in many cases, to force the Natives to accept the faith as part of the process of servitude…The history of the Alta California missions are instructive here. These were settlements established by Spanish colonizers so as to rapidly assimilate native peoples there into both European culture and Catholicism, under the belief of the Church that it had a moral right to evangelize and that the Spanish crown had a legal right to land. The missions operated by forcibly resettling indigenous persons around the mission itself so as “convert them” not only from so-called heathens into Catholics, but from savages to civilized peoples, in European terms. Once Indians were Baptized they were disallowed the right to move about the country; rather, they were forced to work at the missions, under the rigid control of the Friars. Indian women, in particular, were housed in such unsanitary conditions at the missions that diseases spread rapidly, resulting in the deaths of thousands. Contemporaries writing at the time noted without compunction that the labor conditions at the missions resembled slavery, and since the native peoples were unpaid for their work—work that ultimately enriched the Catholic Church and the colonial powers with which the Church was entwined—such an analogy is obviously warranted.

Elsewhere the Church contributed directly to the cultural and even physical evisceration of indigenous Americans, in ways that any truly educated person in this country would know, were our schools dedicated to the teaching of anything remotely comporting with truth. For a comprehensive accounting of the evil done in the name of God to indigenous peoples, one need only read George Tinker’s Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide, or David Stannard’s meticulously documented, American Holocaust, to see that my comments at Providence, far from indicating a bias against Catholicism, fully dovetail with historical fact, however inconvenient those facts may be for a school that has chosen “Friars” as its sports mascot.

That today’s campus conservatives think challenging the phony whiteness of Jesus, or noting the history of the church’s role in racism makes one a radical is instructive. It speaks to what an utterly sheltered, provincial and fundamentally ignorant world view these persons have been given heretofore, by their parents, high schools, priests and preachers, and by a larger society that has no room for any understanding of America and Christianity that isn’t laudatory. Their inability to hear of evil, let alone address it, is rendered all the less likely by such a sheltering, and their ability to engage in even the simplest rational dialogue with others, or even with history, is made almost impossible.Comment:  Good job linking ignorance about black Jesus to ignorance about the Euro-Christian genocide of indigenous people. We also could link these things to the hatred of Obama, immigration, and the "welfare state." Or the love of mascots, hipster headdresses, and other forms of casual racism and sexism. Again, it's all about asserting white male privilege over everyone else.

For more on conservative racism, see Conservatives Fear Minorities and White Men Lose to Demographic Change.

Below:  Fictional Jesus vs. real Jesus.