White Jesus Must Die: Decoding Black Jesus The Iconography of Coon Christ and Jesus of the People

Abstract

The depiction of a racialized Jesus is as old as the modern concepts of race. According to art historian Anna Swartwood House, our modern depictions of Jesus are based on Renaissance images of a pale-skinned man with flowing hair, such as those of three iconic paintings: Michelangelo’s Last Judgment(1536–41), Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper (1495–98), and Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ (1940). Yet these depictions of Jesus as a racialized figure in Christian history have no historical bearing on the true nature of Jesus’s racial identity. They are merely, as House writes, “a long tradition of white Europeans creating and disseminating pictures of Christ made in their own image” (House 2020). It is not known when images of white Jesus became a staple item in Black homes, but from my own memory as a child in the 1960s and 1970s, I can recount the multitude of Black families that had at least one portrait of Sallman’s painting adorning the walls of their homes. For many Black families, there was no question that Jesus was a white person.