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Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Pp. 336. $32.50 hardcover.
This book posits that as important as anything Jesus Christ is reputed to have said or done is the simple fact of his appearance. He conveys meaning as a sign as much as he does as an actor; he needs only to stand and be seen with blue eyes, or black skin, or red hair, and the tides of power in American culture flow back and forth and back again.
This is, of course, because in Jesus Christ Christians see the image of God himself, the embodiment of perfection and human aspiration, and so it makes eminently good sense that, as Blum and Harvey document, late nineteenth-century racial theorists like the New York attorney Madison Grant worked hard to sever any link between Jesus and his presumably Jewish ancestry and instead strove to demonstrate that Jesus must have been "Nordic," with eyes and skin the color of their own. For Grant, that Western Europeans had historically represented Christ with blonde hair was significant; as he claimed "such quasi-authentic traditions as we have of our Lord strongly suggest his Nordic, possibly Greek, physical and moral attributes" (163).
Such theorizing was typical of those Americans of European descent who strongly desired that Jesus look as if he might be their cousin. Men like Grant, or members of the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s, threw behind that yearning the scientific force of fin-de-siècle racial pseudo-science. Other nineteenth-century Americans, like Mormons or the adherents of the Lost Cause who straggled dazed through the South of the Reconstruction, found that a white, suffering Jesus gave meaning to their own oppression and allowed them to reclaim the moral high ground that identification with Jesus Christ could offer.
The authors trace such racialized imaginings of Christ far back in Western...