Do we really want a white Christmas?

“How do I know that Christ wasn’t black?” my grandfather once asked. He was philosophizing, as he often did. He was under pressure because someone had “defaced” a monument to Jesus and Mary within his jurisdiction by painting their faces and hands black. Grandpa was the Town Marshall in Patagonia, Arizona, a mining town that was then in steep decline ever since the gold veins that were the reason for its establishment had been exhausted.
The defaced monument had been erected by a local woman at the conclusion of World War I. After her son had been drafted and sent to Europe to fight the Kaiser, she prayed for his safe homecoming and promised to build the shrine if God returned her son safely. Her son did return from the war whole and she kept her end of the bargain. She chiseled a cave into the side of the mountain and placed within it sculpted ceramic statues representing the birth of Christ.
The shrine became modestly famous and actually attracted a few tourists to the impoverished town each year. There were always fresh flowers left there by those who came to lift up a prayer in this very Catholic area.
So when a furious visitor complained to my grandfather that the statue had been painted black by someone apparently wishing to make a political point, grandpa was obligated to bring the perpetrators to justice. His pursued his investigation without much enthusiasm, primarily because he did not necessarily agree that the statues had been defaced. So far as I know, he never actually did anything. So far as he was concerned, someone had simply given the monument a fresh coat of paint.
Shortly thereafter, someone restored the statues to their original hues and the whole controversy died down.
My grandfather intuitively understood something that too many people never figure out – that Jesus Christ probably bore absolutely no resemblance to the sandy-haired, blue-eyed European looking fellow created by painters whose only image of the human race was that of their fellow Europeans.
The sincerely pious efforts of those European painters probably did a disservice to the cause of Christianity. It is far more likely that Christ bore a closer resemblance to Yasser Arafat than he did to that handsome example of Aryan perfection sitting at the table of Leonardo DaVinci’s “Last Supper.”
In an ideal world, the now traditional European representation of Christ would be harmless. But in a world of race baiting charlatans like Jesse Jackson, skin color rather than the message has become the big issue. Recently, African-Americans have embraced a synthetic alternative to Christmas called Kwanzaa. The ever so reverend Al Sharpton, Democratic candidate for president, announced his support for Kwanzaa because he believed that it would help “de-whiteify” Christmas.
It’s too bad that Al Sharpton and his ilk do not have the advantage of my grandfather’s wisdom. The whole point of Christ’s life was that the message he brought should be the point of emphasis and not necessarily the messenger. What the gospels glorify as virgin birth might now be called an unwed pregnancy. Christ came from the humblest origins possible within his contemporary culture precisely so that the message he conveyed to the world would have to stand on its own, independent of the messenger’s social status – or his skin color for that matter.
And it should be noted that the words of this man of the humblest origins eventually conquered the Roman Empire. The prestige and power of the Caesars was no match for the word of God, brought to the world by a man who emerged from the lowest social strata within a race of slaves.
I would advise all those out there, who believe that African-Americans need an alternative to Christmas simply because Renaissance era artists chose to depict Christ in their own image, to imagine Christ looking like whatever makes them comfortable. If you find it easier to accept the word while imagining Christ as black, Asian, or Hispanic, then go for it. It is, after all the message, and not the appearance of the messenger, that gives the reason to the season.
I have to wonder that if we did not have such a white Christmas, would anyone really feel the need for a de-whiteified Kwanzaa? Do we really need one more division in this country?