This Christmas … What Color Is Your Santa, Your Jesus?

This time of the year we tend to radiate the Yuletide aura that grips our spirits and causes us to focus on world peace and goodwill toward humanity. Parents want to see their children happy because of the gifts they receive, and we hope our loved ones are blessed by our company. Plans are made to celebrate in the homes of family and friends as we focus our minds on Christmas and want it really means.

For those who practice Christianity, it is the time to reflect upon what God did through Christ by way of what is called Incarnation…that is God becoming human. I like what the revivalist George Whitefield said, “Jesus was God and man in one person, that God and man might be happy again.” The unfortunate reality is how ungracious and unhappy we are because of the white privilege implications that surround fantasy and reality: Santa Claus and Jesus respectively.

Image is everything. White Santa and White Jesus. Thanks to Megyn Kelly of Fox News and her false assertions about Jesus and Santa being white in response to an article written by Alisha Harris of Slate, we are reminded that we are nowhere near being post racial this Christmas. What many fail to realize is how the concept of race is a “new world phenomena” introduced doing the colonization of what we call the “Americas” and the continent of Africa from the 1400s through modern times. This nasty and proverbial wound upon the psyche of African Americans continue to purport there is really nothing good or grand about “blackness” or anything worthy other than whiteness.

When Alisha wrote in her treatise and suggested Santa Claus should not be a white man, I realized I could not care less. For me, Santa is a mythological figure that carries about as much weight as a unicorn. But, it is the impact of image Alisha addressed that reminds us how proponents of whiteness create a climate that continues to couch racism in coded language, perpetuating the belief that “nothing good can come from the hood.” But, Megyn Kelly got under my skin when she said that Jesus was white, too. To which I shouted at the TV, “That’s a d@^* lie!”

However, this is a great opportunity for teaching and resolving basic myths and ignorance about Christ, Christmas, and racism. Santa is fictional. Jesus is a historical figure who walked the dusty trails of Palestine, and He was nowhere near white!

In fact, Jesus was a brown-skinned Jew. He was not the modern-day depiction of a white man with blondish brown non-kinky hair and blue eyes, which is the figment of a Renaissance painter’s imagination. Jesus was a Jew born in a territory under the tyrannical Roman government. Jesus, as a child, was taken to Egypt to be saved from Herod’s murderous plot to kill the male boys who were two years old and younger.

During those times, Jesus would have stuck out like a sore thumb in Egypt had he been white. However, Megyn Kelly’s fallacious assumptions speak to a broader theological implication that is not frequently addressed.

First, her assertion that a fictional Santa is white holds as much street cred as “affluenza,” the notion that wealth is a “condition” that can obstruct rational behavior. However, when she tacked on that Jesus is white, she demonstrated a cultural and theological ignorance, which feeds the frenzy of white privilege. If Santa is white, then Christmas is only for white people as my pastor Carl Kenney suggested in his blog “The Rev-elution.” That said, I could not care less.

However, if Jesus is white, then it becomes the theological anchor to support white racism. For the record, let me state: a white god is too small for me just as a black god is too small for me.

Christmas, for me, has nothing to do with Santa being white, but it has everything to do with God becoming flesh…taking on the frailties of human existence to reconcile a broken humanity to a loving God. Christmas is the universality of the Divine taking on the particularity of humanity. Christmas is about transcending the cultural, gender, socio-economic, and educational differences that separate us.

Christmas is the opportunity to become post “whatever” and reclaim our pre-fallen existence rooted in grace and forgiveness. Christmas is about God being with us, for us, in us and through us bringing light, life, and love to a world we mess up through war, bigotry, greed, and pollution. Christmas is about accepting people of all races and ages that the dominant culture disregards. Christmas is ultimately about being “post” worldly and lovingly godly.

So, even when ignorance is exposed like that of Megyn Kelly, I am prompted to say like Donnie Hathaway, “And this Christmas will be a very special Christmas for me.” Not because of a white fictitious Santa but because of a loving wonderful Savior.