-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
James W. Perkinson, Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey. The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 5, December 2013, Pages 1541–1542, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.5.1541
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
This review begins its work in the echo of a bombing whose reverberation is tangled with the bombing that anchors the writing of Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey. Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 15, 1963, experienced the white supremacist response to Martin Luther King Jr.'s trumpeting of his “dream,” three weeks earlier, on a day of race-neutral solidarity in the nation's capital. And as Blum and Harvey note, the explosion obliterated the white face of the stained-glass Jesus (previously bathing the church's sanctuary in familiar “comfort”) as well as the brown-skinned bodies of four young black innocents. The recent debacle in Copley Square, Boston, which shattered that city's 116th marathon, has served as equally troubling notice that religiously fueled wrath over racially coded politics remains volatile and deadly. On how we “read” such depends much of consequence.
The Color of Christ stands as a pop culture tour de force, ferreting out the New World career of an Old World savior as his body and meaning “explode” into prolixities of claims and shards of significance too combustible to track entirely. The authors' focal concern is Jesus's relationship with an elusive and recombinant whiteness, ranging from the supremacist genocides of early colonial days to our current kaleidoscope of digitized buffoonery. From the blank hole left atop the white body of the Jesus of Birmingham emerges a cacophony of voices, testifying to messianisms abhorrent and creative, recalcitrant and progressive, one more time reifying white power inside the sanctuary or bombastically breaking the thrall of light-coded control in celebration of an insurgent coming of color. In Detroit, for instance, the battle became briefly epic in a westside neighborhood, after the 1967 rebellion. Blacks painted the statue of Jesus in the inner city churchyard of Sacred Heart Parish black and brown overnight, only to find they had to renew their efforts a few days later when the statue was repainted white by other neighborhood residents. Here was the battle over sacred emblems signifying a war of political interests, long shaping a city and a nation!
