People probably overestimate how “non-white” Jesus would be at the time. The whole skin color thing is a very colonial concept. I don’t know that in a world centered in the Mediterranean people would have thought of Italians as “white” and Northern Africans or Middle Easterns as “non-white”.
So in a way maybe yeah, “white Jesus” is a very American invention, just not necessarily in the way Americans parse it. US racial categories don’t work anywhere else even today, anyway.
Sure. Point is, it’s a product of colonialism and full-on anachronistic. Americans in particular keep trying to apply their modern categorizations, which both leftists and conservatives have fully internalized, to all places and times and it really doesn’t work.
People probably overestimate how “non-white” Jesus would be at the time. The whole skin color thing is a very colonial concept. I don’t know that in a world centered in the Mediterranean people would have thought of Italians as “white” and Northern Africans or Middle Easterns as “non-white”.
So in a way maybe yeah, “white Jesus” is a very American invention, just not necessarily in the way Americans parse it. US racial categories don’t work anywhere else even today, anyway.
No, it’s much older than the US. It’s a European invention, just as the US is fundamentally a product of European colonialism.
Sure. Point is, it’s a product of colonialism and full-on anachronistic. Americans in particular keep trying to apply their modern categorizations, which both leftists and conservatives have fully internalized, to all places and times and it really doesn’t work.