The Greatest Lie of All Time
This lie has resulted in war, generational trauma, the downward mobility of millions of people, and countless other grievances across the entire globe.
As a matter of fact, it can be argued that no other lie has resulted in as much violence and pain as this one.
What lie is this, you might ask?
The lie that Jesus Christ, if he did in fact walk the earth, was a Caucasian man.
Even if we choose to ignore the fact that the European features with which Jesus is most often depicted are not commonly seen in individuals from the part of the world where he was from, why then did he hide in Egypt?
I cannot name a single religious leader who has not perpetuated this blatant falsehood. Even Hollywood has played along, always casting Caucasian men to play the son of God, usually men with blonde hair and blue eyes!
It isn’t difficult to see why. Whiteness protects itself above all else. And here in the United States, all must bear this burden, most recently women and other uterus-bearing individuals.
For those of you who still believe the overturning of Roe v. Wade earlier this year by the Supreme Court has anything to do with protecting the life of the unborn, let us quickly examine four facts:
Americans across the country overwhelmingly support a woman’s right to choose, even in states where we are led to believe that is not the case. One need look no further than the results of the 2022 midterm elections- every state where abortion rights were on the ballot overwhelmingly voted to protect those rights. Some estimate as many as 2/3 of Americans nationwide support a woman’s right to choose.
Ben J. Wattenberg, a white supremacist who advised President Lyndon B. Johnson, believed the United States had a huge problem on its hands; consider this excerpt from his book, The Birth Dearth (1989): The major problem confronting the United States today is there aren’t enough white babies being born. If we don’t do something about this and do it now, white people will be in the numerical minority and we will no longer be a white man’s land. Wattenberg proposed three solutions: 1. We could pay American women to have babies, except you’d have to pay Black and Brown women as well, 2. We could increase immigration quotas, but the far majority of immigrants in the ‘80’s were people of color (many, like my mother, fleeing US-backed civil wars), or 3. From The Birth Dearth (1989): The third thing we could do is remember that sixty percent of the fetuses that are aborted every year are white. If we could keep that sixty percent of life alive, that would solve our birth dearth.
W.A. Criswell, the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, satisfied with the Roe v. Wade ruling, stated: I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person… and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.
And finally perhaps the most telling words, spoken by Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Moral Majority along with Pastor Jerry Falwell (recognize that last name?) at a 1990 conference sponsored by the Ethics and Public Policy Center (another Religious Right organization): Let’s remember, …that the Religious Right did not come together in response to the Roe decision. No…what got us going as a political movement was the attempt on the part of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its racially discriminatory policies.
That’s right. Racism. Good old-fashioned racism and the ability to practice it openly and without consequence is the glue that holds together the Religious Right.
White supremacy was partially born out of a fear that people of color would surpass any societal advances made by white folks and take on leadership roles in our governmental, educational, and other systems. Thus a key component of the power structure that we see played out in interracial dynamics to this very day is the perpetuation of the myth that white people are superior to all others.
And what better way to infect the minds of millions of people than leading them to believe that their Savior Jesus Christ is white?
Eric Curry is an organizer, writer, San Francisco historian, and former Congressional candidate. Check out his guided tours here or read his first book, A Real San Francisco Story. With Pets. here