English religious imagination racialized Satan as a tall black man

Evidence

John Nelson, a late eighteenth-century English Methodist preacher, recalled one of his nightmares: “I dreamed I was in Yorkshire, going from Gomersal-Hill-Top to Cleckheaton; and about the middle of the lane, I thought I saw Satan coming to meet me in the shape of a tall, black man, and the hair of his head like snakes; … But I went on, ript open my clothes, and shewed him my naked breast, saying, ‘See, here is the blood of Christ.’ Then I thought he fled from me as fast as a hare could run.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1977

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The demonization of blackness in an ordinary English Methodist’s dream shows how racial ideology saturated even the religious subconscious of the working class—a psychological substrate of white supremacy that Robinson’s theory needs.
• CANDY: A vivid, unsettling dream-image—Satan as a tall black man with snaky hair—that captures how race penetrated the English religious imagination.