Even Martin Luther King Jr. absorbed racist images of a white Jesus

Evidence

In 1957, King received a letter for his “Advice for the Living” column in Ebony magazine. “Why did God make Jesus white, when the majority of peoples in the world are non-white?” Jesus “would have been no more significant if His skin had been black,” King responded. “He is no less significant because his skin was white.” The nation’s most famous Black preacher and activist prayed to a White Jesus? A “disturbed” reader ripped off a letter to Ebony. “I believe, as you do, that skin color shouldn’t be important, but I don’t believe Jesus was white,” the reader stated. “What is the basis for your assumption that he was?” With only a basis in racist ideas, King did not respond. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 940

Categorization

• XREF: Crucial test case for reader’s goal: even the antiracist icon unknowingly held a racist idea (white Jesus), supporting Kendi’s claim that racist ideas pervade even well-meaning figures — assimilationists and antiracists alike.
• SEED: Could build a piece on how ideological antiracists still harbor unexamined racist imagery — the white Jesus as proof that eliminating racist ideas requires structural work, not just good intentions.