Megyn Kelly said that Jesus was white. The son of God, she said, was a white man. It logically follows, lest you're deeming Mary a Nubian princess -- that God his father was white as well.
That's it in a nutshell -- the mother lode of the white supremacy that governed this nation for most of its history, the mother lode of the white supremacy that still keeps the steeled toe of its jackboot on our throats. A white God is the poison pill buried in the creamy cannoli of Christianity. God is white. Man is made in God's image; and thus white men are Godly. The rest of us are those over whom God's reflections (white men) rightly hold dominion.
It's always been there. What's amazing is that it took an executive-level Fox newsreader to megaphone it. If a person of color had made the same declaration from another standpoint, he or she would have been dismissed as just an angry or aggrieved ethnic; and you needn't listen to them because... God, like His son, is white, and man is made in God's image, so the non-white are lesser beings.
The figure on the crucifix has an aquiline nose and long flowing hair. The ubiquitous pop culture images of Jesus are equally white. Until relatively recently, most black churches had a white Jesus staring down from their walls, telling its black congregants that the God Almighty they worshipped looked like the people who chained, enslaved and brutalized them for centuries -- that they were dehumanized and reviled by those created in God's own image; chained and reviled by those who functioned in God's stead on this earth. White revulsion, they were told, was God's own.
It's long been considered a conundrum in black American society that its Christian church, propped on the racist foundation of a white God, also fueled our greatest feats of liberation. But I don't think the irony is as great as once thought. We've too often tied our liberation to the notion of whites being as Godly as they've insisted they are. We expected them to shed the white supremacy of our slave/Jim Crow past like a dirty sock, despite the fact that this society had lived in that nasty old thing for centuries.
For example, at the dawn of Barack Obama's presidency, we too leapt on the "Is America now post-racial" meme. We feigned shock that a smart man who was raised by a white mother and grandparents in white households, and thus viewed the world with a mainstream -- as opposed to outsider -- lens, would have trouble soothing white folks' racial hackles and getting them to see past the black. Barack Obama's masterful electoral ability to mine his biraciality did not America post-racial make, as we all learned the hard way.
Since then, his black, bi-racial presidency has been subjected to a level of contempt rarely openly displayed for a sitting president, right down to being heckled by a Congressman while delivering a State of the Union Speech.
As the Greenberg Quinlan Rossner Research Group reported on their focus groups of Republican base voters:
And while few explicitly talk about Obama in racial terms, the base supporters are very conscious of being white in a country with growing minorities. Their party is losing to a Democratic Party of big government whose goal is to expand programs that mainly benefit minorities. Race remains very much alive in the politics of the Republican Party.
And as they wrote of their focus groups of white Republican evangelicals:
Social issues are central for Evangelicals and they feel a deep sense of cultural and political loss. They believe their towns, communities, and schools are suffering from a deep 'culture rot' that has invaded from the outside. The central focus here is homosexuality, but also the decline of homogenous small towns.
The slavery-based stain of white supremacy was still there for all to see; but many blacks, like whites, hailed the dawn of a mythical, post-racial America because we were all anxious to see the America (read: white people) as "cured." We desperately wanted to believe that they had achieved the perfection they had claimed for all these years; the perfection their presumed closeness to God should have promised. Did blacks, too, want to believe that those created in the white God's image were worthy of His name? After all, our culture's been brewing here longer than most. It's harebrained to believe that we've been any less tainted with by white supremacist stain than all the rest.
So, for Megyn Kelly, the Fox News Gang and too many others, Jesus, and the God who seeded him are white, and made (white) man in his image. All the rest of us... well... you know... It's history.