This Swedish-looking Jesus was painted, if I remember correctly, for the student magazine at my alma mater by Warner Sallman, the son of immigrants to the U.S. from Scandinavia. Though it was adopted as a symbol of dominant, white Christian culture, that& #39;s not how it started. 1/5

Sallman& #39;s Jesus is the subversive expression of an ethnic (and within that ethnicity, a religious) minority. Sallman& #39;s Jesus is portrayed as friendly, at odds both with the portrayal of clannish "squareheads" & the dour Christ depicted in much Swedish Lutheranism at the time. 2/5

That& #39;s the thing about the construction of white-ness within a culture of white supremacy: once scandinavians were folded into white-ness, what this Christ meant to the community it was produced for was perniciously "normalized", its particularity was strategically forgotten. 3/5

And so it& #39;s easy not to see Sallman& #39;s Christ as Swedish, as ethnic, as having any context at all. But Black Theology and Black portrayals of Christ and Mary are seen as "contextual", even tho blonde-haired, blue-eyed Swedish Jesus here carries a contextual theology as well. 4/5

An ENORMOUS difference: this Swedish context was concealed by conveying the privileges of white-ness upon the descendents of those immigrants. The history, culture of Black Americans was suppressed through kidnapping, enslavement, lynching, incarceration, segregation, etc. 5/5