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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's not how it started. 1/5
Sallman's Jesus is the subversive expression of an ethnic (and within that ethnicity, a religious) minority. Sallman'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'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's easy not to see Sallman'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
