"There Won't Be Any Rich People in Heaven": The Black Christ, White Hypocrisy, and the Gospel According to W. E. B. Du Bois

Abstract

W. E. B. Du Bois despised white supremacy, economic exploitation, and European and American colonialism. The pillaging and partitioning of Africa angered him no end, especially since they were legitimated by the erasure of Africa and its peoples from the authorized histories of the world. M[T]here has been consistent effort, he wrote in The World and Africa in 1946, to rationalize Negro slavery by omitting Africa from world history. Fundamental this historical amnesia was the neglect of Africa's crucial role in the development of modern religions. White Europeans and Americans, Du Bois insisted, whitened their religious faiths in order justify the oppression and dehumanization of people of color. This was nowhere more apparent than in whites' conceptions of Jesus of Nazareth. Roughly two millennia ago, Du Bois observed, there was born in the Egypto-Syrian area, with its Mongoloid and Negroid elements, a social reformer called Jesus Christ. Hypocritical white Europeans and Americans, however, refused acknowledge that he was anything but white. As Du Bois maintained, Nordics who have never accepted his doctrine of submission evil, repudiation of riches, and love for mankind, have usually limned him as Caucasoid. Of course, the biblical Jesus was not white. He was a Syrian Jew, one whom Du Bois described as perhaps bearing a hooked nose and curled hair. Christ may have even inherited Ethiopian blood. Du Bois, in short, seemed think that if the association of whiteness with godliness provided a rationale for racial oppression, then recognizing the blackness of Christ, or at least his nonwhiteness, might equip African Americans with another set of tools counter exploitation and hatred.1 Du Bois's attack upon the Caucasoid Christ and his consideration of a nonwhite Jesus in The World and Africa and in a host of poems and short stories presaged a theological and religious revolution that occurred in the United States during the late 1960s. As champions of civil rights and Black Power assaulted the citadels of white supremacy during the second half of the