Black Santa

This year, once again, we have the ballyhoo about the wholly manufactured "War on Christmas," which seems to suggest that wishing someone "happy holidays" instead of "merry Christmas," recognizing that the U.S.A. is a land of diverse faiths, and that not everyone is a Christian, is somehow bellicose.

A new salvo has been fired in the person of Megyn Kelly, one of the blonde Stepford Wives on Fox News. Annoyed that Santa Claus was being portrayed as black in some places, she stated categorically that Santa is white, and while at it, that Jesus is white, too. This, she claims, is historical.

She was roundly criticized for it, and later laughed it off, saying it was a joke. Yes, of course telling children of color that thinking that a beloved symbol might be shared by their race is impossible is a laugh riot. But then pinhead Bill O'Reilly backed her up.

The very notion of declaring that a mythical figure is white is of course ludicrous on its face. What she is thinking of is the common depiction of Santa Claus as rendered by cartoonist Thomas Nast, acting on suggestions from the poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas" which may or may not have been written by Clement Moore. The red suit, the beard, the chimney, the reindeer, all of that comes from those two men. And of course Santa was white, as Nast was white and he was drawing for a white audience.

But the history is a little trickier. St. Nicholas was a Greek bishop from Turkey, so was probably not lily white, and certainly didn't wear a fur-trimmed red suit. The truth is that that saint, along with Germanic and Scandinavian folklore, combined to make Santa Claus. He belongs to anyone who chooses to celebrate Christmas, and can be any color of the rainbow. Kelly's rant was shockingly ignorant and insensitive. And she's usually the most reasonable one on Fox News.

Now as for Jesus. There is no historical consensus as to what race Jesus was (if Kelly thinks otherwise, she must have been reading Klan history books). He was Semitic for goodness' sake, born in Judea, where the sun is pretty intense. I'd say he was a shade or two darker than Kelly. What cultural history tells us is that most Biblical figures have been assigned racial characteristics based on their own, subjective views. White people think of Jesus as white, while darker peoples may see him as darker (although American blacks, indoctrinated into Christianity by their white owners, seem to have accepted Christ as white).

There are no photographs of Jesus. Their are no first-hand accounts. He has, over time, become a figure much like Santa Claus, a mythic being that lives in the hearts of some. He can be any color, any size, any shape. To attempt to define him is petty and childish. But that's par for the course in today's conservatives.