The Best of Emerge Magazine - Softcover

 
9780345462282: The Best of Emerge Magazine
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0345462289 ISBN 13: 9780345462282
Verlag: One World, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

A collection of the finest columns from the pages of Emerge magazine celebrates African-American culture, current events, history, and more in articles by Nelson George, Les Payne, Thulani Davis, Ralph Wiley, Jill Nelson, Tananarive Due, and Trey Ellis, among others. Original.

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Aus dem Klappentext

frican Americans achieved more influence and faced more explosive issues than ever before. One word captured those times. One magazine expressed them. Emerge.

In those ten years, with an impressive circulation of 170,000 and more than forty national awards to its credit, Emerge became a serious part of the American mainstream. Time hailed its uncompromising voice. The Washington Post declared that Emerge gets better with each issue. Then, after nearly a decade, Emerge magazine closed its doors. Now, for the first time, here s a collection of the finest articles from a publication that changed the face of African American news.

From the Clarence Thomas nomination to the Bill Clinton impeachment . . . from the life of Louis Farrakhan to the death of Betty Shabazz . . . from reparations for slavery to the rise of blacks on Wall Str

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

is Jesus black?

BRENDA L. WEBBER, APRIL 1995

His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire; And his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace; and his voice as the sound of many waters.

—Revelation 1:14–15 (King James Version)

In African-American churches across the United States, traditional depictions of a White, blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus are being replaced with images of a savior with dark skin, brown eyes and kinky locks. From the pulpit to the pews, Black worshipers are looking for a reflection of themselves in the Jesus they serve.

But apart from the works of artists and the popular grassroots movements to have all European images of biblical personalities removed from African-American churches, there is a growing movement among Black biblical scholars to set the record straight and to declare, through critical scholarship, that there is valid reason to believe that Jesus Christ, if not Black, was most certainly “a person of color.”

The idea of a Black Jesus is not new, says James Cone, the Briggs Distinguished Professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York and one of the scholars who espoused a theology of Black liberation in the 1960s. In the 19th century, Black nationalist Robert Young made that assertion; Bishop Henry McNeal Turner of the African Methodist Episcopal Church often stated, “God Is a Negro,” and Marcus Garvey later argued the same theme.

The difference today, says Cone, is that “Black scholars, for the first time—certainly since the 1960s—have begun to realize that they can challenge the dominant White theological establishment.”

In what is described as a “reappraisal of ancient biblical traditions,” this new breed of Black biblical scholars are challenging long-standing views about who Jesus was, where He came from and what He looked like, and they are debunking many of the popular racial myths purported to be biblical interpretations.

“It is an understandable concern of African-Americans, given our history in this country and given the way the Bible and Scriptures have been used against us,” says the Rev. Renita J. Weems, assistant professor of the Hebrew Bible at Vanderbilt University School of Divinity in Nashville, referring to whether it should matter to Black people if Jesus is or is not a person of color.

“We have been told our color is a curse, and all our images of God and biblical personalities have been European,” Weems says. “It would be a correction of at least two or three centuries of racial oppression. It should be a concern, but I’m not sure it should be a preoccupation.”

At issue are the teachings of European scholars who have “de-Africanized” the Bible in their interpretations and who view Blacks, Afro-Asiatics and other people of color as essentially unimportant to a biblical exegesis.

Some European scholars consider the argument that Jesus was a person of color to be negative, revisionist history, while African-American scholars consider it positive, corrective history. In short, contemporary Black biblical scholars have upped the ante and staked their own claim on the Holy Scriptures.

“Artists, writers and people of renown or people who are of astute minds have always sought to correct things when they find that they are incorrect,” says James W. Peebles, publisher and compiler of the Original African Heritage Study Bible. His company, Winston-Derek Publishers Group, of Nashville, turned to scholars such as the Rev. Cain Hope Felder, professor of New Testament language and literature at Howard University Divinity School in Washington, D.C., to help develop a Bible that, says Peebles, “puts everything back into focus.”

For instance, in footnotes to the account of the crucifixion of Jesus in Mark 15:21 and Matthew 27:32, the Original African Heritage Study Bible states that Simon of Cyrene, the man called upon to carry the cross of Jesus as the Roman soldiers led him out to be crucified, was an African visitor to Jerusalem. He had come from the province of Cyrenaica in northern Libya, where many Black people lived.

This Easter season, many African-Americans will worship with the added knowledge that the man who helped to carry their savior’s cross—and the man on the cross—were people of color, much like themselves.

This is more than just an academic exercise.

Black biblical scholarship has given comfort to African-American religious communities that have become discontented with European images and biblical interpretations that suggest Blacks contributed little to the biblical narrative, that they come from a cursed race (Genesis 9:25–27) and that they were destined in the Scriptures to be the slaves of other nations. In Genesis 10 are the descendants of Noah’s sons. These scriptures, and others, were used as justification, first for the enslavement of Blacks in America, and then for the legalization of racial segregation and discrimination.

Black church denominations, including Protestant and Catholic, are publicly addressing the issue of racism in religion.

Some predominantly White mainline denominations, evangelical groups and ecumenical organizations also are studying the issue of racism within the church. Even after such reviews, some Whites have not altered their vision of Jesus. Some openly question whether an Afrocentric view of the Bible, with a Jesus of color at the center, is nothing more than a kind of me-ism and false pride that could become a barrier between the races.

“I think what has happened in the past is that people in the dominant culture—the White, European culture—have imposed their understanding of God upon other people throughout the world,” explains Cone, “and therefore, as long as Whites imposed that position upon the African-American community and made them accept the White God, everything was fine, and that was regarded as objective and true.”

Now that European truths are no longer readily accepted and African-Americans and other people of color have begun to critically evaluate what they have been taught, there is a new level of racial tension.

“White scholars get angry, and they say all we get into is kind of ‘everybody’s view of God is just as good as anybody else’s,’ and that’s not true,” says Cone. “What we are saying is that if we are going to come up with a God that is good for everybody, then everybody has to be a part of that debate.

“It is not God who does all this talking, it is human beings who do it. It is human beings who write books, do theology and do biblical and scientific work. And we know that human beings are not perfect; therefore, they need to be challenged, and they need to be challenged with evidence.”

In the Book of Acts, Chapter 8, is the well-known account of the roadside baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch, a high treasury official in the court of Candace, the Ethiopian queen. Earlier in the text (Acts 2) is the account of Jews from Mesopotamia, Egypt and Libya near Cyrene who were at Pentecost, the day that the Holy Spirit descended upon the disciples and followers, after the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ.

An important fact of biblical history is that the Church at Antioch in Syria (Acts 11) is recognized as the first Christian church and is where the term “Christian” came into use. Footnotes in the Original African Heritage Study Bible attribute 50 percent of the prophets and teachers in the Church at Antioch as persons of color, with Acts 13:1 giving particular attention to two of them: Simeon, called...

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Verlag
One World
Erscheinungsdatum
2003
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0345462289
ISBN 13 
9780345462282
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
119
Herausgeber
Curry George E.
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar