Ebony Magazine was nearly driven out of business—why?
In March 1969, Ebony published an issue featuring a Black Jesus on the cover. The response from parts of the Black community was swift and severe, with many readers expressing outrage and threatening to cancel their subscriptions.
Some even went so far as to send Johnson Publishing Company images of what they referred to as the “True (White) Jesus.”
This reaction reveals the depth of psychological conditioning and internalized belief systems within the Black community, stemming from centuries of indoctrination that equated divinity and righteousness with whiteness. The backlash against the depiction of a Black Jesus highlights the lasting impact of this programming and the challenges of reclaiming an authentic representation of spirituality and identity.
The indoctrination of the image of White Jesus into the minds of Black people stands as one of the most effective and insidious examples of psychological warfare in human history.
Take a moment to critically reflect and ask yourself: If enslaved Black people were stripped of everything of substance—reading, culture, language, and identity—why was Christianity not only allowed but actively imposed?
The answer lies in the true intentions of White slave masters and colonizers of Africa. The conversion of Black people to Christianity was not motivated by a desire to save Black souls or to share a heavenly afterlife with them. Instead, it served as a deliberate tool of control, subjugation, and psychological programming—a means of reinforcing a hierarchy of power and perpetuating the dehumanization of Black people under the guise of religious salvation.
This reality challenges us to reconsider the role of Christianity in the context of systemic oppression and to interrogate the ways in which it has been used to uphold structures of domination rather than liberation.
When we honestly, logically, and critically examine the historical facts, it becomes clear that White slave masters and colonizers were not trying to save the souls of Black people when they imposed Christianity. Instead, the Bible was weaponized as a tool for subconscious brainwashing during the enslavement of Africans in America and the colonization of Africa.
Black people were given a version of Christianity that exclusively featured white deities—a white God, a white messiah, white angels, and white prophets. This deliberate portrayal served to instill the myth of white divinity into the collective minds of African slaves.
The depiction of “white-only” deities was a calculated effort to subconsciously indoctrinate Black people with the false belief in white divinity—and, by extension, white superiority.
WHOEVER CONTROLS YOUR CONCEPT OF GOD CONTROLS YOU.
To establish and maintain their positions of dominance, White slave masters and colonizers recognized the necessity of embedding the belief in white divinity into the consciousness of Black people. The portrayal of a white Son of God logically leads to the conclusion that God the Father must also be white.
This ingrained narrative has led many Black people to consciously worship a white God. More insidiously, it has caused many to subconsciously worship—or at the very least admire—white people. To consciously worship a white God is, in effect, to subconsciously elevate white people to a divine status.
(This message has been edited. The original unedited message was posted onto Karibu Kijijini’s Online Forum, in 2013)
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