Brown Jesus

People are getting energized about the idea of a brown Jesus, it seems. This question is a lot more complicated people expect it to be, for several reasons. Don't expect that all of your assumptions about this discussion are true. They probably are not.

1. There is a long, fact-challenged tradition within European art that presented Jesus as blond-haired and blue-eyed and within film using English actors with a similar look. This tradition is almost certainly incorrect, for two reasons. Even today, people from the Middle-East do not tend to look like that. Furthermore, it was probably even less that way 2000 years ago than it is now, because there has been more genetic mixing between the people of the Middle-East and Europeans since then, not less.

2. There is a long, fact-challenged tradition within liberation theology that called Jesus black for political reasons. It was an attempt to distance Jesus from his historical origins in order to deny whiteness a place in its reframing of Christianity that traditional Christians have long resisted because of its denial of biblical theology. The particular claim of a black Jesus is hardly what's really wrong with liberation theology, in my view. Its theological claims are the real problem. But nevertheless the idea of calling Jesus black is a big part of how liberation theology distanced itself from the theological tradition, and many hear something like that in this.

But even aside from the historical political context, the actual words themselves are not unambiguously or obviously true or false. There are several reasons I say that:

3. The word "brown" until recent years was largely used by people in Latin America for people of African descent who were of mixed ancestry and not unambiguously black or white. However, in the U.S. it simply was not a racial term in common use until very recently. To Americans, the term as applied to an actual person would usually be describing actual skin tone, not racial classification. It describes the brown skin color of those whos racial classification is black. But it is also a color found among other peoples, including some from India. Thus it signals a look that is basically true of people of African and Indian descent to many people. But that group with that color skin would not have included Jews from the Palestinian region 2000 years ago.

4. In recent years, it's become more common to hear the word as a racial term that strikes me as meaning "neither black nor white" or "neither fully black nor fully white," and that might be what the author means. It's certainly how some people today will hear it. Members of my family regularly use it that way now, but I can't imagine any American using it that way even 30 years ago. This really is a change that's been relatively recent. And we know that change, even rapid change that spreads within certain circles online in quick ways, might not be how others hear that same language. That's certainly so with terms like "racism," so why wouldn't it be so with terms like "brown?" Some will hear the term as it's used in 3, not how it's used in 4. Put that together with observation 2, and you get the idea that this is a political move in some ways like what black liberation theology was trying to do.

5. So we've found one use where the statement might be true, presuming Jewish people could count as not white. But that's not as clear as some might think. Jewish racial status is not clear. The U.S. government's racial classification system places Jewish and other Middle-Eastern peoples in the category of Caucasian, which etymologically would be false, but that's how social constructions work. Words mean what people use them to mean, and this is one social construction that operates in our society today. In that sense, Jewish people are white, and Jesus was white. That isn't a claim about having blond hair and blue eyes. I don't have blond hair and blue eyes, but I'm white. It is a claim about where the racial boundary line is. On one influential and important social construction system of race, Jesus simply was white. Period. So he was not brown.
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6. On the other hand, there are social constructions that draw the lines in other places. It's certainly not unambiguously true that Arabs are white, for example, even if there is one social construction system that classifies them as white. And there are Jews who do not see themselves as white and racists who do not classify Jews as white. Hitler didn't see Jews as white, and that's an important fact about the social constructions that operate regarding the category of being white. On that system of classification, Jesus was not white. But that doesn't necessarily amount to being brown, depending on how you use that term.
I would maintain that it's a really bad idea to put out a book describing Jesus as brown, just as it's a really bad idea to put out a book describing Jesus as white, if for no other reason than either statement is very likely to mislead many who hear it into thinking you mean something you don't (and there might be other reasons in addition). Better to be precise when using potentially politically loaded terms and to either recognize ambiguities or avoid them, and precision does not allow for a description like this. But my point here is not to judge the use of the language in this book. It's to explain how the people putting out the book might mean something true, even as the people resisting it might also mean something true. And that can be so even if none of them should be saying what they are saying, because all of them are ignoring genuine complexities that are important and worth being aware of.