Not surprising, but very disturbing. European-made statues of Jesus look European because the art of every Christian people has traditionally been inculturated such that the European depictions of Him make Him look European, just like those of the Syriac people make Him look Middle Eastern, those of the Copts make Him look Egyptian, and so on. So it's actually a good sign of the integration of the religion into the culture, but as some people think that European culture is inherently "white supremacist", they obviously can't see that.
Let them put up statues instead of the founder of the arch-minority religion
that many
sadly deceived supposedly 'revolutionary' black people were (re)named after, Muhammad, and deal with the consequences that ought to come according to the worst interpretations of
that religion, then, if they actually believe in the kind of nonsense they say. Of course they won't because this isn't about reality as it actually
is; it's just another manifestation of the tired and false quasi-leftist meme of "Christianity = White = Racist = Bad".
Tell that to the millions of native Africans in Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Libya, etc. who were Christian when most of Europe was still worshiping rocks and trees, you historically-illiterate morons.
I'm pretty sure Abouna Joseph John from South Sudan is still a black man
and also a Coptic Orthodox Christian, and in being that, he is following a form of Christianity that originally came to the Nubian lands in Egypt and Sudan with no imperial conquest whatsoever in the 340s (we have lists of bishops for the Nubian territory of Philae dating back to the time of HH St. Athanasius c. 346, which is notably before the adoption of Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire, c. 380), and was adopted as the official religion of the Sudanese Nubian kingdoms by the 6th century (by 580; the first of the Nubian Christian kingdom to fall to Islam, Nobatia, did fall in the initial Arab-Muslim invasion in 650, though the other two, Makuria and Alodia, did not fall until 1312 and 1504, respectively). Depending on which date you want to use (mid-4th or late 6th century), Christianity was therefore in Nubia over a millennia before the establishment of Trans-Atlantic slave trade (1526), and possibly as many as three centuries before even the Arabs arrived in the area and set up their own slaving network (c. 641).
That's all without even mentioning Christianity in the Axumite kingdom, which is undoubtedly older than it is in Nubia (maybe much older), such that it is found on Ethiopian coinage c. 327 AD (though the traditional date for the conversion of King 'Ezana is 330 AD). This is one of he oldest Christian Churches to be established in the entire world (behind only Armenia in terms of official adoption by an empire/recognizable modern country, as Armenia officially converted c. 301), and aside from the Syro-Phonecian Greek St. Frumentius, who was the tutor of the future king and converted him after he had ascended to the throne,
its formation didn't involve any 'white' people/non-Africans at all!
In fact it was the Christian Axumites who were ruling Arabia for some time following the temporarily successful defeat of the Jewish Himyarites in southern Arabia in the 6th century, prior to the invention of Islam. The veneration of the local Christians in the area of Najran (modern Saudi Arabia), where Christians supposedly remained for some centuries, who were martyred by the Yemenite Jewish king around that time (look up the martyrs of Najran sometime; they're really fascinating) is what ended up in the Qur'an as the "people of the ditch" story in Surat al Buruj, where they are of course scrubbed of their Christian identities.
Anyway, the point is that all of this sucks and is stupid and is reliant on a false narrative that doesn't actually take into account the
2,000 year history Christianity in Africa before declaring depictions of Christ made by Europeans racist because, I dunno...white people, I guess... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Well excuse me all to hell for existing. You know who doesn't act like this? Literally every Egyptian, Sudanese, Ethiopian, and Eritrean person I've ever communed with! Nor the lady from Togo who was visiting the monastery of St. Shenouda I was there, or for that matter the friends I made from Tanzania when I was still RC. I'm pretty sure this crappy attitude that confuses being an ignorant jerk with 'liberation' is just a (*ahem*)
relatively privileged American problem.
