I think a point that might be being missed in some of the talk about Ethiopian icons (which would also apply to other African icons) is that the point is not to 'Africanize' Jesus and say,
yes, He is Ethiopian/Eritrean/Egyptian/whatever, but rather to emphasize that He is incarnate as a human person. So in Africa or in any place, He may be depicted in the general way that
people in that place look. 'Black Jesus' seems to only be a fixation of those for whom the 'color line' (a seemingly uniquely American obsession) is especially salient, but I have not noticed that attitude among any of my Ethiopian, Sudanese, or Egyptian friends (except when responding to 'Afrocentrist' pseudo-scholars who want to take everything in Egypt and make it 'black'), and it wouldn't really make sense to see it there. For sure, there is a difference noted in color between someone from Alexandria and someone from Aswan, for instance, but that's related to the actual level of Nubian admixture --i.e., why 'Coptic' is an ethnic or ethnoreligious identifier,
not a racial one. There are 'Nubian Copts', if you will, as you can clearly see in this picture from the ordination of one Fr. Kyrillos in the Church of St. Mary and St. George in Omdurman, Sudan (note the good father on the far right):
It has been this way forever (or at least since the 4th century, when HH St. Athanasius the Apostolic sent the first bishops to the Nubian territory of Philae), and we have also had bishops in Sudan who speak Nubian in addition to Arabic, even though sadly the majority of Nubians are now Muslims, at least since the fall of the last of the Nubian Christian kingdoms in the beginning of the 16th century.
The question of what kind of icons should be produced by such a mixed people in order to be most faithful to how Christ looked phenotypically is frankly not really a question. Everyone knows He is born in Bethlehem, not Abu Simbel or for that matter Axum. And actually if we are to go by the more ancient witness, as can be found for instance in the restored icons of the Faras cathedral (the jewel of Nubian Christianity, sadly destroyed with the building of the Aswan Dam in the 1960s, as many Nubian villages were), we can see that it was also a practice among the Nubians -- who are nothing if not native black Africans -- to depict Christ and the Theotokos as (relative to themselves) white people, in comparison to the icons they made of their own bishops:
Our Lord Jesus Christ and the Theotokos alongside HG Bishop Marianos of Alodia (r. 1005-1039), c. 11th century
I would ask people like this Shaun King idiot if this too is 'white supremacy', and if so
how. This is the native Nubian art, done in their own cathedral, to honor Christ our Lord and God, the ever-virgin holy Theotokos, and their own holy bishops.
You literally can't get more African than this. (Sudan is called that in the first place because to the Arabs, these preexisting kingdoms were
the lands of the blacks = bilad al-sudan)
Anyway, I just wanted to point that out, in case anyone is getting the wrong idea that because Ethiopians or others traditionally depict Christ as 'black', therefore they are denying that He was actually
not black or otherwise making Him into something He isn't. I don't think that's what's going on at all, and I've communed with people from Ethiopia, Sudan, and of course Egypt from the very first day that I could be communed. It's just funny that if you actually talk to Ethiopians about this (as I have), they can sometimes become confused and/or incredulous, like "Oh,
that's what you see in our icons? A bunch of 'black' people?" Obviously that kind of perception makes perfect sense if you yourself come from America or Europe, but if you're from Ethiopia where that's just what most people look like, there almost isn't that contrast to be made, and instead people tend to focus on things like (broadly speaking) ethnic group or language group, e.g., are you 'Habesha' (a Semitic person from the highlands) or something else. (The 'something else' also being black, whether its Cushitic, Omotic, or whatever.)
Though this is not the kind of thing that can be definitively proven, I have a hunch that this kind of false dichotomy (Christ having to be black to be faithful to the tradition as it has developed in the country, or having to be 'white' to be more historically accurate, as though icons should be like photographs; obviously that's even less the case in the OO world with its deliberately
very non-realistic icons than it is in the EO world) is at least part of the reason why western art has been more accepted in some OO circles (i.e., the 'Sacred Heart' imagery in Coptic homes, or the presence of western art in some Ethiopian churches; see below), since these are
depictions of Jesus, after all (read: they don't even know that there is non-Orthodox theology wrapped up in the 'Sacred Heart' image; I know this because I've asked Coptic friends who have that stuff in their homes). It's not necessarily a concern that they don't come from Ethiopia, or Egypt, or wherever. That is, of course, distressing to people like me and others who don't want to see the theology of the icon continue to die in our churches, but that's another topic for another day, I suppose.
Proof:
Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo mezmur (paraliturgical song) "Bebete Mekdesih Yasadekegn" sung by Mirtinesh Tilahun (note the mix of Ethiopian and European imagery)
Coptic village Deir El 'Adra (Monastery of the Virgin), Egypt 1997 (note 'Sacred Heart' imagery in depiction of Christ on the wall; it's cut off here, but next to the drawing is the writing in Arabic "God is love", so it's obvious what the highlighting of the heart means to them, even if it doesn't indicate any kind of acceptance of the RC devotion)
Given that this kind of stuff slips in because people honestly don't know any better, I think the greater danger is not in depicting Christ as a certain color, but the ignorance of the people as to where the boundaries of proper faith and practice even are (which obviously touches more than iconography, but it's there too). Or, as HH Pope Shenouda III once put it...
But I guess some people in the West really don't want to hear what
native Africans like HH have to say about anything, because this is really a Western and more specifically American problem (there
is racism in Egypt against Nubians, for sure, but it doesn't mean that the American problem can simply be mapped onto Egypt with no regard as to how that society and American society are very different), and they don't like being convicted of being a bunch of heretics (even if in the process 'we' are convicting ourselves of inviting this stuff into our churches, as in the video). Too bad. It is as it is. "Orthodoxy is Orthodoxy." (A statement with which I'm 100% sure the EO agree, even if they don't see HH as being Orthodox himself.)