Robin DiAngelo, author of the infamous White Fragility and a matchless grifter, recently appeared on a podcast on which she made comments about Christian art that were both deliciously uninformed and self-congratulatory.
DiAngelo’s 2018 book jumpstarted the “all white people are de facto racists” trend. Owing to its success, she has crafted a fine living for herself supported by self-flagellating, progressive funders.
As Reason pithily summarized the grift:
For DiAngelo, racism is not merely a set of negative attitudes about minorities—it is more akin to a spiritual illness that afflicts virtually all white people. Luckily for DiAngelo, she is selling the cure, in the form of her books, lectures, and other speaking engagements. The work is lucrative: the University of Connecticut, for instance, paid her $20,000 to teach at a seminar, and she reportedly charges between $10,000 and $15,000 for a few hours of work. (Or $320 per phone call!)
One can only wonder how much she was paid for her January appearance on a little-known podcast, Not Your Ordinary Parts. On that podcast, DiAngelo explained:
The single image I use to capture the concept of white supremacy is Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel: God Creating Man. Where God is in a cloud, and there are all these angels, and he’s reaching out and he’s touching — I don’t know who that is, David or something? — and God is white, David is white, and the angels are white. Like, that is the perfect convergence of white supremacy, patriarchy.
DiAngelo mistook Adam — you know, the first man God created; the fresco is actually titled “The Creation of Adam” — for King David. She stamped all the figures in the fresco with the worst of all possible descriptors: “white.”
I would recommend that DiAngelo visit the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth. The ancient church was built at the site of Mary’s childhood home, where, according to Catholic tradition, Mary was visited by the Angel Gabriel who brought news of her especial role in salvation history as the mother of Jesus.
When I visited the site as an undergraduate, I was struck by the collection of mosaic panels adorning the sanctuary. Dozens of depictions of Mary, gifts from around the globe, glisten on its walls. She is most often depicted in a queen-like posture, holding the infant Jesus — but her ethnic characteristics accord with the countries in which each panel was crafted.
The space proclaims the universality of Christ’s story — Christ came to free all human beings from sin, including from the enmity that arises between nations and peoples. No longer would a man be judged for his ethnicity, background, race, or socioeconomic status, but for his soul. The very notion of racial equality stems from Christian teaching.
As the Apostle Luke wrote in the Book of Acts, “God does not show favoritism, but accepts from every nation the one who fears him and does what is right.”
Like the artists who created the many mosaics of Mary at the Church of the Annunciation, Michelangelo was of his time and place, and that cultural context is reflected in his painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. (The painting itself is allegorical, as God the Father is understood to be an immaterial being — one without a body at all — in the Christian tradition.)
With regard to Christ’s actual race, he was a Nazarene, a Jew — a member of a people suffering under the oppression of the Roman Empire at the time. The term “white,” as DiAngelo wields it, corresponds to a particular racial hierarchy in an American historical context; when applied to other historical nations and peoples, the term loses its meaning.
So, no, neither Michelangelo’s painted God nor the God of scripture is “white.”