You might have noticed that nativity scenes have three wise men. Scripture doesn’t say there were three, nor does it specify that one is African. But, that’s what they always have (and the Holy Family is always white, often blond).
So, where did those details come from? From the need to shift slavery into a race-based and perpetual condition. In general, except for a few striking exceptions like the Spartans’ enslavement of the Helots, slavery was generally a temporary condition, the consequence of something like indebtedness or capture in war, and wasn’t connected to any notion of race (which itself wasn’t really a concept until the 15th or 16th centuries). Enslaved people often had ways of working their way out of slavery, slavery didn’t necessarily extend to their children, and it certainly didn’t apply to everyone like them.
But, for various reasons, at a certain point, people needed to justify slavery as a necessary consequence of having a particular heritable identity. At that point, Christians adopted the Muslim reading of Scripture, and began to read Genesis IX as God’s creation of races. Genesis IX involves Noah’s three sons, and racists read that passage as God’s creation of Africans, whites, and Asians. That reading was especially useful for, and promoted among, pro-slavery rhetors in the US because it appeared to legitimate southern practices (actually very extreme) by grounding them in Scripture. So, as Stephen Haynes shows, reading and portraying the wise men as three–a white, African, and Asian–was part of back-reading Scripture to legitimate the notion of three races, and the notion that one was condemned to servitude.
It’s interesting to look at representations of the nativity, and notice the moment that you get the three races, and where those paintings are from.
I think of myself as a good listener, and a critical interpreter, but, when a pastor said, “Listen carefully to this passage,” and then read it, and then said, “How many wise men did the passage say there were,” I was certain I’d heard him say three. We always read by what we think we know.
Things like this Nativity scene are perfect examples of how racism actually works. Too many people think that racism involves self-conscious intent, a specific desire to oppress or slur a race, but nobody got up in the morning and, to meet their daily quota of racist acts, decided to put together this Nativity scene. They might have even thought (as I once mistakenly did) that such scenes are anti-racist because they show the diversity of people worshipping Jesus. And it wouldn’t be much better if they made all the participants white. The problem with racism and representations of traditional scenes is that those representations almost inevitably rely on conventional understandings of what happened (I thought there were three wise men). Given how deeply interwoven racism is in our traditions and conventions, a representation that is simultaneously comfortably traditional and not comfortably racist is often impossible. And that is how racism works.
The photo at the top of this article is from the paper copy of the catalog for Frontgate. You can get the whole set for about $2k, or maybe not. It appears to have disappeared from their online ordering.