Equal Opportunity for Angels

I'm really getting tired of seeing all these white angels. It seems like they're everywhere. You can buy all sorts of angel images and icons, magazines and books. There are angel dishes and angel jewelry. You can even find a sign to stick in your garden with a picture of a cherub to protect your crop. But they're almost always white. It all adds up to white angelmania.

Since I don't believe that there is even the slightest chance that angels really exist, maybe I shouldn't care what ethnicity believers extend to them. But the fact is that belief in angels is rampant - as many as 69% of the population believe in them, according to a Time/CNN poll. If that belief is tinged in racism, then we've got a problem.

Racism in the depiction of angels stems from the fact that there is a strong dose of nostalgia in angelmania . The images of angels are most often in the style of Renaissance or Victorian artists, with cherry cheeks and flowing robes. By using these ancient motifs, believers seem to yearn for a time when there was no doubt that there was a god, that he was male and that he was white. End of conversation. Although black people were already known through most of Europe, the concept of "Afrocentric" had not yet been brought to the Western world.

These racist depictions from a long-gone era can be compared with any old, "lily white" images from the past: It's just plain insulting. I have a fifty-year-old magazine with an ad featuring a dozen or so entertainers and athletes who all supposedly smoke the same brand of cigarette. There's not a black face among them. I'd be incensed to see such an advertisement today, just like I feel when I see picture after picture of white angels.

It is possible to find Afrocentric angels if you venture to Christian bookstores that cater to the black community, and there's Della Reese on television as an angel. But by and large the traditional, all-white angels prevail. Non-white angels in the mainstream, white Christian world are almost as rare as a non-white Jesus or God. Even that bird-god is white!

If black, Asian and other non-white children are going to believe in angels, then I at least hope that they don't believe that all angels are white. There is a real threat here to tender young psyches. Beyond this problem, arguing over the ethnicity of angels is exactly like debating how many could dance on the head of a pin, or the color of Paul Bunyan's suspenders. The real point is this: Angels are whatever color people make them. The preponderance of white angels reveals the legacy of overt racism that lies at the core of many hallowed beliefs. It's a Jim Crow mentality.