Cross-posted from the PCC Sacred Conversation on Race blog:

I was surprised and frankly discouraged yesterday when my daughter, chattering away in the car as we traveled to-and-from soccer practice, said confidently that she imagines God to be a white man in his early 20s. The “early 20s” part of that image intrigues me, but the “white” and the “male” parts tell me that I still have a lot of work to do as a parent and a pastor!

For an 8-year-old to say that God is a white man says to me (at best) that my daughter has seen many images of a white Jesus and has concluded, rather logically, that the Father of white Jesus must also be white. At worst, it suggests that she associates — albeit, probably unconsciously so — God with “normalcy” and normalcy with whiteness, ergo, God is white.

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