Critical to the development and maintenance of this image was religious support for African American enslavement. Although [Harvard law professor and author of Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, Randall] Kennedy does not address this point, it seems critical to a more in-depth investigation of the word’s resilience, meaning, and power. “Nigger image,” arguably, helped to justify the ongoing, pervasive legal subordination of blacks. It was essential to the health of the Southern economy that black slavery and slaves themselves not be interfered with, nor economic prosperity impeded. Consequentially, religious tolerance and acceptance became key factors in perpetuating the myth of black inferiority and the evolution of “nigger” in order to sustain slavery. Slavery itself caused considerable tension among religious groups, but ultimately southern clergymen launched a broad campaign to show their support for the enterprise. While stereotypes took various forms, a collective myth emerged that considered blacks not only biologically inferior, but also spiritually depraved. The myth was supported and perpetuated by religious institutions as well as by the law of the time. Abolitionists who fought to articulate the immoralities of slavery commonly found themselves cast from churches.

As Blassingame noted, during the 1830s nearly every state convention of Southern churches “ended with blistering attack[s] on . . .abolitionists.” Arguably, slavery may have been unavoidable for some ministers as their relatives owned them and the churches to which they ministered, acting as corporate bodies, purchased slaves. In some cases the master was essentially transmogrified into God’s representative. In one of the more famous exegesis, Thomas Bacon reminds slaves that disobedience to masters is equal to sinning against God:

Poor creatures! You little consider, when you are vile and neglectful of your master’s business–when you steal, and waste, and hurt any of their substance– when you are saucy and impudent–when you are telling them lies, and deceiving them . . . [that] what faults you are guilty of towards your masters and mistresses, are faults done against God himself, who hat set your masters and mistresses over you in His own stead, and expects that you will do for them just as you would do for Him. And pray do not think that I want to deceive you when I tell you that your masters and mistresses are God’s Overseers, and that, if you are faulty towards them, God himself will punish you severely for it in the next world . . . for God himself hath declared the same.

As Engerman and Fogel explain, the acceptance of slavery, and the myth about blacks transcended both the secular and religious worlds. The Catholic Church, for example, owned slaves, but it was not alone. Bishops, ministers and elders of other religions also purchased and sold slaves. Slavery became a more acceptable enterprise through the dehumanization of the slaves, and it also “limited the humanitarianism of the white minister.” The myth eased tensions about the immorality of slavery, as blacks became intellectually, spiritually, and culturally seen as on par with animals and thus “niggers,” as a class or group, were simply another form of chattel. According to Harris, by the 1660s, “the especially degraded status of blacks as chattel slaves was recognized by law,” and “between 1680 and 1682, the first slave codes appeared, codifying the extreme deprivations of liberty already existing in social practice.”

If Jesus is depicted in the Bible as having African features and was known as the “son of God,” then what color do you think God is? Being that Africans are largely spiritual people, do you understand why it was necessary for the Western world to change the color of Jesus from black to white in order to justify and maintain the enslavement of God’s people? How has this image of a white God weakened our ability to both understand and effectively challenge our oppressor and its fraudulent system of global white supremacy? Why do we continue to teach the West’s version of a religion that was created in Africa and is ultimately meant to reinforce our inferiority???

Source: Michele Goodwin. Nigger and the Construction of Citizenship. 76 Temp. L. Rev. 129. Spring 2003.