Cambridge Companion to Black Theology 2.2

Each of the previous chapters (here most recently) in the Companion made clear that the black liberation theological enterprise begins with and lives in the experience of oppression. That experience is tethered to historical reality. And, while acknowledging that oppression can exist along more than a single axis, each chapter drew from a well of experience--personal or historical--that can be understood with only a modicum of imagination.  Chapter 7, by contrast, draws on a well of speculation that can can be imagined but only with a modicum of understanding.

In "Jesus and black theology: the ancient ancestor visits," Julian Kunnie informs us that "because Christianity has essentially functioned as an ideological ploy by Western colonialism to proclaim the superlative distinction of Christendom ... [it is] part and parcel of the fabrication of the supremacy of European cultures ...". This claim is not a rhetorical overstatement. Indeed, the centrality of the first-century Jesus to human history is itself a tool of white hegemony:

So supercilious was this claim of theological monopoly that the defining moment of world history separated temporal spheres into "before the Christian era" and "in the Christian era" so that all successive generations would be compelled to subscribe to this historical demarcation wrought by the Christ event of the first century.

So who does Kunnie understand the historical "Jesus" to be?  

The Jesus of black theology is none other than a person of African-Asiatic extraction, who signified the return of the ancestors to a people who have never disregarded the defining role that ancestral spirits play in their lives in every sphere, particularly those who are indigenous and of African descent.

By extension, the black Jesus of today "is a healer of the earth and all the children of the earth, particularly the black oppressed." The contemporary incarnation of Jesus "empowers the oppressed to fight to defend the earth against the ceaseless violation of her being by Western industrialism".

In other words--my words--for Kunnie "Jesus" has always been the avatar of the ancestor who is and brings about the integration of all peoples and the earth. It is white theology, by limiting its focus to certain texts and for its own nefarious purposes, that has framed Jesus as he is widely understood. By re-framing the first century figure as "a poor working-class Palestinian living under the tyranny of Roman colonial occupation", black liberation theology can re-present him as an example of what we (should) have always known.