The ideological claustrophobia felt by White America by the inclusion of a Black Santa is just a single example of many that white people think America’s ideological board room is already too crowded to admit black ideas. It’s the foundational conservative logic error that, if the country looks a certain way now and it works, it follows that it needs to keep looking that way to keep working. Therefore, when we imagine the future, it’s only going to be a successful picture if we keep imagining white faces in familiar places. In fact, it would be immoral and anti-American to picture it otherwise, because we’d be picturing its inevitable failure. Perhaps even committing treason, one of the favorite words of silly people to misuse.
In that regard, I can see how a black family plonking their toddler down on the knee of a fat white man so the kid can beg for school clothes under the menacing condition that he act right for a year, might seem...undigestible. “Now smile while we stage a Viet Cong-style propaganda picture of cultural harmony, and you better goddamn look happy. Isn’t that darling? One or two pictures of a happy black child amongst a sea of blonde white kids, with his butt cheeks already ominiously close to, but not actually penetrated by the white man’s cock, is all the validation we need to feel like we’ve already done more than enough for those people."
Now, the biggest shopping mall in all of Christendom has hired a black Santa to lie in the manger of capitalism, and White America is shitting their yoga pants in fear. Someday their kids may get a paycheck from a black boss, but the day white people lose their self-granted mandate to dictate and approve black cultural thought, even on the most petty of issues, is the day they officially concede that the Fifth Bowl of Revelations has poured its darkness across the world and the Rapture and Armaggeddon are nigh. Frankly, you’d think a good white Christian would be happy about it, but we're all hypocrites on a long enough timeline I suppose.
There is no more powerful cultural bludgeon than telling a black child—or any child who doesn’t fit the white mold— how to imagine. The great spiritual pursuit of the human being is one of mythological identification with the world. The current message of Eternal White Santa is a fundamental amputation of black identity, by white people, from the corpus of American idealist symbology. The same thing is true of Black Jesus. White people can’t allow for a Black Jesus not because it forces them to think about Black Jesus when they see him, but because that image suggests that black people aren’t seeing White Jesus in their minds.
Black presidents may come and go, but the most important people are white, and they are appointed for life.
Unfortunately, both the pro- and anti- Eternal White Santa groups miss the point. One party argues that Santa is white by fable and tradition, and the other has taken to claims of racism and historical daisy chains that imply the historical person—if he ever existed—was Turkish, and therefore of color. Oddly, these are identical lines of argument for and against White Jesus as well. It is as equally pointless to argue that a previous culture's incarnation of a myth was definitive, as it is to suggest that the current vision cannot be reimagined. The ancient Egyptians came and went along with the cult of their goddess Isis, but the idea of a heavenly queen mother was itself given new birth as Demeter to the Greeks, and then Mary by the early Christians. Jesus himself is a grandchild of Isis’ consort Osiris and his saga of death and rebirth, which was given the form of Dionysus by the Greeks before being lifted by the Hellenistic Jews.
Both Isis and Osiris were pictured as Egyptian by the Egyptians as one would expect, but in order for the Greeks to adopt their mythology and symbolism they had to become Greeks as well. How can an idea be universal if the body is non-transferable? “Yes, Jesus is for everybody, but if he wasn’t white he never would have made it” doesn’t exactly scream universality.
It is my theory that the greater the logic failing, the greater the irony that will come out of it. The universality and value of the Santa Claus character is perfectly summed up in the editor of The Sun’s definitional response to little Victoria’s question “is there a Santa Claus?”. Here is his response:
“VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.
Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.
Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.
You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.
No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.
The realization that White America will have to make is binary: first, we have to accept that, like all other cultures, our dominance is transient. Second, if we want any chance of immortality, we have to accept and allow for our stylized ideas to take on new rainments and faces. If we can’t look at different symbols and identify with the same good, we are in no position to look at each other and see ourselves. Black Santa is a good thing, and if Black America can look at White Santa and reimagine him, then it is a great failing indeed if White America can’t do the same.