Jesus was a nigger. To be a nigger, now and then, is to contend with arbitrary violence, legislative repression, and ontological uncertainty. Every moment of one’s life is policed and every action questioned. Where and how a nigger lives is subjugated to interrogation. Jesus, like all niggers, is empirically unjustifiable yet existentially irrefutable. His people came from an infamous little place that was known for nothing good. The nigger’s story sounds like a blues man filled with too much Jack Daniels and too little hope; singing in a empty juke joint, early Sunday morning.
He was born into the world in the body of an unwed teenage mother among an unimportant people in an unimportant part of the world as a Palestinian under occupation. His birth carried the stench of illegitimacy. It was rumored that he was the son of a rapist Roman centurion. But his mother claimed that he was the son of God—her people’s liberation.
Though they would be torn asunder, he gathered about him a ragged movement whose dogged spirit was only held together by a simple belief—freedom was coming. Everywhere they went refugees gathered and left believing that there is something greater than the empire.
Yet, corrupt religious leaders conspired with the empire to silence dissonance and orchestrate hierarchal harmony—rendering justice mute. To live under occupation without resistance is a portrait of self-hate. Thus religious leaders attempting to navigate a treacherous political terrain, often sided with empire to “be”. The nigger and his nigger followers were challenging what it means to “be” a Palestinian living under occupation.
By treating the needs of the people as holy, they troubled religious and political elites conception of themselves. A refusal to believe what the empire has said about you is to be free. While their hearts were bent toward silencing him, the nigger’s greatest offense was disrupting the financialization of the court of the poor which is the house of prayer.
This nigger so disrupted the empire that he was arrested on false charges, convicted in a kangaroo court, and crucified with two other insurrectionists. He was executed by the state. The day of his state-sanctioned execution is called “good”. This day is only “good” because the empire did not have the last word. To be sure the world’s most famous Palestinian was a nigger and niggers never die.
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