Laura Gascoigne examines the portrayal of Christ’s ethnicity through the centuries, and its resonance today

Amid the media storm over the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue by Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol, another act of iconoclasm passed almost unnoticed. Three weeks later, a carved stone bust of Haile Selassie in a park in Wimbledon, where the Ethiopian Emperor lived in exile in 1936 after the Italian invasion of his country, was smashed to pieces. It was not, as I first feared, a retaliation by the self-styled Democratic Football Lads Alliance for the defacing of Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square by anti-racism demonstrators two weeks before. It was a reaction by members of Ethiopia’s Oromo ethnic group to the shooting in Addis Ababa that day of protest singer Hachalu Hundessa. As a black-on-black attack, it hardly rated a mention in the British press.

What is it about the present moment that statues the public has happily ignored for centuries are suddenly becoming flashpoints for rage? I suppose it was inevitable that the debate would move on to religious icons, and American civil rights activist Shaun King soon obliged by tweeting that traditional statues of a white Jesus should be torn down as “a form of white supremacy”, going on to include “all murals and stained glass windows of white Jesus, and his European mother, and their white friends”. His tweets prompted a slew of indignant articles with headings like “Now they’re coming for Jesus”, and emollient statements from church leaders such as the Archbishop of Canterbury, who bent over backwards to sound placatory without actually saying anything about what the Church intended to do.