Reading Scripture as a Black Man

As a black man, I pause when I see that Jesus was taken to Africa as a baby for refuge (Matthew 2:13–18). My blackness will not allow me to gloss over the Ethiopian man whom Philip cozies up to in Acts 8:26–39, or the fact that Moses, the legendary liberator and lawgiver, marries a black woman (Exodus 2:21). I rejoice when I see God chastising Moses’s siblings for their failure to truly embrace his interracial marriage (Numbers 12:1). I nurse a low-grade fever over the master-slave passages, wanting Paul to be far more vociferous and denounce these institutions (1 Corinthians 7:21–24;…