Do Black Lives Matter to Jesus?

As black people, we have gone through 400 hundred years of pain and suffering that is unlike anything else in human history. 

We have been taken from our land, beaten and chained.

We were forced into slavery by people who called themselves Christians. 

For 246 years our women were raped by white men because they could be. For 246 years our men were killed by white men if they fought for their humanity. For 246 years our children were born into a world that viewed them as commodities and then stripped from their parents as soon as they were of working age. 

After the emancipation in 1865, our people were forced into violent segregation while white Christians rode around on horses dragging burned black bodies by a rope. 

In 1921, our haven, Greenwood, Oklahoma, was burned down because of white jealousy and 300 of our people were killed for thriving. 

In 1954, a 14 year-old Emmitt Till was wrongfully accused of whistling at a white women and because of this lie he was beaten, killed and thrown into a river simple because a white woman felt like getting a black boy killed that day. 

In 1960’s, an entire generation of black leaders, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Medgar Evars and others, were killed (for fighting against white supremacy) and their families left to suffer. 

From 1619-present day, our people have had to fight against a systemic, personal and violent racial oppression that has led us to ask this question, “Do black lives matter?” 

And the response of millions people, many who call themselves Christian, is to utter the words, “All lives matter” when in fact the history of America reverberates the exact opposite claim. 

To you ‘all lives matter’ believers I leave this. When a little black girl is afraid at night, afraid that her mommy and daddy may not make it home one day because she is hearing about black people being killed by police in the street, and she looks up to Jesus and ask, “Lord, do black lives matter to you?”

Do you really believe that Jesus takes hold of this little black girl's face, fully aware of hundreds of years of suffering that has preceded her, and says, “Child...do not be so divisive...all lives matter.”

Or does Jesus look as this girl, whom he has made so beautiful as he draped her soul in this marvelous black body, and say “My child, I created you. Of course you matter.”