You’re first hand gesture emoji. You were 16 or maybe 17. You selected the plain old yellow one…but wait! There are 5 more!

You open up the colour palette and you saw that there were multiple, distinct and very few colour tones of skin colours for different hands. Funnily enough, those skin colours are also attributed to so-called racial groups.

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Then you selected the tone of skin which matches yours and it gets placed in your emoji history so that it conveniently can be gathered again. You use it more often to express a wave, a gesture or a sign and then you use it everyday. Then with this hand gesture, being distinctly part of the five given racial groups, is now an image for how you express your gestures and hands.

You might think well, it’s not that big of deal, I’m just matching my hand gestures in the physical to what I can represent in the virtual. That’s an even bigger problem to get around. When we take on these emojis, we then embody the physical things they represent, namely, the isolation and boxing of people in distinct racial groups. Our bodies are filled with that category and the traumas, lies, and illusions the World attaches to that category.

We shouldn’t communicate and express ourselves based on the how the World wants us to express ourselves, but rather how God wants us to express ourselves as we express in Heaven. God wants us to express ourselves in truth and in love, not by self-imposed and worldly racial categories of power and division.

These categories, Black, Dark Brown, Brown, Tanned and White are self-imposed categories. Such self-imposition means that these categories are not real in themselves; they have been given to us by human authority, police recording devices and mere physical descriptions. The very fact that there are only five is indicative to the UK Police IC which matches exactly to the 5 regional codes they and other authorities use as a record. Moreover, any one of these racial categories can be divided into any number of sub-divided categories depending on the necessity for the world to justify the division of two groups. Since these groups can be sub-divided any number of times, they are not atomic in nature and do not make up the building blocks of life. (For example, male and female are indeed self-evident categories because they cannot be subdivided in themselves.)

Therefore, what you embody is an expression of a category that isn’t actually real or fundamental in themselves. These colours and categories aren’t real. What you’re doing is embodying a spirit of “Colouredness, Africanness and Blackness; explicitly being anti-white and anti-European—and anti-Christian. Hip-hop culture, gang culture, “black culture”, blackness…wife beating, drug using and drug dealing are justified forms of aggression and attitude by claiming that white people are racist and are trying to kill you. I believe this embodiment is so dangerous because it means all your actions of violence, abuse, manipulation, aggression and exclusion is justified: we’re doing it in the name of justice and equality.

There is no way of expressing these groups through messaging hand gestures other than through a sub-conscious one of power: “my group dominates your group, your group up-rises against my group in the way they identify themselves.” There is only an expression for one of power and there is no room for the embodiment of Christ.

The World, and the Devil who is the prince of this World, gives us these narrow and frankly useless tools of expressing ourselves. But God with his Divine Spirit, has given an elevated form of gestures and expressions that is not based on race, on power or on categories. We are not mere colours on a pallet, digits and bits designed to beep 1s and 0s. We are Sons of God, through Jesus Christ, he holds that promise and a guarantee of who we truly are.