Parenting & Family Quote by John Henrik Clarke

Clarke is doing something more radical than arguing over religious iconography; he is sketching a theory of power that lives in the imagination. The line turns on a deceptively simple claim: if divinity is internal, then the image of divinity should not arrive as a foreign import stamped onto your psyche. That “suppose to look like you” isn’t mere vanity or separatism. It’s a demand for psychological sovereignty: the right to see yourself reflected in ultimate value.

The subtext is colonial history. For African-descended people in the Americas, Christianity often arrived braided with conquest, slavery, and a visual regime where holiness was routinely coded as white, European, and distant. Clarke’s “assigned to you by another people” frames theology as an administrative act, like drawing borders or renaming towns. The problem isn’t only the picture on the wall; it’s the hierarchy it smuggles in. If God looks like the colonizer, the colonizer’s social order starts to feel metaphysical - not just enforced but ordained.

“Spiritual prisoners” lands because it names the quietest form of captivity: consenting to a borrowed self-image. Clarke is warning that domination doesn’t end when chains are removed; it persists when a people must approach the sacred through someone else’s face. In that sense, he’s speaking to the Black intellectual tradition of the 20th century - from decolonization politics to Afrocentric scholarship - insisting that liberation is also an aesthetic and theological project. The quote works because it collapses big abstractions (God, freedom) into a concrete mechanism: who gets to supply the picture in your head.