In 1925 Countee Cullen published Color. Cullen's poetry includes a great many poignant and pained theological poems, I limit myself here to some famous lines from "Heritage" from the aforementioned collection.
Quaint, outlandish heathen gods
Black men fashion out of rods,
Clay, and brittle bits of stone,
In a likeness like their own,
My conversion came high-priced;
I belong to Jesus Christ,
Preacher of Humility;
Heathen gods are naught to me.
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,
So I make an idle boast;
Jesus of the twice-turned cheek,
Lamb of God, although I speak
With my mouth thus, in my heart
Do I play a double part.
Ever at Thy glowing altar
Must my heart grow sick and falter,
Wishing He I served were black,
Thinking then it would not lack
Precedent of pain to guide it,
Let who would or might deride it;
Surely then this flesh would know
Yours had borne a kindred woe.
Lord, I fashion dark gods, too,
Daring even to give You
Dark despairing features where,
Crowned with dark rebellious hair,
Patience wavers just so much as
Mortal grief compels, while touches
Quick and hot, of anger, rise
To smitten cheek and weary eyes.
Lord, forgive me if my need
Sometimes shapes a human creed.
It does seem to me that the needs of (nearly?) every person to sense that God can empathize with us drives us to imagine God in our own image. Cullen later imagined Jesus as a lynched Black man in his 1922, "Christ Recrucified."
On the other hand, echoing the dominant strains of American masculinity, the pastor of the "other" Mars Hill Church (Seattle) once famously intoned: "In Revelation (the last book of the New Testament), Jesus is a prize-fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is the guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up." Problems with hippie-diaper-halo-Christ aside, wasn't this the basic problem of the zealots? Never mind.
God is an unprejudiced white-hipster!! Like me! I feel great.