The confusion behind the white Jesus is a mix-up between two kinds of record. One is what the earliest documents say about Jesus. The other is what later artists, scholars and missions added. Jesus is usually pictured as white because of the second. The Gospels never describe his face. They do record his people, his family line and his home: a Jewish man of David's line, raised in Nazareth of Galilee, in the first century. That is enough to correct the picture, though not enough to paint a reliable one.
Knowing this rarely settles the matter. Many people already suspect that Jesus was not a fair-haired European, and the picture on the wall still outweighs the fact. In the Jude 3 Project documentary Unspoken, Chris Broussard lists the image among the reasons people give for calling Christianity a white man's religion: "You look at the paintings and the pictures of all the biblical characters being white." A correction that has never been understood step by step tends to collapse in conversation with someone who has experienced that image as a verdict on who belongs.
The four movements that follow build the explanation in the order a learner needs it, so that you can give it yourself. First comes the line between what the text records and what later pictures added. Next is learning to date the image by the kind of evidence behind each claim about it. Then comes the reason the image wounds, which has less to do with its colors than with what it was used to say. Last, you assemble the pieces into an explanation that can survive the strongest pushback. A church historian, a biblical scholar, historians of early African Christianity, pastors, a bishop and a broadcaster each supply one step.