Racism in Christianity:We Are Still Not Free

Shane Renaldo JohnsonReligion 450: Senior SeminarDr. Matthew Charles BaldwinSunday, December 03, 2006

Cursed Sons of Ham -- Genesis 9: 18-27

erase Put (Libya) because he disappeared

“Cursed be Canaan!”

The Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Hivites, Jebusites are in both passages; seeming fairly obvious that Joshua’s battle at Jericho was the fulfillment of Noah’s curse

Genesis 10: 15-18 -- Canaan’s sons

Deuteronomy 7: 1-4 – forbidden people

Sidon Hittites Jebusites Amorites Girgashites Hivites Arkites Sinites Arvadites Zemarites Hamathites

Hittites Girgashites Amorites Canaanites Perizites Hivites Jebusites

Other Kushites references in Scripture

Numbers 12 Jeremiah 13: 23

“Can the Cushite change his skin, or the leopard his spots? Just as much as can you do good, who are practiced in evil!”

Colossians 3: 11 uses “barbaros” in place of “Ethiopia” because this nation was the farthest South in the then-known world. This was to be as polar opposite of Scythian which was the Northern-most nation at the time. “Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised nor uncircumcised, [Southerner] or [Northerner], slave or free, but Christ is all and is in all” (NIV)

David M. Goldenburg, who studied this topic for 13 years, wrote The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam which states that: Semitic Jews did not propagate racism against Cushites

until Philo of Alexandria who says that “Ethiopia” is lowness

Origen was the first to propagate anti-Cushite theology to Christians (p. 50)

Others scholars said that “Ethiopia” is “burnt face”

Middle Passage

Racism at the 1936 Olympics

“The Americans should be ashamed of themselves, letting Negroes win their medals for them.” --Adolf Hitler who refused to shake Jesse Owens’ hand

Civil Rights Movement

Since the Civil Rights Movement

On page 100 of his book, Prophetic Fragments, Cornel West says: “The very category of ‘race’ –denoting primarily skin color—was first

employed as a means of classifying human bodies by Francois Bernier, a French physician, in 1864. The first authoritative division of humankind is found in the influential Natural System (1735) of the preeminent naturalist Carolus Linnaeus.”

Cooper Thompson and other compiled the testimonies for White Men Challenging Racism quotes Curdina Hill as saying “White people aren’t really doing

antiracism work unless they’re working with other people.” Harold Cruse writes The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, in which he says

“The peculiarities of the American social structure, and the position of the intellectual class within it, make the functional role of the negro intellectual a special one. The negro intellectual must deal intimately with the white power structure and cultural apparatus, and the inner realities of the black world at one and the same time. But in order to function successfully in this role, he has to be acutely aware of the nature of the American social dynamic and how it monitors the ingredients of class stratifications in American society… Therefore the functional role of the negro intellectual demands that he cannot be absolutely separated from either the black or white world.”