HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Libby Anne’s blog Love Joy Feminism. It was originally published on Patheos on January 22, 2013.
I grew up reading copious amounts of literature from Answers in Genesis and attending conferences where Ken Ham and other leading creationists were speakers. I’ve been to the Creation Museum, and I’ve been reading Answers in Genesis’ Answers Magazine for close to a decade now. And one thing that was drilled into me over and over again is that racism is rooted in the theory of evolution and that creationism, which teaches that all humans are descended from Adam and Eve, is the antidote to evolution.
One Blood: The Biblical Answer to Racism
I grew up reading this literature and firmly rejecting both (overt) racism and the theory of evolution.
Here is an image from the Creation Museum, an image which describes a theory of human origins that I accepted as gospel truth until college:
I was taught, and Answers in Genesis teaches, that Africans are the descendants of Ham, that Europeans are the descendants of Japheth, and that Asians and Middle Easterners are the descendants of Shem. I’m not surprised, then, to learn that some public school classrooms in Texas are using creationist textbooks that contain the following image:
Growing up in a Christian homeschool family, the textbooks we used for subjects like history and science were suffused with religion, and this theory of racial origins is exactly what I was taught – and what Answers in Genesis teaches. What I didn’t realize, and what Answers in Genesis seems weirdly oblivious to, is this:
This theory of racial origins is actually, well, racist.
Somehow this flew over my head growing up – which is weird, given my familiarity with the Bible – but the story of Noah’s three sons is not somehow equal or without preference or value judgment.
Genesis 9: 18-27
The sons of Noah who came out of the ark were Shem, Ham and Japheth. (Ham was the father of Canaan.) These were the three sons of Noah, and from them came the people who were scattered over the earth.
Noah, a man of the soil, proceeded to plant a vineyard. When he drank some of its wine, he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father’s nakedness and told his two brothers outside. But Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it across their shoulders; then they walked in backward and covered their father’s nakedness. Their faces were turned the other way so that they would not see their father’s nakedness.
When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what his youngest son had done to him, he said,
“Cursed be Canaan!
The lowest of slaves
will he be to his brothers.”
He also said,
“Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem!
May Canaan be the slave of Shem.
May God extend the territory of Japheth;
may Japheth live in the tents of Shem,
and may Canaan be his slave.”
“The curse of Ham” was used by antebellum Americans as a justification for slavery.
Africans, after all, were descended from Ham, and Ham was cursed by God and ordered to serve his brothers Shem and Japheth. (For more background, I highly recommend Sylvester Johnson’s The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity: Race, Heathens, and the People of God
Am I saying that the theory of evolution has never been used to justify racism? Of course not. Am I saying that modern creationists are of necessity racist? Not at all. What I am saying is that Answers in Genesis’ insistence that racism stems from the theory of evolution and that creationism is automatically anti-racist is both overly simplistic and factually incorrect. While I am very glad Ham wants to combat racism, I don’t think he completely understands that he is working to do so by promoting a theory of origins – that all men descend from Shem, Ham, and Japheth – that has long been seeped in racism. While this idea may hold no racist implications for him, it does for many others, especially in the American South.
(After writing the above I read this excerpt from One Blood, and I suddenly wonder if I am giving Ham too much of the benefit of the doubt. I clearly need to reread the book. Ham argues that “the curse of Ham” was actually only meant to be a curse on Canaan, but he somehow does that without making things much better at all.)
Homeschoolers Anonymous 
My grandfather was a southern Baptist preacher and he believed that black people were meant to be slaves. We were told that black people were cursed for idolatry, but my grandfather called Catholics idol worshipers, and Catholics in Louisiana are white. He decided we would go to home school because he did not want his white grandchildren going to school with blacks.
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Oh, yes, “The Curse of Ham”. Cosmic justification for White Supremacy long before Darwin. (And if you’ve ever read collections of Stephen Jay Gould essays, he spends a lot of time on how throughout history, bad science was used to prop up White Supremacy. Just in this case, the bad science is bad theology.)
First, “Men of Sin” will glom onto ANY Cosmic-level Authority — Bible, Koran, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Nature, whatever — to get the “Divine Right” to do what they wanted to do anyway.
And second, genetic drift analysis shows the original humans were probably the Khoi-San of Africa (formerly known as “Kalahari Bushmen”) — short, wiry, medium-skinned, with very Africanized features. Given this, all the lily-white Adam & Eve dioramas in the Creation Museum et al are a real hoot. (Only thing more extreme would be to make Adam clean-shaven with a Fifties crewcut, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see just that in Fifties Creationist literature and exhibits.)
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