1. Racism in Christianity:
We Are Still Not Free
Shane Renaldo Johnson
Religion 450: Senior Seminar
Dr. Matthew Charles Baldwin
Sunday, December 03, 2006

2. Cursed Sons of Ham -- Genesis 9: 18-27
erase Put (Libya) because he disappeared

3. “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

4. 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)

5.  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”

6. Middle Passage

7. 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

8. Civil Rights Movement

10. 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.”