Slavery and ‘one drop of blood’
Hands—@iStockphoto.com/narvikk
It is often assumed that slavery in the antebellum1 USA was driven by white vs black racism. In fact, it was, if anything, the other way around—it was slavery that exacerbated racism.
First, the evidence indicates that throughout history, people enslaved others whenever they had the means and opportunity, regardless of their ‘race’. Black people were captured by other black people for sale to non-African markets. Huge numbers of ‘white’ Europeans were enslaved by both whites and non-whites. The word ‘slave’ itself comes from one of those heavily enslaved white races, the Slavs. In fact, the Barbary coast pirates of North Africa had such a thriving and entrenched white slave trade in the early 1800s that it caused the US to send military forces into battle there, inspiring the famous Marine Hymn line, ‘To the Shores of Tripoli’.
As late as 2001, black Africans were still being kept and traded as slaves in the Sudan.2 Unfortunately, the silence from the ‘politically correct’ media on this open scandal has been deafening—perhaps because the perpetrators were other black Africans, or maybe because many were followers of the ‘religion of peace’.
Second, support for slavery’s role in heightening racism comes from comparing the different social outcomes in the US and Brazil. In the US during the era of slavery, there was an emphasis that was largely lacking in Brazil: that all people, being descended from Adam, are created in God’s image. It means they are all intrinsically equal, one human family, despite all the variety and cultural differences, as the Declaration of Independence said. So in the US, there was a pressure to concoct schemes to make the enslaved group less human—but not in Brazil. This is one important reason why, after slavery was abolished, Brazil had far fewer social problems involving black-white racism than the US.
It also explains why such biblically untenable (though allegedly biblical) notions as ‘pre-Adamite races’,3 and ‘the curse of Ham led to black skin’4 arose and/or were prevalent in the white culture of the USA, yet not that of Brazil.5 In a society with more biblical leanings, the anti-racist and anti-slavery implications of the straightforward history of humanity in Genesis had to be neutralized. Like today’s theistic evolution compromises, these ideas were not driven by what the Bible said, but by the outside ideas prevalent in the society, which were then read into the Bible.
One drop of blood: black or white?
Related to this is another interesting ‘racial’ difference in comparing Brazil and the US. In several Western societies, one is regarded as ‘black’ (or in Australia, Aboriginal) even if the majority contribution to one’s ancestry was ‘white’. In the slavery era in the US, this was known as the ‘one-drop rule’. At the time, it implied inferiority, with the ‘lower’ group’s ‘blood’ regarded as if it were a ‘contaminant’.6
This rule was enshrined in law in Virginia’s 1924 Racial Integrity Act, passed on the same day as the state’s evolution-inspired eugenics act to sterilize people by force. If a white person married someone who had even ‘one drop’ of African ‘blood’ (ancestry), their marriage was a criminal offence.
Given the lack of pressure in Brazil to relegate blacks to an inferior status to justify their enslavement, it’s no surprise that in Brazil the one-drop rule does not work that way at all. In fact, it almost applies in reverse. According to Jose Neinstein, executive director of the Brazilian-American Cultural Institute, for people living in the US, “If you are not quite white, then you are black”. But in his native country of Brazil, “If you are not quite black, then you are white.”7 Many Brazilians who regard themselves as white back home find that when they come to the US, people see them in the opposite way.
All of which only goes to show the arbitrary and culturally determined nature of many of our notions of race and skin colour. What a difference it could make, both to racist ideas and to the ‘politically correct’ overreactions to them, to fully grasp hold of the implications of Genesis. We are not only all related, but astonishingly closely related. We all go back to Adam and Eve—and even more recently than that, to Noah and his family. We really are one human family.
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Further Reading
References and notes
- Before the Civil War. Return to text.
- W. Williams (an African-American economist), Black Slavery is Alive in 2001, Available at www.capitalismmagazine.com, 4 January, 2001, acc. 10 October 2010. Return to text.
- This was to make Adam the progenitor of only the ‘white race’. Thus these alleged pre-Adamites were the ancestors of all other groups, who could then be labelled as subhuman. By not being in the Adamic line, it also precluded the possibility of their salvation through Jesus Christ, the ‘Kinsman Redeemer’ (Isaiah 59:20) and ‘the Last Adam’ (1 Corinthians 15:45). Return to text.
- There was of course no curse on Ham, and no mention of skin colour associated with the account regarding the curse on Canaan, Ham’s son. For a fascinating explanation/exposition of other aspects of this, see the author’s book One Human Family: The Bible, science, race and culture. Return to text.
- See also the book by secular researcher Sylvester A. Johnson, The myth of Ham in nineteenth-century American Christianity, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Return to text.
- In Australia today, the ‘one drop’ can serve to endow victim status and access to various benefits even where the person has little historical or cultural connection to any Aboriginal group. Return to text.
- Fears, D., People of color who never felt they were black: racial label surprises many Latino immigrants, The Washington Post, p. A01, 26 December 2002. Return to text.
Readers’ comments
The book also deals with the differences in Australia (where Aboriginal people were always a stark minority) and South Africa, where the very opposite was true from the beginning. For example, this extract from the book:
And if one accepts the teachings of Christ, all who accept him as their savior are in one spiritual family, regardless of their ethnicity.
In eternity, we will no doubt be no longer defined by our ethnicity, even as the Bible says we will no longer be defined by gender.
But let's not be pollyannaish, race exists in this world. There are for example diseaese like tay-sachs and sickle-cell anemia that vary by race (or people groups if you prefer).
It would be somewhat miraculous if races could be different in so many physical characteristics like color, hair texture, stature, head shape, relativee limb measurements, and on and on, with hundreds of metrics known to any competent forensics expert - and not different in intelligence.
To believe that would be as naive as believing that all breeds of dogs are as different as they are, yet equal in intelligence. They most assuredely are not (there are entire books avaialble on the intelligence of dog breeds), so why think humans are any different?
The eugenicists of the early 20th century, like the founding fathers of the USA, did not hate black people, but they did recognize that to allow white to interbreed with them would corrupt the white race and destroy our society.
Go to any large US city and walk around in white neighborhods and black ones. Which one do you want your children to live in?
Which race has created science and industry that have made the wolrd a better place?
In countries domeinated by which race do you see a concern for the less fortunate and the environment?
(No answer provided - decide for yourself.)
Rev. Robert Hall, in his book Modern Infidelity written in 1835, says:
"Infidelity is the joint offspring of an irreligious temper and unholy speculation, employed, not in examining the evidences of Christianity, but in detecting the vices and imperfections of confessing Christians. It has passed through various stages, each distinguished by higher gradations of impiety; for when men arrogantly abandon their guide, and willfully shut their eyes on the light of heaven, it is wisely ordained that their errors shall multiply at every step, until their extravagance confutes itself, and the mischief of their principles works its own antidote.
I have a question for those who followed or still follow
‘one drop of blood’. If the day came when you needed a blood transfusion to live and the only one that could save you was a person of color would you stand by your principles and die?
Until the Lord comes again, there will always be slavery. It will differ in degree and type but we all are in subjugation to all types of people and systems (government mandates, corporations, God, etc). More importantly, do we want to be a slave of Christ? or to men? or to the lusts of our own nature?
BTW, the book also documents from a secular ethnohistorian that the heroes of today's secular humanists, the Enlightenment Skeptics such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Hume, pushed the idea of 'polygenesis' (separate origins for different races) to displace the mainstream view of monogenesis--i.e. Adam and Eve, thus 'one human family'. And that, according to the same secular authority, this idea was useful "to justify slavery, anti-Semitism, and European domination of indigenous peoples."
Don't we have enough people in the world promoting politically correct worldviews, without having Christian "leaders" doing so as well?
There is nothing at all sinful or nefarious in the notion that God has created (through His providential working in history) different people groups (or, what sane people call "races") or that He's given them different talents and abilities - different ways of glorifying Him.
Inequality (and even racial inequality, where race is seen through sane eyes as indicated above), is a fact of life,
...even if the Neo-Marxist, rabid-egalitarians who write for CMI don't like it.
I recommend people read Mark Noll (e.g., "America's God", "The Civil War as a Theological Crisis" for the actual history of American slavery and just how strongly the Southerners felt supported by the text of the Bible. Noll doesn't whitewash the uncomfortable truths.
Note, by the way, Graham P's comment above in agreement with all the points made in the article; he is not speculating so much as giving his own perception as one who has lived there.
It seems to me that, even in South Africa, the politically correct establishment have “protected” people even of different races, from the truth—despite us living on the same continent.
Blessings to you and CMI!
EvN
What an eye opener!
By the grace of God,may the truth set us free!
Exodus 21:2–6
Exodus 21:7–11
Exodus 21:20–21
Leviticus 25:44–46
And even in the NT
Luke 12:47–48
What does this ministry have to say about this? Are you going to somehow justify such cruelty as portrayed in both the Old and New Testament? Or will you simply ignore this; I think the latter is very likely.
Even a cursory search would have revealed several articles, and reading them would have shown you why it was Bible-believing Christians whose passionate commitment to the teachings of Scripture led to the abolition of slavery, not the Enlightenment (in fact, the heroes of many of today's skeptics/humanists, the Enlightenment philosophers Hume, Voltaire and more, defending polygenesis in opposition to biblical creation of one couple precisely because of the desire to support the inferiority of certain ‘races’, which justified slavery and economic subjugation of other people groups (see for example Anti-slavery activist William Wilberforce: Christian hero).
And far from avoiding such topics, there are major sections on slavery, apartheid, Christian atrocities, even pedophilia and more in my recent book One Human Family (sample reading, including the full topic index, by following the link to the book’s title).
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