Blackness and Slavery
The sons of Noah who went forth from the ark were Shem,
Ham, and Japheth. Ham was the father of Canaan. These three
were the sons of Noah; and from these the whole earth was
peopled. Noah was the first tiller of the soil. He planted
a vineyard; and he drank of the wine, and became drunk, and
lay uncovered in his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw
the nakedness of his father, and told his two brothers outside.
Then Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it upon both their
shoulders, and walked backward and covered the nakedness of
their father; their faces were turned away, and they did not see
their father's nakedness. When Noah awoke from his wine and
knew what his youngest son had done to him, he said, “Cursed
be Canaan; a slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers.”
(Gen 9:18-25, RSV)
THIS BIBLICAL SLORY has been the single greatest justification for Black slavery for more than a thousand years. It is a strange justification indeed, for there is no reference in it to Blacks at all. And yet just about everyone, especially in the antebellum American South, understood that in this story God meant to curse black Africans with eternal slavery, the so-called Curse of Ham. As one proslavery author wrote in 1838, “The blacks were originally designed to vassalage by the Patriarch Noah.”
This book attempts to explain how and why this strange interpretation of the biblical text took hold. It does so by looking at the larger picture, that is, by uncovering just how Blacks were perceived by those people for whom the Bible was a central text. What did the early Jews, Christians, and Muslims see when they looked at the black African? Clearly, the biblical interpretation is forced. How, then, did the biblical authors view Blacks and what were the postbiblical forces that wrung such a view from the Bible?
This is a book about the ancient link between black skin color and slav-