The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

by Jemar Tisby

This passage from Genesis not only provided a basis for slavery’s existence, but it was an indication for some that God decreed a specific race of people to be cursed and live their days in bondage. Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederate States of America, remarked in his well-known “Cornerstone Speech” that “the negro by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system.”23 And Dabney tentatively advanced a claim that many white Christians held as incontrovertible truth: “It may be that we should find little difficulty in tracing the lineage of the present Africans to Ham.”24 A racial genealogy underlies the racist interpretation of Canaan’s curse. It assumed that the progeny of Shem became the Jewish people, the descendants of Japheth became white people, and these two were the rightful masters of those descended from Ham, the “degraded” black race. In one stroke of dubious demography, slavery became the right and proper place of Africans specifically and exclusively.