The Study of Racialism

gemini072 · Moderator Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 2695 }

Is There a Redemption?

It was characteristic of the folklore of curses (for example, in the Flying Dutchman tale), that various versions would begin to offer resolutions of a curse in some form of a redemption. The curse of Ham is no exception. In the Islamic tradition several authors explain the exemption of some descendants of Ham from the curse by adding stories of the lifting of the curse. In the Byzantine tradition, Pentecost was the antitype to the Tower of Babel, hence also a form of redemption from the consequences of the curse of Ham. Yet the fact that white Christians believed that blacks stood in need of a more specific redemption is suggested by the request that a group of missionary bishops made at the first Vatican Council of 1870, "asking the pope to release the Negro race from the curse which, it seems, comes from Ham."

Another, even stranger example of a proposal for lifting the curse on blacks was made by Modesto Brocos (1852-1936) in his painting A Redenção de Cam (The Redemption of Ham), which won the first gold medal at the Brazilian Fine Arts Exposition in 1895 and is now in the Museo de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro. Here the resolution represented is a white (male Portugese) sexual partner, as the succeeding generations- arranged on a diagonal line from upper left to the center of the painting -look lighter & lighter. What the American John Fletcher viewed as the cause of Ham's curse, the Brazilian Modesto Brocos thus saw as the way of lifting it. Despite the endorsement of interracial relationships, this is hardly a view free of preconceptions, as it presumes the identification of whites as a racially chosen people. Even the (rare) redemptions of the curse may thus show what Patrick Girard has called 'pigmentocracy." Yet these examples of 'redemption' still deserve to be contrasted with the view of the Georgia-born writer Maurice Thompson, who composed a work entitled "The Voodoo Prophecy"(ca.1889):

You seed of Abel, proud of your descent,
And arrogant, because you cheeks are fair,
Within my loins an inky curse is pent
To flood
Your blood
And stain your skin and crisp you golden hair.

Thompson formulated what one might regard as a secularized version of the curse of Cain/Ham: it has become the 'inky curse' ineffaceable and threatening as pollution of the blood stream via 'miscegenation; and Natus AEthiopus. "Race" may partly function in analogy to the distinction between unbelievers and believers; yet, as has already been noted, it does not permit conversion.

p. 103 Neither Black nor White yet Both

note: in the painting the Negro grandmother on the left the Mulattoe daughter the quadroon grandchild and the White son-in-law