One of the books I’ve been reading this year is Carl F. Ellis Jr.’s Free at Last?: The Gospel in the African American Experience. It’s good history of African American movements and an exposition of the goals and promises they have held over the years. It’s a wealth of information and trivia that would make a great text for a semester course. The trivia mostly comes within the sixty-page glossary of people, places, and terms that may have been referred to in main text.

One of the terms explained in this glossary is the myth of the “curse of Ham.” It’s an idea I’ve known about for years, but I can’t remember how I first heard it. It came up several weeks ago on Twitter by one of those accounts that reads like a gateway drug to radicalization. It’s based on a few verses in Genesis 9, which read: “And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him. And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren” (Gen. 9:24-25 KJV).

It’s a weird passage because of the unclear reason Noah is provoked to curse his grandson and bless two of his three sons. But you see when reading these two verses that Ham is not the one cursed. It’s Canaan, his son. The narrative at this point emphasizes Ham being Canaan’s father, and in the next chapter it spells out the Canaanite peoples and some of the cities they founded, including Sodom and Gomorrah. It’s easy to see the setup for the wrath God would pour on them when bringing Israel back to the promised land.

But the myth is that Noah’s curse was on the father, Ham, touching every one of his descendants in every generation. Ellis says those who paint Christianity as a white man’s religion use this as a proof. Some of them argue it’s a good reason for African Americans to convert to Islam, but aside from this being a foolish interpretation of Genesis, it comes from a ninth-century Muslim apologist.

Ham the son of Noah was a white man, with a handsome face and figure, and the Almighty God changed his color and the color of his descendants in response to his father’s curse. He went away, followed by his sons, and they settled by the shore, where God increased and multiplied them. They were the blacks . . .

Ibn Qutaybah, Kitāb al-maʿārif, p. 26

That, friends, is not Biblical theology. It misreads the written word of God and imagines an explanation to fit some human conclusion. If Christian orthodoxy is anything, it’s bound to God’s word (let the reader understand). Ellis adds that this idea was used to justify slavery within White Christianity-ism (an idolatrous civil religion that uses the language and forms of Christianity for its own ends).