The races are separated and distinguished by more than mere skin color but it cannot be overlooked that the Bible teaches a conceptual frame of reference regarding light and dark which is univocally (by all peoples everywhere) reiterated. In accord with what the Westminster Confession calls “the Light of Nature”, Painter and Theorist Jacques Nicolas Paillot de Montabert wrote in 1837:
“White is the symbol of Divinity or God;
Black is the symbol of the evil spirit or the demon.
White is the symbol of light…
Black is the symbol of darkness and darkness expresses all evils.
White is the emblem of harmony;
Black is the emblem of chaos.
White signifies supreme beauty;
Black, ugliness.
White signifies perfection;
Black signifies vice.
White is the symbol of innocence;
Black, that of guilt, sin, and moral degradation.
White, a positive color, indicates happiness;
Black, a negative color, indicates misfortune.
The battle between good and evil is symbolically expressed
By the opposition of white and black.”
This metaphysical paradigm compelled Morison to comment:
“They had inherited, among other things, a long history on the meaning of color; it was that this color ‘meant’ something.” (Toni Morison, on Antebellum America)
This is even patently obvious in our language (as well as all others)—intelligent people are called “bright” while the unintelligent are referred to as “dim”. Both judicious and attractive people are called “fair”. When someone is uninformed they’re “in the dark” and once informed they are “enlightened”. To be “light-hearted” is to be jovial while being “black-hearted” is synonymous with a wicked character. The sense in which Africa is “The Dark Continent” is by double entendre—spiritually as well as anthropologically. “It appears that the symbolism of black-negative and white-positive is widespread among people of all colors.” (David M. Goldberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, p.3)
That is to say that everyone innately associates darkness with danger or malevolence and light with rationality and benevolence. Dark complected people have always and in all cultures been regarded as more menacing and less trustworthy. This is so even amongst Blacks as they tend to shun the darkest among them in deference to those with lighter skin. The now famous “White or Black Doll Tests” clearly demonstrate this dynamic among black children (age 3-5 yrs.) who, when asked to choose the “good baby”, almost always pick the white doll over the black one. (Associations of this kind made by those so young testify to the innateness and in-born nature of the human mind. No child needs to be taught to be afraid of the dark; it is preprogrammed and inherent.)
Christians, following the language of scripture, have always echoed the sentiments of John Knox who said of this matter: “To me it is enough to say that black is not white, and man’s tyranny and foolishness is not God’s perfect ordinance.”
But it is alleged by the guilt-laden ministers of the day that all such things are merely proof of the systemic wickedness of racism. Even the more noetically bent among them are resolved to interpret this universal association of darkness with evil and uncertainty as an immanent effect of the fall. But this is like saying that the psychological association of heat with fire is a sin—as if humanity had collectively failed a sociological Rorschach test in identically the same fashion one to another throughout all time. Really, this claim strains all credibility and seems to cause more problems than it solves.
The fact is that every people in the world have always acknowledged, atleast on some level, the general correspondence between observable morphological/racial traits and certain predispositions of character and intelligence. This historical unanimity of opinion grates hard against those who would presume to convince us that race has no relation to aptitudes of character or intellect and that color has no metaphysical correlation to vitue or vice; but if we are to be at all conversant with reality we must affirm what God has wrought in His created order.
Caucasians are simply more introspective and ultimately more ethical (on average) than are other peoples. This fact is so obvious to all as to require no proving here; suffice it to say that Blacks and Mestizos themselves consider good ethical character to be, as they say, “acting White.” As much as this heritable predisposition toward a higher ethical order is observed even in the progenitor of the White race (Japheth), so too has the antitype been acknowledged in the Black race (Ham):
“But Pharoa easily reduced the Egyptians to bondage to himself, nor is it written that he did this by force. For the Egyptians are prone to a degenerate life and quickly sink to every slavery of the vices. Look at the origin of the race and you will discover that their father Cham, who had laughed at his father’s nakedness, deserved a judgment of this kind, that his son Chanaan should b e a servant to his brothers, in which case the condition of bondage would prove the wickedness of his conduct. Not without merit, therefore, does the discolored posterity imitate the ignobility of the race.” (Origen on African heritage and color in Gen. 9)
Anne Coulter has recently come under fire for addressing the reality of this matter by speaking of the uniqueness of an “Anglo-Saxon benevolence”. She has come to recognize that as American demographics trend away from White society that we are seeing a natural trend away from civilized thinking and behavior. She is brave to acknowledge their correspondence and she is demonized for voicing what everyone knows to be true. No matter their status of religious conversion, education level, or ‘proper socialization’, you can track every social and criminal pathology along racial lines. A White Atheist neighborhood is far safer and more ethical in general than a Black Christian one. Now, I know that the modern Evangelical is rankled by such a statement but it must be understood that the natural preordination of certain lineal characteristics in no way undermine the Gospel or the sanctifying effects which result therefrom; on the contrary, such ethnic inborn affections and psychological predispositions evidence themselves as a primary vehicle of providence.
It was accordingly with an acknowledgement of both nature and nurture that Mather penned his tract, TREMENDA: The DREADFUL SOUND with which the WICKED are to be THUNDERSTRUCK, Delivered upon the Execution of a MISERABLE AFRICAN for a most inhumane and uncommon MURDER. (Cotton Mather, May 25th, 1721) On which Weiner comments:
“On one hand, Joseph Hanno [the ‘Miserable African’] was the product of precisely the kind of spiritual inclusiveness that Mather advocated. ‘I have a great deal of knowledge,’ Hanno told Mather of his own Christian education. ‘Nobody of my color, in old England or new, has so much.’ And yet Hanno’s knowledge of Christ clearly had not made this particular African more law abiding,…Hanno instead had committed a crime that struck at the very foundation of the Puritan vision of social order: the benevolent exercise of paternal authority. In the dead of night, Hanno had struck his wife’s head with the blunt end of an ax and placed her in their common bed (he then slit her throat with a razor for good measure)… Mather entreated blacks to make a special effort to live up to standards of Christian behavior, defying Hanno’s example, particularly by obeying their superiors. The sermon was an occasion in which Mather could use the spectacle of impending execution to reassert his vision of black Christianity.” ( Mark S. Weiner, professor at Rutgers School of Law in Newark, New Jersey and author of Black Trials: Citizenship from the Beginnings of Slavery to the End of Caste)
The issue of inordinate criminal pathologies amongst Negroes was a matter of conventional observation, as attested to by the “Narratives of Negro Crime in New England, 1675-1800″and was understood as coherent only through the Christian frame of reference: Not yet having been emasculated by Social Marxism, Christians interacted with reality in candor. They acknowledged the overt visual distinctions between people groups as natural corollaries to their respective behavioral predilections. That is, they acknowledged the patent inclinations of behavior and capability native to the various lines of human descent.
Their unblinking willingness to accept heredity as a handmaiden to providence was undergirded by their view of God as the one whom Van Til would come to call “The All-Conditioner”; and His scripture which makes perennial denunciations of certain lines of descent—the first of which was segregated by visual appearance in the person of Cain whom God “marked”.
And as for the Negro in particular, John Gil comments:
“’To a people terrible from their beginning hitherto’; for their black colour and their grim looks, especially in some parts; and for the vast armies they brought into the field, as never were by any other people; (see 2 Chronicles 12:3) and they might well be said to be so from the beginning, since Nimrod, the mighty hunter, was the son of Cush, from whence Ethiopians have the name Cushites, and is the name Ethiopia is called by in the preceding verse Isaiah 18:1:” (John Gil’s Commentary on Isaiah 18:2)
The Bible refers to the Negro race as ‘a people terrible from their beginning onward’ (Isai.18) Gil takes from it the same observation as had Origen (above) before him—that the ‘discolored posterity’ of Ham were ‘marked’ in a fashion reminiscent of Cain. And as Cain’s ‘marking’ was the clear and observable manifestation of distinction God imposed between people groups to facilitate their holiness (i.e., separation).
Even Abraham Lincoln, the “Great Emancipator” opined before an audience of Black Republicans on the subject of the Negro:
“I agree with Judge Douglas he [the Negro] is not my equal in many respects—certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment.” (1st of the Lincoln/ Douglas Debates)
But that just goes to show that people understood demographics as destiny long before the rise of modern statistical analysis and critical surveys of Intelligence Quotient amid the races. So it appears then that Toni Morison was right regarding the Negro: Historically, psychologically, metaphysically and biblically, color ‘means something’.
But of course, someone will still insist, in spite of their own reflexive association of dark with evil and the Bible’s identical assumptions, that the ‘color of the races are meaningless’; they would call Charles Hodge an inveterate liar for saying, “The differences between the Caucasian, Mongolian, and negro races, which is known to have been as distinctly marked two or three thousand years before Christ as it is now…. these varieties of race are not the effect of the blind operation of physical causes, but by those causes as intelligently guided by God for the accomplishment of some wise purpose…” They must call him a liar because the notion that God has appropriated to certain peoples shades of color which the Bible connotes to virtue or vice on a metaphysical level is itself a violation of the law which they’ve enthroned above God in their hearts—namely, that God has not the right to deal in such innequality.
At root then, they deny the sovereign Supralapsarianism of God over His creation and they turn in deference to a Hindu-esque, all-is-one-without-distinction sort of egalitarian Idol.
[…] Your farm isn’t safe, neither is your daughter. After they rape your daughter you’ll find that pregnancy isn’t your first concern, instead it is the extremely high risk of AIDS. In this case, the beautiful and talented young white girl tested positive. Lord have mercy on her. Her father is a coward and a weakling who obviously hated his family as is apparent by his actions. He’s an example of what you do not want to be. Instead, love your family as Christ taught us to by putting on the armor of God previously mentioned, and fighting the forces of darkness. […]
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[…] Providence: Cultural & Biological Part III […]