No. of Recommendations: 4
Not exactly. Yes they claimed they were superior, but they also claimed that slavery was a good thing and sanctioned by the Bible. It was the best thing that could happened to those they saw as inferior. Jesus, in their minds, would approve of the great good that slavery represented.It took 40-50 years in the US, but slavery went from being considered a necessary evil by the slavers, to what you are saying. Slavery was the white man's burden, black people simply could not govern themselves, so the white man, by necessity, had to step in. Black people benefited from slavery. They wrote their own propaganda and convinced themselves, but there was the traditions of the story of Ham to glom onto, so it was easier, we had been doing this for some time.
The story of Ham:
https://theconversation.com/the-curse-of-ham-how-p...SNIP How could this be possible? How had religions supposedly dedicated to propagating the word of a compassionate and loving God become so intricately involved in this “appalling evil”? The answer is rooted in a grotesque misuse of the very words of the Bible. Of the many ways that Christians have invoked the Bible to justify their actions, none has exceeded in cruelty and wilful ignorance their appropriation of the “Curse of Ham” to justify slavery.
Ham (no relation!) was the youngest son of the Biblical patriarch Noah. When Ham saw his father drunk and naked, Noah felt so humiliated that he put a curse on Ham’s son, Canaan, condemning his descendants to perpetual slavery. Here is the moment, as told in Genesis 9:24-25 (New King James Version):
“So Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son [Ham] had done unto him. Then he said: ‘Cursed be Canaan. A servant of servants he shall be to his brethren’.”
The making of a ‘slave race’
Since the 15th century, religious leaders have cited the passage as the justification for the enslavement of all African people. For almost 500 years, priests taught their flocks that a Hebrew prophet had condemned millions of Africans to slavery because they were descended from Ham’s son Canaan. The curse of Ham thus formed the core religious justification for the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The curse of Ham entered Islamic thought in the 7th century, as a result of the influence of Christianity, and medieval Muslim scholars drew on Noah’s curse in their work, as the historian David M. Goldenberg has shown. The Koran, however, makes no mention of the curse and Muhummad’s Farewell Address rejects the superiority of white people over black people.
According to this reading of Genesis, God had not only mandated slavery, he had also predestined black people as a “slave race”. In fact, some Christian leaders argued that it was in the Africans’ interests to be enslaved, because their captivity would hasten their conversion, purifying and redeeming their souls in readiness for Judgement Day.
By manacling and herding millions of Africans onto ships bound for the colonies, slave traders and their enabling church leaders and governments had persuaded themselves that they were guiding the “Negroes” out of darkness and into salvation. SNIP
And there's more.
