Black History in the New Century

Two Sundays ago a cute little girl caught me and my daughter Lily in the bathroom at church.  After walking in she looked at me, then at the baby and asked me, "Are you taking care of someone else's baby or is that your baby?"

I smiled and replied, "That's my baby."

"Oh," she said.  "She doesn't look anything like me, does she?" I said, smiling.

"No." She said, then hesitated to say, "She has a light face and you have a brown face."

"Yeah, maybe she'll get darker later."  I said, still genuinely smiling.

Children can be very real without being malicious.  That's what makes them cute and special. :-)

It's interesting that so many African American things are happening right now, at the beginning of the turn of the century.  The United States National Slavery Museum opened in June 2006 in Fredericksburg, Virginia, not too far from where my Mom grew up.  Then in November 2006 there was a ground-breaking ceremony for a new Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial on the National Mall, which hopes to be completed in 2010.  All are familiar with the events of this past election and subsequent January when Obama took the oath for the President of the United States.  Finally, I read yesterday in the NY Times that the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D. C. has contracted a design team for a National Museum of African American History and Culture to be built just across 14th Street from the National Museum of American History.  This new museum is projected to be completed in 2015.  All this makes my head spin.

In light of these current events, one might hope that racism and prejudice in the U. S. have also died out but it is still present.  Jeramy and I had hopes of a leadership position in a church in Garland, Texas (near Dallas), but were rejected because the music minister's wife was racist and made threatening comments to the search committee.  That sin has been dealt with by their pastor and after they had repented and asked us back, it was too late for us to go - the ship had sailed.

Inter-ethnic marriages and families still turn heads in the southern states.  One day after Jeramy and I married, we stopped in Charleston, West Virginia to eat and the looks we got were a little condemning.  My American black friend and his white wife from the Czech Republic live in Alabama and are treated like second-class citizens.  She sent me a few msnbc videos about it.  A white couple I befriended in Seminary adopted a black child and live in DeSoto, Missouri.  They always get comments like, "Why adopt a black child?"  And this precious baby was originally destined for abortion, but the mother couldn't afford it.  Did you know that minority groups, black and latino, have the highest rates for abortions today?

The Bible is very clear that people of all tribes, nations, tongues, peoples and languages descended from two persons created in God's image with all the genetic variability needed to make what we see today.  When the language was confused at the Tower of Babel, environmental stresses brought about the distinct visual characteristics of ethnic groups.  The "Hamitic curse" only applied to his son, Canaan, which was wiped out when Israel took over the Promised Land.  And the Apostle Paul, as he preached on Mars Hill in Acts 17, proclaimed that God "made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation . . ."  Genetically speaking, differences in skin color, eye shape, etc. only amount to 0.012% of genetic variations.  (Ken Ham, et. al. One Blood, The Biblical Answer to Racism. Green Forest: Master Books, Inc., 1999. pp. 54. ISBN: 0-89051-276-0)

Answers in Genesis is an excellent resource ministry that scientifically combats evolutionary worldviews, such as racism, from a Biblical presupposition.  It is worth checking out.