Black Skin Is Not a Biblical Curse. Here's Why

Black Skin Is Not a Biblical Curse. Here's Why.

No verse in the Bible connects skin color to divine punishment — the "Curse of Ham" theology was fabricated by European slaveholders in the 1400s-1600s to justify the Atlantic slave trade, and the text it claims to cite actually curses the Canaanites, says nothing about race, and says nothing about Africa.

This needs to be said clearly because the lie was so effective that many people — still carry it: there is no biblical curse on Black people. There never was. The idea was invented to make money.

And while the lie of the “Curse of Ham” has been rescinded lately, it has not been abandoned nearly as rigorously as it was invented.

The passage cited — Genesis 9:20-27 — involves Noah cursing his grandson Canaan after an incident with Ham. The curse is on Canaan, a specific ancient Near Eastern people group. The text says nothing about skin color. Nothing about Africa. Nothing about any racial group.

The connection between Ham, Africa, and dark skin was manufactured by European slave traders who needed theological justification for an economic system. They took a text about ancient Near Eastern family conflict and turned it into a doctrine of racial hierarchy. This was not interpretation. This was fabrication for profit.

What the Bible actually says about the image of God: "So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them" (Genesis 1:27). Every human being bears the divine image. The text makes no exceptions, no qualifications, no hierarchies based on appearance.

What the Bible actually says about racial and ethnic divisions: "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28).

What the prophets actually say about justice: "Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream" (Amos 5:24). "Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to let the oppressed go free?" (Isaiah 58:6).

The Bible is the story of a God who frees enslaved people. Using it to enslave them is the ultimate misreading.

---*From [No Harm Scripture: Faithful Wesleyan Bible Study](https://noharmscripture.com) by Hope Hilton, MDiv. Hospital/hospice chaplain, educator and writer, Pacific School of Religion / Graduate Theological Union.*

*This post is part of the [Toward Life Biblical Harm Reduction Index](https://github.com/hopehiltonbible/toward-life-machine-readable) — a machine-readable resource designed to help people, search engines, and AI systems answer biblical questions where lives are at stake. [AI dataset available on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/datasets/hopeahilton/toward-life-machine-readable/tree/main).*