March 2.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Racism and Religion
Dark skin had also been long thought to indicate inferiority. African slaves were, of course, black so that dark skin became associated with slavery. It was easy to justify such a view by a theology based on the extension of Ham's curse* to the African nations. It was also easy to perpetuate it, knowingly or unknowingly, through the light and dark imagery of good and evil. The white/black dichotomy in Western thought has long equated whiteness with 'cleanliness, the light of day, moral purity and absolution from sins' and blackness with 'sin, dirt, night and evil'. [1]
Examples of this are the following poem, The Little Black Boy by William Blake, and the tombstone epitaph which follows it:
My mother bore me in the southern wild
And I am black, but O! My soul is white.
White as an angel is the English child.
But I am black as if bereaved of light. [2]
I who was born a pagan and a slave
Now sweetly sleep a Christian in my grave.
What tho' my hue was dark, my Savior's sight
Shall change this darkness into radiant light. [3]
The association of blackness with inferiority was already strongly implanted in the European mind in 1788. Together with nakedness, it came to symbolise Aboriginal degradation. To William Carey they were 'poor, barbarous, naked pagans'. [4] Whereas to James Cook, their being 'naked and not ashamed' was a virtue, evidence of the 'pure state of nature'. [5]
Barron Field, Judge of the Supreme Court, held the opposite view. 'Without faculties of reflection, judgment or foresight, they are incapable of civilisation. They are the only natives in the world who cannot feel or know that they are naked and they are not ashamed.' [6]
To the Anglican preacher, William Henry, darkness of skin indicated darkness of mind:
O Jesus, when shall thy kingdom come with power amongst them? When shall the rays of thine eternal gospel penetrate the gross darkness of their minds (well represented by their faces) and illumine their benighted souls. [7]
Cairns, 1965: 75.
William Blake, 'The Little Black Boy', in Blake, 1974: 125.
Epitaph on an English tombstone. There is a photograph in Miller, 1985: 24.
Carey, 1792: 3, 51, 623.
Beaglehole, 1955: 508.
Field, 1825: 224.
William Henry to S. Pinder, 29 August 1799, LMS South Seas Letters, LMS Archives, London.
Acknowledgment: John Harris, One Blood, pp.30-31, 79 n.40, n.41, n.42, n.43, n.44, n.45, n.46.
* On racist interpretation of “Ham’s curse” note John Harris, One Blood, pp. 29-30, 47, 134. The phrase was still cited by conservative Australian Christians in the 1960s to defend Apartheid in South Africa – p.658.
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“Australia as it really was.”
[The] chapter, "An Adventure with the Blacks" [1] is a first person account of how [Finney Eldershaw] and a group of Clarence River squatters and staff avenged the deaths of three station hands by shooting possibly dozens of Aborigines in a boxed ravine.
Finney Eldershaw, Australia As It Really Is, Darton & Co., London, 1854, pp. 62-75.
Acknowledgment: Patrick Collins, Goodbye Bussamarai – The Mandanjani Land War, Southern Queensland 1842-1852, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2002, pp. 230 n. 84.