Carlyle and High Victorian Racism

David Brion Davis considers Carlyle's 1853 pamphlet Occasional Discourses on the Nigger Question [another source cites an 1849 version published as "Occasional Discourses on the Negro Question"] - which incidentally is the source of the expression "dismal science - as symptomatic of a rebirth of "official" scientific racism displacing earlier scientific notions of racial equality:

Despite the prejudice of Hume and some other eighteenth-century writers, and in striking contrast to post-Revolutionary France, most British scientists of the early 1800s, exemplified by James Cowles Pritchard, insisted on the unity and even perfectability of all human groups. The historian Seymour Drescher makes the extraordinary point that not a single M.P. spoke of any alleged incapacity of the Negroes. But by the 1850s African American visitors in Britain, like Frederick Douglass, sensed a deeply troubling change in attitude even from the mid-1840s (symbolized by Thomas Carlyle's 1853 Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question). (Inhuman Bondage p. 76)

The Curse of Ham

Staying on the topic of colors, one of the most disturbing passages from the Bible concerns the "Curse of Ham," which has been more influential than any text in history in the justification of modern slavery and racism. The actual story related in Genesis 9:18-27 is so bizarre and nonsensical that it is hard to believe anyone takes it seriously today, although I am curious as to how contemporary biblical literalists interpet it. Here is the text:

The sons of Noah who came out of the ark were Shem, Ham and Japheth. (Ham was the father of Canaan.) These were the three sons of Noah, and from them came the people who were scattered over the earth.

Noah, a man of the soil, proceeded to plant a vineyard. When he drank some of its wine, he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father's nakedness and told his two brothers outside. But Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it across their shoulders; then they walked in backward and covered their father's nakedness. Their faces were turned the other way so that they would not see their father's nakedness.

When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what his youngest son had done to him, he said,
"Cursed be Canaan!
The lowest of slaves
will he be to his brothers."

He also said,
"Blessed be the LORD, the God of Shem!
May Canaan be the slave of Shem.

May God extend the territory of Japheth;
may Japheth live in the tents of Shem,
and may Canaan be his slave."

Setting aside the inexplicable curse on Canaan's son (but not on Canaan himself), and setting aside the fact that skin color is not mentioned, the influence of the text derives from the supposed explanation for the different "races" of humanity and the legitimation of the enslavement of one of these races. In the historically dominant interpretation, Ham and Canaan were black, and there descendants were properly slaves. Broadly speaking, Japheth's descendants were the Eastern Europeans, Shem's descendants were the Arabs and Hebrews, leaving Africans and other Aisans to be descended from Ham. Thus the Biblical origins of the racist "Curse of Ham."