Tuesday, June 9, 2020

Creation Moment 6/10/2020 - The Vast Smudge of Racism

The heart is deceitful above all things,
and desperately wicked:
who can know it?
Jeremiah 17:9

"The close connection between racism and evolution will not
surprise historians of evolution.

The reason is, because the main proof of human evolution for a century after Darwin published his book that changed the world was the ‘evidence’ from ‘inferior races.’

One of the best examples are the many drawings of various races which were ranked from the highest most-evolved humans, to the lowest, the less-evolved humans. The least-evolved humans shown were very similar to the highest-evolved apes. As Klinghoffer writes, Charles Darwin conceived the idea of evolution which
posits a racial hierarchy. That’s not surprising, since the theory sees all of life as a vast smudge, graduating from the simplest to the most complex animal life. In any hierarchy, someone has to be at the bottom. As Darwin stated explicitly in The Descent of Man, that place was occupied by Africans. For generations, American public school children learned from their biology textbooks the pseudoscience that Caucasians are more “advanced” on the evolutionary ladder than Africans. Yet this was the scientific consensus of its day.
Eugenics turned out to be one of the worst blights on humanity that eventually lead to the Nazi holocaust which, in turn, resulted in the murder of over 12 million lives.

As Klinghoffer writes, the harm of this racist past has resulted in many evils including
Dehumanizing Africans and others is not only part of America’s, but of evolutionary biology’s terrible burden. Near the turn of the last century, in New York City, St. Louis, Seattle, and elsewhere, Africans and other native people were put on exhibit in zoos, as animals. Human Zoos recounts, among other heart-breaking stories, the life of African pygmy Ota Benga (1883-1916). He was bought in a slave auction and displayed in 1906 alongside an orangutan in the Monkey House at the Bronx Zoo. The organizers intended this as a lesson for the public, illustrating the scientific truths of Darwinian theory. African-American clergy at the time spoke out against the insult to their dignity, only to be dismissed by the New York Times, which explained that “the pygmies … are very low in [on] the human scale.” 
Present-day racists and others continue to draw on Darwinian racial theory. Protesters called for racial justice, remembering George
Floyd and his death at the hand of four Minneapolis policemen, two of which were themselves persons of color.
---But how many remember the horrific injustice that occurred, in the name of science, just a few miles away? Namely, African American Ota Benga’s protest — “I am a man! I am a man!” — summarizes the very best message of the struggle for human rights today."
CEH