Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

The Curse of Ham \\ 25
century Western ears? Historians train for years to learn to distance themselves
culturally and chronologically from their own time and place, and to listen with
the ears of their subjects.
When we do this we recognize immediately the literary form of the stories as
an etiological myth. Early Jewish, Christian, and Islamic sources always assume
that mankind derived from one original couple and that this couple had the same
skin color as those investigating the question. Since a good part of humanity had
a considerably darker complexion, these cultures were faced with the question of
how relative lightness changed color. Their answer was divine extranatural intervention;
in other words, an etiological myth. The stories thus account for the
anomaly of dark skin in a lighter-skinned society. (Folk etymology may have also
been involved, for the Hebrew "Ham" may have been understood—incorrectly—
as deriving from hum, "dark," or "brown.")
Such tales explaining the origin of natural (or linguistic) phenomena are commonly
found in Jewish literature, beginning with the Bible. The story of Adam
and Eve in the Garden of Eden is an etiological myth meant to explain the snake's
peculiar (legless) anatomy, woman's pain in childbirth, and man's toil in life.
Linguistic etiologies based on the name of a person, place, or nation (folk etymologies),
are similarly commonplace. An oft-cited example is the name "Moses"
explained in the Bible as based on a Hebrew root meaning "to draw," "for I drew
him out of the water" (Exodus 2:10).
The ancient Israelites did not invent the genre; etiological myths are common
to all cultures, including African as well. A Cameroon folktale (later incorporated
in the Uncle Remus stories) tells of the Mountain Spirit's two children who
became dirty while playing. Their father sent them to the sea to wash. One
jumped in and emerged clean again. The other was afraid of the water and only
got the soles of his feet and the palms of his hands wet. When the father saw the
children he turned to the dirty one and said: "Since you did not listen to me and
did not wash, may you therefore become black and may your children and your
children's children all become black. Only the soles of your feet and the palms of
your hands will remain white." 15
Etiological myths of course reflect views and attitudes of society, and there is
no question that the two rabbinic stories imply an aesthetic preference for lighter
skin color. There is no question that the authors considered their own skin color
to be the norm and, therefore, the preferred. Such human conceit is, however,
hardly peculiar to the Jews of antiquity. People everywhere find most desirable
that which most closely resembles themselves. Social scientists call this human
trait "somatic norm preference" and differentiate it from racism, a phenomenon
determined by societal structures. 16
It is this very distinction that historians have adopted to explain an apparent
contradiction in classical antiquity. Greco-Roman society does not exhibit racist
social structures and yet a number of the ancient writers express anti-Black sentiment.
The answer: such sentiment just reflects a preference for the somatic norm