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Race Relations
347
expressed in Acts 17:26 (King James Version): “[God] hath made
of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the
earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds
of their habitation.” Or, again, they confuse the judgment of man
with the judgment of God when they appeal to the “curse” which
Noah, recovering from a drunken stupor, placed upon Canaan:
“Cursed be Canaan; a slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers”
(Gen. 9:25). A careful reading of this passage in its proper context
shows that it was Noah rather than God who placed this curse upon
Ham’s son, and that Noah was scarcely in a condition to be the Lord’s
spokesman under the circumstances. The defenders of segregation and
white supremacy see God’s judgment as being passed almost exclu
sively upon the Negro and not upon the white. Moreover, when they
take account of the redemptive will of God, they do so almost ex
clusively in the narrow terms of personal and spiritual salvation with
no reference to the application of love understood as including justice
and righteousness to the social order in the area of race relations. In
an effort to justify their defense of segregation, they frequently appeal
to the strongly deterministic social philosophy of William Graham
Sumner and the social psychology of William McDougall (dominant
in America in the early part of the twentieth century but greatly
modified in the direction of voluntarism since about 1940), and
thereby obscure the power of God to change human life and to trans
form intergroup relationships.6
The opponents of segregation and other forms of racial discrimina
tion have also frequently failed to see their goals and their strategy
in the light of the full implications of the Christian understanding of
God’s will. They have overlooked the work and power of the Re
deemer in making the beginnings of a present transformation of in
dividuals and of the group life possible. Like the defenders of the
status quo,
they have often exaggerated the deterministic character of
cultural patterns and institutions, and have used their belief in the
inflexibility of these social forces to justify passive submission to the
existing order. They have seen God’s judgment upon prejudice and
discrimination clearly, but they have frequently not understood the
6 See, for example, George Eaton Simpson and J. Milton Yinger,
Racial
and Cultural Minorities: An Analysis of Prejudice and Discrimination
,
New
York, Harper & Brothers, rev. ed., 1958, pp. 500-501; Robert M. Maclver,
The More Perfect Union,
New York, The Macmillan Company, 1948, pp.
170-171; and Gordon W. Allport,
The Nature of Prejudice,
Cambridge, Mas
sachusetts, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1954, pp. 469 if.