Black History is My History! 19 Feb.2023
Genesis 9:18(NIV)
Black History is My History you must understand that we are all in this together. You see if we are going to celebrate Black History, we have to celebrate the Good and the Bad. Black History Month is not meant to put blacks and whites against each other. And it’s not meant to celebrate one race while excluding another. It’s meant to highlight some of the important people and events of our American history.
I have read stories about how the black race started that people have misquoted from the bible about Ham and the “history” of the black man. Ham was one of Noah’s sons who helped him build the ark. Ham sinned against his father Noah by seeing the “nakedness of his father.” This does not simply mean that Ham saw Noah naked as Noah lay sleeping (although this is one view), but something a lot more serious. When you read the Old Testament and you read the term “uncovering the nakedness….” that term is generally used to describe something sexual, “uncovering the nakedness of someone.” There is disagreement as to what really happened but what is clear is that Noah placed a curse on Canaan and not on Ham who committed the act (Genesis 9:25.) I been thinking about this, because some of you all may have not heard about this. It has been talked about and taught for hundreds of years that the curse placed upon Ham was a curse that caused his skin to become “black.” Ham is widely “considered” to be the father of the black race because the curse placed upon him changed his skin color. Now you must know that back in the days of slavery this scripture was used as the basis for enslaving black people,
the fact that black race came into existence because Noah cursed his son Ham (which Noah did not do.) The misconception that Ham’s curse was for his skin to be black and therefore all of his descendants would be black would justify slavery for hundreds of years in Europe and in America. The justification came because many believed that Noah’s curse was on Ham and besides turning his skin black, it also included that all of his descendants would be servants (slaves) and serve their brothers.. If you go on the internet today and Google “blacks in the Bible” or just Google “Ham” you will find references to Ham being the father of the black race. Now imagine hearing this story of your race as a child and growing up thinking that your skin color was caused by a curse placed upon a man who sinned against his father. Imagine thinking that there truly was something wrong w,ith being dark skin. It was bad enough when others believed it about you but it became a lot worse when you believed it about yourself. Are you able to understand what I am telling you. This may be the first time that some of you have ever heard this and yet it is a prominent teaching in racist circles – that God created us inferior because of something Noah’s son Ham did thousands of years ago. In a 2004 review of David Goldenberg's “The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity and Islam” published in 2003, states that Goldenberg "argues persuasively that the biblical name Ham bears no relationship at all to the notion of blackness and as of now is of unknown etymology." There have been others who have argued against this belief since its inception hundreds of years ago and yet the belief still exists.
These are just a few examples of why we need to understand our past from both a racial, Christian and Biblical viewpoint. If we do not know the truth we will forever believe a lie.
As I was doing some research on this in one search, I found that when you Google “blacks in the Bible” when the individuals were listed, ninety percent were associated with something negative that happened in Biblical history. I read one article that said God continuously cursed the Children of Israel because Moses had married a woman of color. What I also found interesting is that Simon of Cyrene was sometimes left off those same lists. This was not an accident and if a person did not know better or searched “harder” they could have easily accepted the fact that there was nothing positive in Scripture pertaining to people of color even though most people in the Bible had color just because of being out in the sun. My point is that we need to know, understand and believe in the truth. We must research and learn for ourselves and stop accepting anything people tell us as facts and the truth just because we refuse to verify it.
Let us read (Deuteronomy 6:1-9) what Moses instructed the Children of Israel to do when he brought them out of Egypt. “Now this is the commandment, the statutes and the judgments which the LORD your God has commanded me to teach you, that you might do them in the land where you are going over to possess it, so that you and your son and your grandson might fear the LORD your God, to keep all His statutes and His commandments which I command you, all the days of your life, and that your days may be prolonged. O Israel, you should listen and be careful to do it, that it may be well with you and that you may multiply greatly, just as the LORD, the God of your fathers, has promised you, in a land flowing with milk and honey. Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD is one! You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as frontals on your forehead. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” (Deuteronomy 6:1-9)
Moses told the Children of Israel to Teach and Remember! They were not just to learn it for themselves, they had to teach them to their sons and daughters and their grandsons and grand-daughters. Each generation was to teach the next so that nothing was lost with each subsequent generation. Moses was not telling them to passively teach their children, there was a sense of urgency and importance that was to accompany it. This was about life and death – mainly theirs!
The commandments that God had given Moses were so important that they were to write them down and put them in places where they could not help but see them. These were not to be placed in a journal and left on a shelf never to be read. They were to be publicly displayed so all could see it. Nothing was to be hidden.
Black history month is to make sure the contributions of Black people in this world are not hidden. It should be shared alongside the achievements of other races. We must understand today that all lives matter, all history matters. It’s not just the selected, approved history that justifies a lifestyle! Proverbs 29:18 says “Where there is no vision, the people are unrestrained. But happy is he who keeps the law.” Some translations say “without a vision the people perish.” We need to be able to see where we are going – that is the vision.
Being able to see sets the boundaries. It gives us the ability to take in some information and ignore others based on where we are going.
Having a vision allows us to stay focused on our goals, because we take in what will help us reach the goal while removing what is not helpful. All of this is tied to our understanding of our past. Everyone, regardless of race, has a desire to know something about their ancestors. This is why websites that allow you to search your backgrounds are so popular. To understand our pasts allows us to operate in our future.
What I want you to know today is that we need to understand the past in order to have a better future. By experiencing the past we will have a better perspective of the struggles our parents and grandparents went through that helped us to get to where we are right now.
Black history month is not just about famous black Americans who have done something great. Everyone sitting here today has a history. Black history month does not capture your specific history, but focuses on the history of the Black people who helped to build this United States of America into the great nation that it is. But this is where it stops and where our jobs begin. Black history does not tell the story of the single mother who worked three jobs to educate her children to be successful. It does not tell the story about the father who was not educated but provided for his family and made sure that his children were well taken care of. It does not tell of the teachers, both black and white, who encouraged us in school to go further than society would ever have thought we could go. It does not tell the story of the high school janitor who always had an encouraging word on Sunday mornings because he was also the pastor of a local Church.
Black History does not tell the story of the many small acts of kindness that many have done because people did not seek recognition for it. This is the Black history that we must tell our children. We must tell them our stories.
We must tell them of our struggles and how we made it through. We must show them Black History is not based on how others define us, but on how we define ourselves based on what we have done and what we can do. We must teach them Black History is My History!
Church I tell you the Battle is not over we must continue to fight for our rights, we must remember that Black History Month exists to deliver what federal policy has not — the eradication of systemic racism.
Yes, the policy is important, but the state of black America today proves that racism is still alive in this land of the free.
• We have Brown v. Board, and yet the racial segregation in schools remains.
• We have the Fair Housing Act, and racial segregation in housing has barely changed in nearly four decades.
• We have the Fifteenth Amendment and a Supreme Court-weakened Voting Rights Act, and yet state laws still implement measures that disproportionately affect black voters.
• Black unemployment remains at twice the rate of white Americans.
• Black median wealth is nearly ten times less than white wealth.
• Black Americans are incarcerated at a rate five times that of their white countrymen.
• And black health continues to be worse on nearly every front — heart disease, asthma, infant mortality, diabetes — and the racial gap between white and black cancer deaths is growing.
Scripture’s importance to the black population in the U.S. is reflected in Pew Research Center survey data showing that black people are more likely than most other Americans to read scripture regularly and to view it as the word of God, more than half of black people in the U.S. (54%) – both Christian and non-Christian – say they read the Bible or other holy scripture at least once a week outside of religious services, compared with 32% of whites and 38% of Hispanics, according to data from the 2014 Religious Landscape Study. Indeed, relatively few black people (24%) say they seldom or never read the Bible, compared with 50% of whites and 40% of Hispanics.
In Closing:
Right now, there is a lot of anger in America. People are divided down political, religious, and even racial lines. Yet God has commanded us to put aside our prejudices and look at one another with His eyes.
The Time is Now for Black America to take a stand and fight for our rights, to See the Vision of God and Trust in God.
