My Top Twelve Books of 2016 - #12: One Race, One Blood

Since we're nearing the end of 2016, I’ve decided to make a list of my twelve favorite books I read for the first time this year. The first of this countdown is Ken Ham and A. Charles Ware’s book One Race, One Blood.

“And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth…” (Acts 17:26)

Events in 2016 have put an even bigger spotlight on the present ethnic tensions in America. Stories of the shootings of black men and police officers have filled our TV screens and news feeds. There is a problem in America. Most proposed solutions to these problems have been legal in nature. Of course there are legal barriers to equality of opportunity—failed economic policies keep minorities from success and the failed public school system has given us millions of high school graduates, nineteen percent of whom cannot read. There are good, biblical solutions to these problems. The problem is that these legal solutions don’t go deep enough. As Ware says in this book, “A mere change of law never means a change of heart.”

This book begins by telling the story of Ota Benga.

Ota Benga was born in 1881 in Central Africa where he grew strong and keen in the ways of the wilderness. The husband of one and the father of two, he returned one day from a successful elephant hunt to find that the camp he called ‘home’ had ceased to exist. His wife, children, and friends lay slaughtered, their bodies mutilated in a campaign of terror by the Belgian government’s thugs against ‘the evolutionary inferior natives.” Ota was later captured, taken to a village, and sold into slavery. (p. 16)

Eventually, Ota was sold to a man named Samuel Verner who put him on display as an “emblematic savage” in the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Ota was a pygmy and because of his height and because his skin was darker than other Africans on display, he was placed at the lowest end of the evolutionary display. While the Caucasians who represented “humanity’s highest culmination” were placed at the other end.

After the fair, Verner sold Ota to the director of the Bronx Zoological Gardens who placed Ota in a cage on display alongside the apes. The exhibit was wildly popular. The zoo had to put a police officer beside Ota’s cage because he was “always in danger of being grabbed, yanked, poked, and pulled to pieces by the mob."

Eventually, [the zoo’s director] was worn down (either by the media pressure or by the exhaustion that the spectacle he had created). Ota was released from the zoo…In 1910, he arrived at a black community in Lynchburg, Virginia, where he found companionship and care. He became a baptized Christian and his English vocabulary rapidly improved. He regularly cared for the children, protecting them and teaching them to hunt. He also learned how to read and occasionally attended classes at a Lynchburg seminary. Later he was employed as a tobacco factory worker.

But Ota grew increasingly depressed, hostile, irrational, and forlorn. When people spoke to him, they noticed that he had tears in his eyes when he told them he wanted to go home. Concluding that he would never be able to return to his native land, on March 20, 1916, Ota pressed a revolver to his chest and sent a bullet through his heart. (p. 21)

Ham goes on to show that this belief that pygmies belonged to a lower race goes straight back to Darwin’s The Descent of Man. Darwin “often used words like ‘savage,’ ‘low,’ and ‘degraded’ to describe American Indians, pygmies, and almost every ethnic group whose physical appearance and culture differed from his own.” (p. 20)

The authors clarify that they are not saying that evolution is the cause of racism—sin is the cause of racism. But we cannot deny that the theory of evolution has been used as a scientific justification for racism since the theory’s beginning. Evolutionary paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould said, “Biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1850 but they increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory.” (p. 91)

The authors spend a significant amount of time tracing the history of racism that was justified by appeals to evolutionary theory. After this, they give a biblical view of the origin of ethnic groups (they prefer this term to “races”). The biblical view is that every man and woman is descended from Adam and Eve. God scattered humanity at the Tower of Babel and this created many distinct cultures and languages. Continuing in this vein, the authors suggest a scientific explanation for how these different ethnic groups came to have such different physical features. These sections are fascinating.

Overall, I would heartily recommend this book. I’ll end this post with a quotation from the book that I believe summarizes its message:

If you want to solve racism in your own life, it’s very simple: You've got to believe the Bible. That’s the bottom line. You can spend millions of dollars trying to solve racist problems. You can pass new laws and institute all sorts of programs, but unless people believe the history in the Bible—unless our minds are renewed—we will never have the full picture of reality, and we won’t have the foundation that we need to make decisions that line up with truth rather than the lie. (p.117-118)

Buy the book here:

https://www.amazon.com/One-Race-Blood-Ken-Ham/dp/0890516014

Read the book online for free here:

https://answersingenesis.org/answers/books/one-race-one-blood/