Young Black Girl On The White Bed

Historians believe that by the nineteenth century, the belief that black people were descended from Ham was used by southern United States whites to justify slavery. According to Benjamin Braude, a professor of history at Boston College:
in 18th- and 19th century Euro-America, Genesis 9:18–27 became the curse of Ham, a foundation myth for collective degradation, conventionally trotted out as God's reason for condemning generations of dark-skinned peoples from Africa to slavery.
Author David M. Goldenberg contends that the Bible is not a racist document. According to Goldenberg, such racist interpretations came from post-biblical writers of antiquity like Philo and Origen of Alexandria, who equated blackness with darkness of the soul.