Ham is hard to swallow

The documentary channel is running a feature on a lost interview with the late Jamaican Reggae singer/legend, Bob Marley (my most favorite singer ever). While rambling on, he got all stuck on the Canaan and Ham thing explaining why Black people are subservient to white people. The documentary pointed out how the story of Ham, the cursed one, was part of the story of Rastafarianism, the religion Bob Marley preached in his heart wrenching songs about the human struggle against oppression, be it slavery, apartheid or exploitation.
The place of the black man in the world being very severely oppressed seemingly fit a Biblical explanation. There was this Ham guy, descended from Canaan, who went wrong, and therefore was "Black." Ham carried on, producing descendents who inherited his curse from him, thus explaining why Africans were black, poor and enslaved by whites.
This sets up for the Black homeland, the ancient mystical land of Ethiopia, to be ground zero for the return of the Christ. God would naturally want to reclaim his lost children and therefore act through a Black man. That black man was believed to be King Salassie of Ethiopia. Why Ethiopia? Ethiopia is simply the most holy place in the Black realm.
The non-believers would continue to wait for the false idea of what Christ was to come true, having no idea, first of all, of why Ethiopia is so special. But for the Black people who followed the teachings of Marcus Garvey, a figure more prominent in Africa and the Caribbean, an Ethiopian was the obvious choice of God.
Anyways, hence King Salassie. The 1950s being a time of rebirth and new hope for the African Third World, this belief spread rampantly throughout the Third World countries in the Americas with large Black populations. The King paid a state visit to Jamaica in 1955, touching off among the ordinary people a joyous fervor that led to the rastafarian movement and eventually to Reggae music, a sound that would come to captivate the world with its mystical rhythm and reverential lyrics.
So Reggae was caused, in short, by a visit from a revered head of state to a small third world country. The rest is musical history.
But, really now, it's coming time fast to just let that whole ham story just die along with racism itself.
Rastafarianism and Mormonism, two religions that apparently really love the whole Ham thing, were born into a society far less reformed than it is today. Society wass far from even entertaining the notion that the significance of race was The Greatest Lie Ever Told and everyone was being oppressed by it. The black people bought into it to to accept the world the way it was: very unjust and treacherous. The white people bought into it to dehumanize people based on race, a notion required to accept the position of oppressor and exploiter.
Even in 1979, the time of the Marley documentary interview, it would have been very difficult to see human skin color as something that didn't require oppression. But as much as Bob Marley wanted to reach an American black audience, here in the U.S., his audience was a mostly young, mostly white one, yet one keenly interested in seeing the world change in favor of peace in world affairs, reconciliation on race and, other freedom causes, like the movement to legalize marijuana, especialy for medicinal purposes.
Here in the land of Dr. Martin Luther king, Jr., the march for equality in American society was powered by the same desires for freedom the very whites who brought them here as slaves only 200 years ago had sought from kings and tyrants in the old world. Blacks of the same period as the rise of Rastafarianism (the 50s) were seeking their long-delayed equal stake in the American dream, so calls to join a Black King back in Africa for a repatriation had little or no resonance.
So I bristled at the sight of Bob Marley and the rastafarians in the film talking up that old story of the sons of Ham, and it is the same kneejerk repugnance I feel when Mormons do the same thing.