This week, some of the people who were displaced by Hurricane Katrina appeared before a Congressional sub-committee and shared their feelings about what happened, including their belief that racism played a big part in how they were treated and why they were ignored for so long. New Orleans residents compared the experience with the Jewish Holocaust, saying that their experiences were a Holocaust, too. The senators and representatives, it seems from news reports, were unmoved; one lawmaker reportedly said, “Not a single person was taken from New Orleans and put into an oven,” and another senator said he found it hard to believe that soldiers held guns to the heads of suffering people.

Such is the phenomenon of denial when it comes to racism, but the fact is, racist beliefs are imbedded deep into the psyches of Americans, and many of those beliefs have a religious origin! It was Christianity which said that Africans were subhuman; a Puritan minister named Dean Berkeley said to his parishioners that they were to “consider blacks as creatures of another species.” In order to experience the “rapture,” early Christians thought, both “man and beast had to be brought under control,” and that meant subjugating Africans and Indians. The only way this subjugation could be justified was by dehumanizing them. Christian ministers said the most amazing things about Africans and Indians, including the belief that Satan possessed Indians until they became beasts!

If an individual of African or Indian descent didn't submit to the oppression of the Europeans, he or she was defined as a heathen and was considered fair game for those who hunted beasts! Roger Williams, a preacher, said that since Indians and Africans didn't belong to the human race, Christians could assign them to the evil part of nature (not humanity), and those things in nature which were evil were open to being hunted and killed.

In 1716, there was an attempt in Massachusetts to change a law which described Indians, Africans and mulatto servants as “personal property.” but a judge complained, saying he was unable to separate them from hogs and horses. A Christian missionary wrote that there was nothing in the stature of an African to distinguish him from “horses, cows, goats, sheep and swine.” President Andrew Jackson compared Indians and Africans to “bloodhounds and dogs,” and President Theodore Roosevelt is said to have said that Indians were a part of the flora and fauna of the earth, not humans. He reportedly said, “I won't go so far as to say the only good Indian is a dead Indian, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”

The preachers taught that “the negro is not of the nature of mankind, and therefore cannot be a subject of humanity.” One author wrote that the serpent who had persuaded Eve to eat the forbidden fruit was actually a Black man “who had descended from an ape-like man, who had, in turn, evolved from a “man-like ape.” A cleric, the Rev. Thornton Springfellow, referring to this author, said in a sermon that “the ancestors of negroes now in the United States were the slaves of serpent.” Other ministers preached regularly that Black people did not have souls.

If those types of beliefs were preached into our ancestors, white and Black, it isn't hard to understand how, subliminally those beliefs are still at work today, in the self-hatred experienced by Black people and in the hatred or intolerance of Blacks experienced by white people. Though the government in general was simply horribly lax in handling the Hurricane Katrina tragedy, surely racism was working in ways people cannot even identify. Racist thoughts were preached into us; they will have to be preached out.