AiG claims not to be racist, yet they make up stories that fit well with 19th century white slave owners. Read for yourself, is AiG perpetuating this myth?
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@Timothy_Horton - the article is certainly eye-opening, but please add a little more to your conversation posts!
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It is only fair to analyze that exhibit in relation to the many anti-racist claims that Ken Ham also makes. There is a tension here worth exploring, but Ken Ham is not a racist.
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The article isnāt saying that Ken Ham is a racist, he isnāt. But AiG is making stuff up. They donāt even use the Book of Jubilees to get Noahās wife names. Also AiG has Dr. Jeanson on staff who dabbles in ancestral DNA.
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Thereās being an overt racist and then there is playing very loose with racial stereotypes. Thatās what Ham, Jeanson, and AiG is doing. They revere Henry Morris who peddled exactly these sorts of racist tropes regarding the sons of Noah. Thatās exactly where this narrative originated.
Jeanson in Traced said (paraphrasing), āall Asians look the sameā. He made no similar observation for Europeans however. Is this a racist thing to say? Yes. Itās wildly insensitive and uninformed and parroting a racist trope.
Thereās calling someone an overt racist and then thereās these sorts of casual racially insensitive comments that tell me someone simply is not very progressive on matters of race.
I donāt recall it in the text of his book but Jeanson uses the term āEskimoā when referring to native peoples of the North American arctic elsewhere in his work. To many Arctic peoples itās like using the n-word. Now a lot of people may be ignorant of this fact and you still see the term used occasionally by academics but if I were writing a book on human diversity I would invest more effort in being racially and culturally sensitive rather than resting on my assumptions and stereotypes about race.
It would hardly surprise me if these people were even less sensitive about race behind closed doors. Ham is committed to image and PR and he knows what will not play in public. Heās never going to present a view that he believes doesnāt sell. I mean these are bigoted people. If itās not about race then there are certainly bigoted views being said in regards to sexual orientation and religion.
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Can you provide a more specific quote please?
It is wildly insensitive and uniformed, so Iād like to know precisely what he said.
āThe diverse peoples of East Asia all resemble one another.ā (pg. 115)
He makes no such statement for Europeans.
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While I broadly agree the stereotyping you reference is problematic, I might note that it is challenging to author a wide ranging book covering this topic without tripping up somewhere. For instance, someone who uses oriental inappropriately may be more oblivious than racist or colonial; they are just out of touch as to the western centric associations of that. I do recall some pointed criticism of David Reich as well over some presentations in Who We Are and How We Got Here, so how varied populations are referenced can be delicate. Again, I think the criticism is legitimate and Jeansonās language was sloppy at best; but what should be stated can be overstated.
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I would say a big difference is that Jeanson and Ham unlike Reich are working against this backdrop of a very overtly racist paradigm of Henry Morris and others that explicitly says that the descendants of the sons of Noah were imbued with certain innate character traits. Theyāve never really gone out of their way to distance themselves from that and both Jeanson and Ham repeatedly say what a role model Morris is to them.
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Iām going to have to learn to stop underestimating creationists. Whenever I think they have reached the limit of their ability to outrage and offend, they prove me wrong.
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While the statement itself is problematic, it might be more a matter of ignorance than of racism.
It perhaps stems partly from the way that perception works. People who have mostly associated with those of European descent can be poor at distinguishing Asians. Their perception immediately picks up on features that distinguish Asians from Europeans. Those of us who have spent time at universities have become acquainted with a wider range of Asians, so we have better learned to recognize their individual features.
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Iām of European descent and I can easily tell the difference between individual people of Asian ancestry. A lot of racial prejudice isnāt necessarily deliberate but just the result of succumbing to our unexamined biases. Letās just say I donāt think Jeanson is someone who has been very introspective about the prejudice heās been exposed to in his life.
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That doesnāt help Jeanson. Heās spent time at universities. Moreover, it doesnāt require acquaintance, just awareness.
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And people will bend over backwards to give them the benefit of the doubt.
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It certainly seems to suggest a willingness to promote his own ignorance through his writing. It also suggests a lack of self-awareness ā not knowing the difference between āI canāt tell the differenceā (due to lack of exposure to Asian populations), and the claim they āall resemble one anotherā ā a conflation of his subjective inability to distinguish, with an objective lack of difference.
This is really not the sort of person I would want attempting to explain differences between ethnic groups (as the book, in part, seems to be attempting to do) to an audience that likely has even less exposure than Jeanson himself. (What is the proportion of Asians in the Bible Belt, incidentally?)
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Please, people, letās not soft pedal and deny outright racism when we find it. That only helps the racists.
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It seems to me that much of racism is ignorance and lack of self-awareness. In my community thereās a lot of people that donāt think theyāre racist simply because they donāt feel malice toward other people groups, butā¦ 
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Oh, I dunno. I was just arguing with someone whose views are quite racist the other night, and he was full of lofty declarations of the equality and dignity of all humankind, in between the racist bits. I find that protestations of a belief in equality are often loudest from the people whose views are most problematic. They are an illustration of the problem, in many cases, rather than being a genuine counterweight.
Now, Iām not that familiar with Ham as a whole. But it surely is far less surprising to find that a YEC is a racist than to find that heās not. Both are possible, but one is vastly more likely.
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I donāt really know the exact criteria by which we declare a person to be racist.
But whether a particular act or statement is racist is often quite easy to determine, and that appears to be the case, to me, with Jeansonās āThe diverse peoples of East Asia all resemble one anotherā statement, particularly when he attempts to support it with an illustration that shows the exact opposite of what he believes it to show. I neither know nor care whether Jeanson should be, himself, considered to be a racist.
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