(The Racist Origins of “Hamito-Semitic” — The Old Name “Hamito-Semitic” for the Afrasian Language Family Deriving from the Biblical Name of Noah’s Son Ham, t…

(The Racist Origins of “Hamito-Semitic” — The Old Name “Hamito-Semitic” for the Afrasian Language Family Deriving from the Biblical Name of Noah’s Son Ham, the First Use of the Term “Hamite” for Certain Africans Arising from the Horrific Adoption by White Racists of a Myth of Their Own Making — Not Biblical — That Ham Was the Ancestor of Africans and That God Had Passed Noah’s Curse to Ham’s Supposed Descendants by Giving Them Dark Skins, a Myth Still Invoked by Some American Fundamentalist Christians to Justify Their Racism — a Terminology to Be Avoided Like the Plague): There is an old, horrendously bad name for the Afrasian (Afroasiatic) language family that unfortunately still gets used by a few scholars in Europe: Hamito-Semitic. The “Hamite” part of the name comes from the biblical name of Noah’s son Ham, whom Noah cursed for inadvertently seeing his father naked. The first use of this term, Hamite, for certain Africans arose out of the horrific adoption by white racists of a myth — a myth of their own making, not biblical — to justify their enslavement of Africans: that Ham was the ancestor of Africans farther south in the continent and that God had passed Noah’s curse to Ham’s supposed descendants by giving them dark skins. What is still more appalling is that, even today in the twenty-first century CE, some American fundamentalist Christians continue to fall back on this myth to justify their own racism. The note is a warning label on a piece of toxic terminology that continues to circulate in scholarly literature. Every time a European linguist uses “Hamito-Semitic” instead of “Afrasian” or “Afroasiatic,” they are reproducing — whether they know it or not — a racial category invented by slave traders and perpetuated by fundamentalist bigots. The name itself is a monument to racism, and its continued use in the twenty-first century is inexcusable.