Creationism is just as racist as evolution

Creationists, whether YECs or IDers, just can’t help falling over themselves in their eagerness to tar the theory of evolution (and Darwin) as racist. This is nonsense for any number of historical reasons. Racism obviously had existed long before Darwin. Darwin, though he sometimes expressed statements that are racist by modern standards, was remarkably non-racist by the standards of his age and treated people of other races without prejudice, as well as being passionately opposed to slavery (he was far less racist than most Christians and creationists of the time). It’s true that evolution was pressed into service to provide justification for racism, but the same could be said of Christianity. Such arguments were invalid and are not a logical consequence of evolution. Nor is there any truth to the smears that evolution caused the Holocaust.

But the strangest thing about creationists trying to link evolution and racism is that creationists generally accept some of the theory of evolution. Not all of it obviously, but the major creationist organizations all accept the idea of natural selection and evolution within ‘kinds’ (a non-scientific creationist term that, in practice, is defined to be whatever amount of evolution creationists are willing to accept). Answers in Genesis even enthusiastically affirms that it has no problem with the concept of natural selection.

Creationists don’t accept that evolutionary change can accumulate indefinitely and that humans could have evolved from apes or earlier primitive animals, but that’s not the scale of change involved in the evolution of all living humans from their most recent common ancestors. Human racial differences are minor and easily explained by natural selection. To creationists, humans are a ‘kind’, and human races evolved within that kind. So if the theory of evolution is racist, that makes creationism equally racist.