When the "creationists" got it right!

I've been teaching college classes on race for almost 10 years, and for most of that time I've been showing some part or other of an excellent video series called Race: the Power of an Illusion. I've always found it ironic that, in one part of the story, we find that in the 19th century a debate raged about "monogenesis" vs. "polygenesis." the monogenesists insisted that, like the account in the Hebrew book of Genesis, that there was one creation, one pair of man (Adam) and woman (Eve) from which all subsequent humans were descended. The polygenesists, on the other hand, argued that, because they (white people) had nothing in common with the inferior Asian and black African and American Indian people of their day (as they saw it), that the book of Genesis must only relate to the origins of white people, and that those other groups must have had their own, separate origins, with no common ancestors shared.

In this case, then, while the reasoning (an unquestioning dependence on scripture as literal truth) was wrong (in my opinion), the religious adherents actually ended up with the accurate conclusion, whereas the other folks, many of them scientists, who started with an unquestioned presupposition based on the racist ideology that white people were superior, and thus justified in oppressing nonwhite peoples, were led to a grossly inaccurate position.

This stands in stark contrast to the debate in the 20th century over Darwin and evolution, which led the religionists to reject the truth, and the adherents of science to get it right.

How about that?!