Children of Ham

The Children of Ham are a designated racial group within the Republic of Gilead, subjected to a policy of forced resettlement known as the "Resettlement of the Children of Ham." This program, announced on state-controlled television, represents one of the regime's most explicit exercises in racial engineering, revealing how Gilead's patriarchal theocracy is built upon a foundation of systematic racism and ethnic cleansing. The term itself, drawn from a biblical curse, is used to justify the expulsion and containment of an entire population, marking them as inherently other and unassimilable within the new order.

Policy and Implementation

The resettlement of the Children of Ham is presented as a scheduled, bureaucratic process. A news broadcast, watched by Offred during one of the Ceremony evenings, reports that "Resettlement of the Children of Ham is continuing on schedule" and that "Three thousand have arrived this week in National Homeland One, with another two thousand in transit." The announcer's tone is reassuring and fatherly, framing the mass displacement of people as a routine administrative achievement. The destination, National Homeland One, is located in North Dakota, a remote and agriculturally marginal region. The official theory is that those resettled there will farm, but no images of the actual conditions or the people themselves are shown on screen, leaving their fate opaque and abstract. The logistics of moving thousands of people at once—by trains or buses—are left unmentioned, and the lack of visual evidence suggests a deliberate obscuring of the human cost.

Ideological Foundations

The policy is rooted in a racist ideology that Gilead has inherited and intensified from the pre-Gilead period. The regime's "racist policies" were "firmly rooted in the pre-Gilead period," and "racist fears provided some of the emotional fuel that allowed the Gilead takeover to succeed as well as it did." The biblical label "Children of Ham" is a theological justification for racial hierarchy, casting the targeted group as descendants of a cursed lineage and therefore deserving of subjugation and separation. This ideological framework allows the regime to present ethnic cleansing not as a crime but as a divinely ordained social order, a necessary measure for the purity and stability of the state.

Narrative Significance

The Children of Ham policy functions in the novel as a chilling example of how Gilead's totalitarian system operates through the intersection of multiple forms of oppression. While the narrative focuses primarily on the subjugation of women, the resettlement program demonstrates that the regime's control extends to racial and ethnic groups as well. The policy is mentioned in the same news broadcast that reports on military victories and the cracking of an underground espionage ring, situating it within the regime's broader project of national purification and security. For Offred, the news of the resettlement is one more piece of information that underscores the vast, impersonal machinery of the state, a system that can uproot thousands of lives with the same bureaucratic efficiency with which it manages the reproductive lives of Handmaids. The silence around the actual experiences of the Children of Ham—their suffering, resistance, or death—mirrors the silencing of other marginalized voices within Gilead, reinforcing the novel's critique of how power renders certain lives invisible and disposable.