Even though I don’t see any historical claims in Deb’s column or in the video, I’ll speak to one of the issues here as an historian, in order to add that missing piece to the theological, scientific, and philosophical pieces already present.
It’s deucedly difficult to make historically accurate general claims about racism, human rights, evolution, and separate creation. That’s not a point of contention in the material here, but such claims are very often made in various contexts. Perhaps some readers/hearers of the column and the video might be inclined to add an implicit historical dimension to these issues, when that might be unwarranted.
Let me explain.
Saying (for example) that evolution contradicts human dignity, or that genetics supports human equality, are IMO going well beyond the historical record. One might construct philosophical or theological arguments about specific connections that ought to exist, and that is all well and good, as long as one is explicit about one’s assumptions. Historically, however, things quickly get complicated. What actually has been said about such connections? In fact, individual secular scientists and leading Christian theologians and biblical scholars have said many different things on many different occasions. One can easily find among scientists in the past strong support for scientific racism: http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Stein2.htm, or a strong denial of any validity to it: http://biopolitics.kom.uni.st/Stephen%20Jay%20Gould/The%20Mismeasure%20of%20Man%20(148)/The%20Mismeasure%20of%20Man%20-%20Stephen%20Jay%20Gould.pdf. One can also find among major Christian theologians outspoken support for the view that the Bible allows slavery: http://biologos.org/blogs/ted-davis-reading-the-book-of-nature/slavery-science-and-southern-presbyterians-before-the-civil-war/, or just the opposite: The Bible Against Slavery (1837) by Rev. Theodore D. Weld (1803-1895). And, as I’ve argued elsewhere, Darwin was a racist by modern standards, but he strongly objected to genocide: Did Darwin Promote Genocide? - Article - BioLogos. The previous sentence is directly contrary to what is said in another column on the TGC site: What Your Biology Teacher Didn’t Tell You About Charles Darwin.
In other words, readers, please go slowly if you are inclined to draw conclusions about the historical situation on this very important issue, or if you want to extrapolate from an individual historical example to a broader generalization in the hope of applying it to our situation now. Things get very messy, very quickly. Anyone who thinks there is a specific, necessary connection between human rights and either the Bible or Christian theology or evolution had better take a deep breath before going any further. There isn’t. Historical context can influence specific interpretations of the book of nature (science) and the book of scripture (hermeneutics and theology) in diverse ways, any one of which can seem very convincing at the time to an author and her or his audience. I urge humility all around—yet paradoxically the courage to uphold one’s moral convictions.