Seeds of Racism in the Soul of America. (Book Reviews).

Seeds of Racism in the Soul of America. By Paul R. Griffin. Foreword by Gayraud S. Wilmore. (Cleveland, Ohio: The Pilgrim Press, 1999. Pp. xviii, 148. $20.95, ISBN 0-8298-1313-6.)

In this brief but provocative book, Paul Griffin attempts both to discuss the intellectual origins of racism and to explain the persistence of racist ideas in this country after the apparent advances of the civil rights era. Racism endures, he writes, because it is essentially "a religious confession" (p. 4) that originated not among "unlettered ... southern slave owners" (p. 11) in the nineteenth century but among the high-minded New England Puritans of the seventeenth century. Rejecting C. Vann Woodward's insights about the relationship between racist practices and modernity, Griffin argues that racial prejudice was present in the minds of the first Europeans in America even before slavery was introduced. Successive generations of intellectuals in the North kept alive the Puritans' belief in black inferiority, he asserts, and as a result the most cunning exponents of white supremacy today are often those who claim to care the most about the plight of African Americans: white liberal politicians, white academics, and radical white feminists.

Although reviewers do not usually learn much about a book from reading its foreword, Gayraud Wilmore's introduction to Griffin's work is extraordinarily revealing. A careful scholar, Wilmore admits to having "serious questions" (p. xi) about the manner in which the author presents his argument, and even while endorsing the book, he notes that he had at first considered abandoning it as "an ill-fated vehicle" (p. x). Wilmore's ambivalence is understandable, for distortions, inaccuracies, and contradictions abound here. Griffin states, for instance, that "history books have quietly passed over the ... brutal misdeeds" (p. 26) of the slaveholding class--a fair assessment at one time, perhaps, but hardly indicative of the scholarship produced by historians of the South over the past forty years. Trying to expose the racist sentiments held by Social Gospel minister Walter Rauschenbusch, Griffin attributes to him ideas expressed by a medical ethnologist nearly fifty years before (p. 49). In order to highlight the subtle racism of white liberals during the struggles of the 1960s, the author brings forward the eight Alabama clerics lambasted by Martin Luther King Jr. in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail." Based on the actual opinions of those religious leaders, however, "pro-segregation conservatives" is a far more accurate label than the "liberal churchmen" (p. 88) tag that Griffin employs. And in his final chapter Griffin illustrates the "long tradition" (p. 120) of racism practiced by twentieth-century white feminists by imputing to them some of Mary Boykin Chesnut's musings in her diary!

As the above examples suggest, Seeds of Racism in the Soul of America cannot be considered a serious work of history. Yet despite this defect, scholars should not dismiss Griffin's arguments altogether. As his closing statements emphasize, the author is simply asking whites "to repent ... and purify their minds" (p. 122) of the racism that has infected American society over the centuries. Seen in this light, it is clear that he intends this book as a jeremiad akin to the liberationist theological tradition popularized by African American intellectuals such as James Cone, Cornel West, and Gayraud Wilmore himself. Although one wishes Griffin had been more circumspect in his use of historical sources, his argument as a whole does carry weight as a religious statement. Indeed, racism is a demonic force that has long corrupted the souls of white Americans.

GARDINER H. SHATTUCK JR.
Andover Newton Theological School