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Article: Seeds of Racism in the Soul of America. (Book Reviews).
- Article from:
- The Journal of Southern History
- Article date:
- February 1, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 Southern Historical Association. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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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. ...