As did many of his generation, Griffin decided to pursue the American dream of a college education. He found a job at a large company in Dayton that paid for its employees to attend college. Griffin endured racist slurs from coworkers about his pursuit of a bachelor's degree at a local university, but the depth of their animosity didn't strike home — until the day he found a pile of ashes in front of his work station. His coworkers had burned the text books he had brought in to study on his lunch hour. When he complained to his supervisor, he was told, "Why does a person like you need education, so you can become one of those educated . . . ."

Out of those ashes was born a lifetime of scholarship. Today Griffin, professor of religion and director of African and African American studies at Wright State University, holds a Ph.D. in African-American and American Religious History from Emory University, an M.Div. in church history from United Theological Seminary and an undergraduate degree in sociology from Wright State University. But throughout his studies, the riddle of racism haunted him. So Griffin has turned to his scholarship for an answer. The result is his newly released book Seeds of Racism in the Soul of America, published by Pilgrim Press in August 1999.

"I have asked myself, why has racism persisted—in spite of all the sincere efforts to eliminate it—efforts that have included the bloodshed of the Civil War and the civil rights struggle and the passage of numerous laws," Griffin says. "What is it about the nature of American racism that makes it impossible to eradicate. I suggest we've been looking in the wrong places for the seeds of racism. That's why efforts so powerful have been unsuccessful. The starting place is not economics.

"We have to look deeper, and we have to look at the American mind. It's there we find the seeds of racism that continue to pop up everywhere despite our good intentions," he says. "We have not only misunderstood the origins of American racism, but why it is a disease that cannot be simply dealt with through social programs and federal laws. America needs to undergo a radical conversion of the mind.

"American racism is first and foremost a matter of distorted theological ideas," Griffin says. "So it's a ideational disease of the mind, and until now, we have not understood that."

Griffin traces the seeds of racism not to the antebellum South, but back to the very tap roots of our society—the New England Puritan Christians, who first used theological ideas to justify slavery and racism.

American racism, he writes in his book, "is a theological dogma grounded in powerful but distorted Christian understandings of the biblical text. These corrupted biblical and theological ideas did not take shape initially among crude and unlettered southerners. They were first the product of colonial-era northern Christian intellectual idealogues — the American Puritans. These cultivated Christian ideologues...were preeminent in planting in the American mind...the ideas that God had created black people to be forever inferior and subject to all other races."

According to Griffin's book, these old seeds of racism are today sprouting bad fruits all across America. Although the blame for the persistence of racism has traditionally been laid at the feet of uneducated southerners, white supremacists and political conservatives, Griffin takes to task white liberals and radical white feminists for perpetuating racist ideas when it advances their agendas. "Although they have escaped serious critique," Griffin writes, "they often have a hidden allegiance to Puritan theological racism."

Many white liberals participated in the battles for federal laws that ended legal segregation, Griffin concedes. "Yet they were also among the first to flee the central cities, public schools and downtown institutions like churches, YMCAs and YWCAs, public schools, libraries and settlement houses. The white flight of the post-civil rights years stemmed from fears that blackness means corruption."

Griffin also turns a critical eye toward feminists. He shows that in their battle to have women's rights included in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, feminists argued that not including a stricture against discrimination based on sex would put white women at the bottom of the social hierarchy, below black men and women. "In the nature of things secular and religious," Griffin writes, "white women always come before black women and men."

But despite nearly 400 years of racist beliefs, Griffin does have hope for America's future. He believes it is possible to change people's hearts and minds. "We need to go to the root of the problem: the American mind," he says. "This is why President Clinton's initiative to open up a national dialogue on race is so important. But before we can make real progress toward racial reconciliation, Americans must confess in heart and mind, beginning in religious sanctuary, academic lecture hall, halls of Congress and even scientific laboratories that this is an ungodly and illogical theory."

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