The Malady of American Racism: A South African Perspective*

Abstract

George M. Fredrickson. The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Char- acter and Destiny, 1817-1914. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. 343 pp. H. Shelton Smith. In His Image, But.... ; Racism in Southern Religion, 1780-1910. Durham: Duke Uni- versity Press, 1972. 318 pp. Brace Clayton. The Savage Ideal; Intolerance and Intellectual Leadership in the South, 1890-1914. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972. 231 pp. The intellectual props of American racism have never received the same attention as the edifice itself. The role of the churches, schools and science in supporting the racist ideology has more often been assumed than ex- haustively researched and analysed. While individual intellectual leaders in the fight for or against segregation have attracted their students, com- prehensive surveys of racism in the church and in schools or of the American racial debate have strangely been few and far between.