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WRITINGSThree parts in this section, and I’ll add entries as time goes on:
Books
I had published two previous
books on education, but this one was the beginning of things for me,
where I found my voice and approach. This sports book—or at least
nominally it is a sports book, the publisher considered it a parenting
book and I saw it as being basically about growing up--was directed at
a general readership rather than the academic audience I had written to
up until that time (I’m a professor of education), and it had a broader
focus than the field of education. It was also the beginning of
integrating my personal story into my writing, a pattern I have
continued. I was immersed in sports as a kid and into my twenties
and this book was an occasion for making sense of the effect that
activity and preoccupation had on me. I think this book is still
worthwhile reading a decade after its publication, and I see it as
linked to my later writing. It is only available from the
publisher in a very expensive hard copy edition. The best way to
obtain it is to get it from a library. If it is not in the
library’s collection, a reference librarian can order it through
interlibrary loan.
This book has a 2005 copyright,
but it was written in the late 1990s concurrently with the sports book,
so I’m listing it here. It outlines my views on education, but as
with all my writing beginning with the sports book it has a broader
focus than its nominal topic. It outlines a philosophical
perspective I apply to making sense of everything in American life and
my own life. I’m not sure how to label this outlook, but it is an
interplay of libertarianism and cultural conservatism. It
is available at Amazon and the Xlibris site.
William Pierce, who died in 2002,
was the chairman of the National Alliance, a white advocacy
organization he founded. The book recounts Pierce’s personal
story from childhood on, identifies what shaped his thinking and
actions, outlines his perspective on the issues of the day, and
describes his day-to-day routine. The Fame book kept my frame of
reference broad as I recounted Pierce’s views on history, philosophy,
race, politics, economics, international relations, the media,
education, men-women identities and relations, childrearing practices,
and approaches to leisure. I found Pierce to be a person of
remarkable capability, decency, integrity, courage, and dedication. As
impressed as I was with Pierce, however, I tried to be as objective and
complete as I could in portraying him, and that included dealing with
his limitations. I was particularly struck by the contrast
between the man I came to know and the demonic, sinister picture of him
I had gotten from the mass media. I hit me how much of what I
know, or think I know, comes from mediated rather than direct
experience. That is to say, someone—a teacher, a media
figure, a politician, an advocate for a cause--tells me and shows me
what something is like. If Pierce isn’t as he has been depicted,
I asked myself, what else isn’t as it has been presented to me?
Who are these mediators of reality? What are their interests,
what are they selling? This book changed my life forever. I
came away from my encounter with Pierce far more conscious of race from
a white perspective and of myself as a white man and of my European
cultural and historical roots. You can get this at Amazon, and Pierce’s
organization, the National Alliance, sells copies—check its web
site—and you can get it directly from the publisher’s web
site.
While writing the Pierce book, I
encountered several hundred racially conscious white people.
Predominantly, they do not conform to the image of them the media has
created: neo-Nazi bigots, menacing skinheads, ignorant thugs who commit
hate crimes, and so on. The seventeen white Americans, from
across the country, both men and women, young and old, who offer their
personal statements about race in this book aren’t public figures or
leaders of organizations. They aren’t on television and they
don’t publish books or make movies. Politicians don’t articulate
their perspective or advocate their positions. Journalists and
intellectuals don’t write about them unless it is to belittle
them. Schools make no attempt to deal with them
objectively. In this book, you hear from them. I didn’t
alter, soften, or censor what they said or tell the reader what to
think about them. More than coming to know their thoughts
on race, you’ll meet these people as human beings. Two of them
are no longer alive. Democracy depends on the free exchange of
ideas. There are individuals and organizations that want to
silence people of this sort, as well as punish anyone who tries to give
them voice. Available from the same sources as The Fame of a Dead
Man’s Deeds.
This book is made up of my
writings on race through 2005. Included are excerpts of my books
and, in total or in large part, my short writings, as well as three
unpublished articles and a speech. The writings are ordered
chronologically for the most part, and I provide commentaries to
accompany them. This gives the book a narrative line and lends an
autobiographical quality to it. In large part, Living White is my
own story over the past seven years as it relates to race. The
book’s focus is on the personal, in contrast to the public, dimensions
of the racial challenges that whites confront at this time. The
book is directed at a white audience and I hope it supports readers in
living more honorable lives as white men and women.
Available from the same sources as The Fame of a Dead Man’s
Deeds. In late 2008, a French translation of this book was
published (Saint-Genis-Laval: Éditions Akribeia).
If you want to get my view of American life and our individual lives, you could read the books in the order I have listed them here, beginning with Sports in the Lives of Children and Adolescence. Add to that the short writings since the publication of my last book, Living White--they are listed in the "Recent Short Writings" section below--and then the material in the “Thoughts” section of this site. If you only have the time or interest to read just one book, I suggest The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds. If you want the latest and/or a sense of who I am, read the thoughts in the order they are listed in the Thoughts section of this site, beginning with "On Foucault"--and you can read them in any order, they are self-contained. Recent Short Writings• Robert S. Griffin, An Educator’s 10 Concerns About Social Media, 14 pp., 2013.Ten concerns, or worries, which, as a university professor, I have about the impact of social media involvement on students. Read the complete paper here. • Robert S. Griffin, An Interview on Sport and Society, 8pp., 2013 In early 2103, the editor of Le Harfang, a journal of a Canadian organization, the Alliance of Ethnic Quebecers, requested a written interview with me on the impact of sport on society with particular reference to nationalism. These are my answers to his emailed questions. Read the interview here. •Robert S. Griffin, What Louis Michael Seidman Made Me Think About, 7 pp., 2013. An opinion piece in the December 30th New York Times by Louis Michael Seidman, a professor of constitutional law, caught my eye. Seidman, or the Times’ headline writer, entitled it "Let's Give Up on the Constitution." This is a response to it submitted to The Occidental Observer web site for publication. Read the full response here. • Robert S. Griffin, Are Whites Pathological? Yes and No, 16pp., 2012. In October of 2012, the editor of the journal The Occidental Quarterly, Kevin MacDonald, issued a call for papers to be included in an upcoming theme issue on White pathology. “Whatever blame for our situation that we place on others,” Dr. MacDonald said in the announcement, “the bottom line is that we are allowing the unfolding disaster to happen. It is unprecedented for a civilization to voluntarily cede political and cultural hegemony to others, particularly when so many of these people harbor hatreds and resentments toward our people and our culture.” I submitted this paper to be considered for inclusion in that theme issue. TOQ capitalizes White, so, while it is not my normal practice, I do it in this writing. Read the full paper here. •Robert S. Griffin, Commercial Sports and Kids, 6pp., 2012. This writing is a follow-up to the writing two sources down on this site, How They Get Us to Watch the Super Bowl: An Inquiry into Sport Marketing Strategies. Here, I outline some of the effects the sports entertainment industry, professional sports, has on kids. Read the full paper here. • Robert S. Griffin, "Moneybull": An Inquiry Into Media Manipulation, 17 pp., 2012. "Moneyball" was one of the best-received films of 2011 and an Academy Award contender for best film at the 2012 Oscars. It is based on a non-fiction book by the same name. What we are told in the film isn't true. Or better, it is true here and there but fundamentally untrue. "Moneyball" obscures significant truths. It portrays things as lucid and simple and resolved that are in fact muddy and complex and open to debate. From what I have heard and read, people accept "Moneyball" as an accurate picture of what went on with the A's ten years ago, and its ideas, premises, as valid ones, when I consider them highly questionable and in need of qualification if not fundamentally false. To the extent that I am accurate in my perceptions, it is very important for reasons that go beyond this popular entertainment, and that is what pressed me to give as much energy as I put into this writing. Read the complete paper here. • Robert S. Griffin, How They Get Us to Watch the Super Bowl: An Inquiry into Sport Marketing Strategies, 16 pp., 2012. The 2012 Super Bowl football game won by the New York Giants over the New England Patriots drew the largest American television audience of all time. That's for any kind of programming, entertainment, public affairs, anything, not just sports. One hundred thirteen million people in this country watched that football game. This was a show put on by the employees of two privately owned, profit making sport exhibition companies. How did they get me and another one hundred thirteen million people minus one to attend to their football performance, and more than that, care about how it came out? What accounts for our enchantment with commercial sports: the Red Sox and Cowboys and Lakers, and all the rest? How do these sport show companies market their product with such remarkable effectiveness? This writing outlines nine things that have come to mind in this regard. Read the paper here. • Robert S. Griffin, How University Students Think, 11pp., 2012 This writing is best viewed as a companion piece to a couple others on this site. One of them is "How University Academics Think," the eleventh source down from this one, in which I suggest that the investigation of how university faculty and administrators see things is an important area of inquiry and offer some thoughts in this regard. While I hope this paper on the way university students think, at least in some areas of their studies, stands on its own, I believe it makes most sense if it is considered in conjunction with the one on faculty; I see them as an interrelated pair. Too, it will be helpful to explore both writings within the context of the educational ideology, goals, and strategies I outline in "Totalism and Thought Reform in America's Universities"--either the short or long version, the second and third sources down. I hope these three writings encourage others to contribute their own insights to this general concern, take what I've offered further, amend and correct it, and so on. Read the paper here. • Robert S. Griffin, Are White Racial Egalitarians Lying?, paper, 5 pp, 2011. The lead article in the August 2011 issue of the journal American Renaissance by Robert Greenberg, entitled "When Whites Lie to Blacks," decries whites that in our time "contradict plain reality" and expound a "parade of deliberate falsehoods" to and about blacks. In this same issue of AR, Jared Taylor, in "Response to Dr. Greenberg," while noting that he found the Greenberg essay "witty and insightful" and that he read it "with admiration," nevertheless takes exception with its major premise, that whites who espouse egalitarian line on whites and blacks are out-and-out lying. This paper is my take on the Greenberg-Taylor exchange. A version of this paper was published under the title "Are Whites Lying" in American Renaissance, vol. 22, no. 10, October, 2011. Read the paper here. • Robert S. Griffin, Totalism and Thought Reform in America's Universities (short version), paper, 9 pp., 2011. This is a shortened version of the writing just below this one that I put together to accommodate the space requirements for publication. You can read the description of the long version to get a sense of what both of these writings are about. The major difference between the two versions is that with the short version I cut the material illustrating how Robert Jay Lifton's thought reform methods fit what's going on in today's universities. Depending on your time and interest in this topic, you can read either version. Read the short version here. • Robert S. Griffin, Totalism and Thought Reform in America's Universities (long version), paper, 28 pp., 2011. In the summer of 2011, I received an e-mail message from the president of my university--I'm a professor of education--addressed to all faculty and staff saying that all first year students would be required to read the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. At the time, I had just completed reading psychiatrist and scholar Robert Jay Lifton's memoir, Witness to an Extreme Century. I put the two experiences together and wrote a paper on what I see going on in today's universities. Read the long version here. • Robert S. Griffin, "A Case for Conservative Schooling," 31pp. book chapter, 2011, originally published in 2005. This is an essay from the book listed above, While There's Time: Conservatism and Libertarianism in Education. Conservative is a pejorative term to those who shape the hearts and minds of today's future teachers in our colleges of education. Teacher education students don't study conservative educators--they hear about them from their professors and in the books they are assigned to read. Conservatives in education, traditionalists of all stripes, so it goes, are misguided, anachronistic, and just perhaps malevolent. This essay was written primarily for my own students--I teach in a college of education--to give them a chance to consider a positive argument for conservative (or, other terms, traditionalist, essentialist, classical, perennialist) approaches. Read the essay here. • Robert S. Griffin, "A Lesson in Democracy," 21pp. book chapter, 2011, originally published in 2005. This is an essay from the book listed above, While There's Time: Conservatism and Libertarianism in Education. I have been taken by the constant reference to democracy in the writings and talk of the dominant perspective held by professional educators, progressivism. The most important book by the leading figure in progressive education, John Dewey, is entitled Democracy in Education. Teaching democracy, inculcating this doctrine in students and implementing its ways in classrooms, is to be a top priority in schools. What's this all about? I asked myself. Even more fundamentally, when did this country become a democracy? We pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands--not to the democracy for which it stands. When is the last time you heard this country referred to as a republic? This essay is my exploration of this topic. Basically, I contend that the democracy thrust in schools is part of a movement to collectivize America. Read the essay here. • Robert S. Griffin, "What Schools Can Learn from Sports," 32 pp., chapter, originally published in 2005. This is a chapter from a book of essays on education listed above, While There's Time. It gets at how a study of the ways of sport, the sport culture, can inform what isn’t working in schools and give direction to efforts to improve them. Read the chapter here. • Robert S. Griffin, "Sports and Growing Up," book chapter, 23 pp., 2011, originally published in 1998. This is a chapter from the book listed above, Sports in the Lives of Children and Adolescents. It outlines the lens through which I view the impact of organized sports--and really, everything, family and peer relations, school, activities of all sorts, media contacts--on young people. It is about growing up well (or not), what that involves, and the role of parents in that regard. The ideas in this chapter provided the bases for the four thoughts I wrote for this site in the latter part of 2010 entitled "Lessons for Our Daughter." Ken and Melissa Heise, whom I refer to in the chapter, are parents who wrote me asking for my advice around organized sports involvement for their son and daughter. Read the chapter here. • Robert S. Griffin, Libertarianism and Racial Nationalism--Or Better, White Racialism, essay, 9 pp., 2011. This is an abridged version of the writing a couple sources below on this site, Libertarianism and White Racialism. I shortened it to meet the length requirements of an essay contest conducted by the journal The Occidental Quarterly, which published it in its Spring 2011, Vol. 11, No. 1 issue. (It was a runner-up to the winner.) Depending on the time you have to devote to this topic from my perspective, you can read this one or the longer one. The longer one, twice the word count, is a much more complete take on this concern, but I think this shorter version gets my perspective across well enough to give you a sense of how I see things. Read the abridged essay here. • Robert S. Griffin, Becoming a Full Professor, paper, 10 pp., 2010. The faculty committee in my college responsible for matters related to faculty concerns developed a proposal that specifies the criteria for promotion from associate to full professor. I volunteered to be on a work group in my department, in which I am a full professor, to review that proposal. Prior to the group's first meeting, I wrote a statement that outlines my perspective on criteria for assessing applications for promotion to full professor in general and the college committee's proposal in particular. This writing includes that statement along with a follow-up statement I submitted to the group following that first meeting. I hope this writing communicates in a general way what it's like in the university these years. Read the full paper here. • Robert S. Griffin, Libertarianism and White Racialism, essay, 34 pp, 2010. In mid-2010, the journal The Occidental Quarterly initiated a contest for the best essay on the topic of "Libertarianism and Racial Nationalism." The connection between libertarianism as a philosophy and approach to living and white racial thought and action is an important concern, but thus far it has received little if any concerted attention in white racial discourse. This essay contest has been a good prompt for me to think though this connection, and I'll share here what I've come to. Read the complete paper here. • Robert S. Griffin, A Needed Paradigm Shift in Education, paper, 48 pp., 2010. This writing is about making better sense of what is going on in American schools. My thesis is that a paradigm shift would be helpful in doing that. Read the full paper here. • Robert S. Griffin, "How University Academics Think," paper, 30 pp., 2010. An examination of university academics' pattern of thought and behavior. To organize and ground my presentation, I tie it to a case study of the current--March, 2010--effort at my university to develop a university-wide program of undergraduate general education. Read the full paper here. • Robert S. Griffin, "Living White . . . Very Well," essay, 8 pp., 2010. A representative of the host of a radio show emailed me saying he had read some of my writing on race from a white perspective and wanted to set up an interview with the host and me. I wrote him back saying I was amenable to the interview and the topic he suggested and that I'd get back to him when I was clear about the specific direction in which I wanted to go in the interview. This essay outlines what I came up with. Read the full interview here. •Robert S. Griffin, "Ralph Waldo Emerson On Self-Reliance," commentary, 15 pp., 2009. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was an American essayist and lecturer who championed individualism and the value of subjective, inner truths—he referred to “the splendid labyrinth of one’s own perceptions”--in the face of society’s pressures on people to conform in both thought and deed. Emerson is a major figure in the history of American thought. This commentary is my response to Emerson’s essay, “Self-Reliance.” Read the full commentary here. • Robert S. Griffin, “The Wages of Ignorance: How the Press Attacks White Advocacy,” article, 4 pp., 2009. A few days after James von Brunn killed a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. in 2009, a journalist wrote an article that included speculations about my links to him. This began a round of media and Internet consideration of my writings on race from a white perspective and my status as a university professor in light of them. A version of this article was publshed as a special report to American Renaissance News. Read the article here. • Robert S. Griffin, Armed in America: Portraits of Gun Owners in Their Homes, photographs by Kyle Cassidy (Iola, WI: Krause Publications, 2007), book review, 17 pp., 2009. On the second floor at my local Borders bookstore in downtown Burlington, Vermont last week—July, 2009--I was perusing the remainder table, I guess they call it. These are books that seem to have zero sales potential, so to get them out of the store they slash their prices and put them out on display with the other road-kill publications. The front dust cover picture of one of them, a hefty coffee table volume, caught my eye. Read the full review here. •Robert S. Griffin, “A Message in the Inbox,” article, 28 pp., 2009. On a Sunday morning in June of 2009, in my office at the university where I am a professor, I came upon an e-mail message that had been sent the previous Thursday and repeated on Friday. It turned out to be the start of a round of media and Internet consideration of my activities, including writings, dealing with race from a white perspective and my status as a university professor given my views on race. Read the full article here. •Robert S. Griffin, “Replies to a White Racial Activist,” 10 pp., 2009. In mid-June of 2009, a white racial activist e-mailed me some questions about my writing and current activities. He said he would share my answers with the members of the white advocacy organization he heads. I answer the questions in this writing. Read the full writing here. • Robert S. Griffin, Channel Surf, transcription, 6pp., 2009. Panasonic 20” Diagonal LCD TV, Model No. 20LAC. Matsushita Electrical Industrial Co., Ltd., Utsunomiya, Japan. Remote control--DVD-VIDEO/RW/R NB075. CLICK-ON. Read the full transcript here. •Robert S. Griffin, Kids and Sports, essay, 5 pp., 2009. The mother of a four-year-old daughter asked me what I thought about the advisability of sports for her child as she grows up. Essentially, this essay is my answer to her inquiry. Read the complete essay here. • Robert S. Griffin, Autotelic Education: A Concept, 8 pp., 2009. In this writing I discuss a form of education that doesn’t manage students’ lives and dictate what they should study and think and become. Read the complete writing here. • Robert S. Griffin, “To a Journalism Student About Sports,” 5pp., 2008. Having read some of my writings on sports, in late 2008 a journalism student at a university in the eastern part of the United States e-mailed me that she was writing an article for the campus newspaper about sports and wanted my reply to some of her questions. With some editing and augmentation, this writing includes her message, questions, and my answers. Read the full writing here. • Robert S. Griffin, Gay Artists in Modern American Culture : An Imagined Conspiracy, by Michael S. Sherry, essay/review, 11pp. 2008. An essay/review that considers gay artists' impact on American culture and the implications of their lives and creations for the white racialist movement. It was submitted to The Occidental Quarterly, but the editor and I couldn't agree on revisions. For better or worse, this is the form I think it should be in. Read the full essay/review here. • Robert S. Griffin, An Undergraduate Educational Studies Program, 12 pp., 2008 This is directed at university faculty in the field of education. It is an outline of an undergraduate bachelor’s degree program with a major concentration in educational studies that I put together—it is not in place anywhere. This program is not professional training nor is it designed to lead to licensure; rather, it is academic study, a scholarly exploration of the field of education that parallels those in other fields, say, sociology or mathematics or literature. My assumption is that this would be a program offered by a college of education and that it would lead to a B.S. degree granted by that college. Read the full program here. •”When They Attack,” essay, 4 pp., 2008 Suggestions to white people whose racial identity and interests might bring them under attack. This is directed to racially conscious white people of whatever stripe: white analysts, white advocates, white activists, white separatists, and white supremacists. While the focus in this writing is on racially-grounded assaults, it may apply to aggressions against those who don’t defer to the ideologies and agendas of those currently in power in any area, diversity, gender, politics, whatever it is. This appeared in The Occidental Observer in December of 2007. Read the full essay here. •Robert Henri on Education, unpublished paper, 4pp., 2008 Robert Henri (1865-1929) was an American painter. Not long before his death, the Arts Council of New York designated him one of the top three living American artists. Henri was also a popular and influential teacher of art. Henri’s ideas on art and life, including education, were collected by a former student and published in a book entitled The Art Spirit. This writing is made up of statements by Henri dealing with education from this book. Read the full paper here. •Traditionalist Education: A Needed Emphasis, article, 2008. This is about a course I teach at the university, but I think a general reader will be able to find things to pick up on in this piece. It deals with what I see is as the predominance of left-of-center, collectivist perspcctives in the field of education to the virtual exclusion of other outlooks. Read the full article here. • Ken Burns’ Show Business, unpublished article, 2007. This is an analysis of Ken Burns' seven-part documentary on World War II, "The War," shown on PBS in late September and early October, 2007. I critique the Burns documentary from the perspective of what I call the four rules of successful show business. This article will only be available on this site. Read the full article here.
In 1956, twenty-six year-old John
Kasper traveled to Clinton, Tennessee, which is just outside Knoxville,
to combat school integration. His exploits in Clinton received
international media attention. Rallies of whites in Knoxville
in May and June of 2007 protesting the media’s underreporting of the
rape, mutilation, and murder of two young white people by blacks took
place while I was researching and writing about Kasper, and I brought
them into the telling of Kasper’s story. This article and picture will not be
published and will only be available on this site. Read the full article here.
This is a fleshed-out and,
frankly, more honest response to this book than what I believe is going
to be published in a Charles Martel Society newsletter, which is
entirely favorable. When I wrote the newsletter review, I decided
I should hold back on negative comments because Kirkland is going to
get enough static for writing a politically incorrect book and he
didn’t need me piling on. I may well have been right in thinking
that, but there is something about me that can’t hold back in telling
the truth in my writing—this newsletter review is the first time I have
ever done that, and it will be the last--so the
complete review is
available here.
This review gave me a chance to
think more about whether the pre-Christian, nature-centered religions
of northern Europe are more valid religious expressions of European
heritage people than Christianity. This consideration began in
the Fame book and has shown up in several of my writings, including the
review of The Conservative Bookshelf listed below. This is
a good book; I recommend it. Read the
full review here.
Adapted from Living White.
A recounting of my first experience of having the light shine on me for
breaking ranks with accepted thinking on the race issue. Read the full article here.
This gets into how university
academics propagandize about race and make themselves look like
scholars and princes of morality in the process. You’ll pick up
an edge from me in this one; the Loewens of the world grate on
me. Read the full
review here.
Sam Francis died in February of
2005—this was his last book. Sam was a leading traditionalist
conservative thinker and an exemplary human being. I’ve been
inspired and gained direction from Sam. Note the discussion of
how those who control the public
discourse marginalize people like Sam. And note too the Bret
Easton Ellis and Michel Houllebecq quotes and the meaning I gave them.
They reflect the nihilistic impulse I’ll talk about in the “Thoughts”
section of this site. Read the
full afterward here.
This is a fine book. Note
my discussions of Christianity, individuality, and contemporary artists
in light of conservatism. Read
the full review here.
Short Writings, 2001-2005
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