Three parts in this section, and I'll add entries as time
goes on
Recent Short
writings. Comments on and a copy
of my short writings produced since the publication
early in 2006 of my latest book, Living White. The
most recent writing is listed first.
Books.
Comments and availability information on five books I
have published since 1998.
Short Writings,
2001-2005. Published and unpublished
short writings, absent commentaries, from 2001 to the
publication of Living White. Again, most recent
first, and unpublished material is available here.
If you wa
nt 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 tcrosbysiteA.pdfhem in any
order, they are self-contained.
If
the PDF links are oversize, adjust them to accommodate your
reading preference..
Recent Short Writings
·Robert S.
Griffin, Thoughts Prompted by “Rich Men North of
Richmond: Including One About Celebration, 8 pp.,
2023.
I've been especially taken by the “Rich Men North of
Richmond” phenomenon that’s so big in the news these
days
(it’s late August of ‘23). It’s a song by a
heretofore unknown singer/songwriter who goes by the
name of Oliver Anthony.
· Robert S.
Griffin, Why I Write (Or Wrote) on White Racial Matters,
8 pp., 2023.
I received an email asking how I came to write about
“white people like John Kasper, who is seen by most to
be very dubious if
not altogether immoral.” I
assumed I’d reply briefly, a short paragraph, and that
would be it, but I found myself going on, and it
was for me, not him.What I was writing was getting at the question of
what has propelled the extensive amount of writing on
white racial matters I’ve done the last couple of
decades.See
the complete reply here.
·
Robert S. Griffin, An Exchange with a Newspaper
Reporter, 8 pp., 2023.
In the first half of May, 2023, I received an email
from John Terhune, a reporter for the Portland Press Herald
newspaper in Portland, Maine, who
was working on a story about White racial activism that
resulted in an email exchange between us. I’ve
decided what we wrote each other and what I
make of it might be of worth to others.See the
article here.
· Robert S.
Griffin, Thoughts Upon David Crosby’s Death, 6 pp.,
2023.
David Crosby, who died January 18, 2023, helped create
two of the most popular and influential American musical
groups in the 1960s and ‘70s, the
Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.He endured the
ravages of a severe drug problem, including addictions
to cocaine and heroin that landed him
in jail, as well as obesity and a general lack of
self-care. His
life involved a stark contradiction: while he gave an
enormous gift to the world through
his music, for many years he badly abused himself and
paid a great personal price for it. Read the article
here.
· Robert S.
Griffin, A
Tenth White American Voice, 3 pp., 2023
In 1831 while a student at the Andover Theological
Seminary in Andover, Massachusetts, Samuel Francis Smith
wrote the lyrics to “America”
(“My Country 'Tis of Thee”) to the melody of “God Save
the Queen.” Read the article here.
·
Robert S. Griffin, Nine White American Voices, 12 pp.,
2022.
In the
article below this one on this site, The American
Political System and White Racial Discourse, I suggested that
White advocacy dialogue and debate
[m]ake
room for American voices—Thomas Jefferson and James
Madison, and (I’m thinking out loud) Emerson and Thoreau
and Mark Twain and Edgar Rice
Burroughs (the Tarzan author) and Teddy Roosevelt and
H.L. Mencken and . . . oh, I don’t know, just somebody
besides Julius Evola, you know? American thinkers,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Teddy Roosevelt,
Ernest Hemingway, somebody.
I’ve asked myself, “Who are White ‘somebodies’
you think ought to be heard?”Of
course, the possibilities are virtually endless, but
I’ve got to
start somewhere and nine people come to mind.Read the
article here.
· Robert S.
Griffin, The American Political System and White
Racial Discourse, 7 pp., 2022.
In the recent mid-term elections (this is being written
in December of 2022), Democrats, apparently with a good
amount of success,
Republicans with
being no less than a threat to American democracy.I’ll use the
democracy-under-siege talk so prominent lately as
a springboard to a consideration of the America’s
political system from the perspective of White racial
advocacy.Read
the
article here.
• Robert S. Griffin, What Does Watching the Film
“Shadowlands” Bring Up for You? 3pp., 2022.
I streamed a movie the other day that prompted responses
in me that made a difference in how I see things,
including
myself,
and that have stayed with me, and I think it might do
the same for you.Read
the article here.
• Robert
S. Griffin, Schooling and Education Amid the Siege: A
Perspective, 12 pp., 2022.
This writing sketches out a perspective on schooling and
education (they are different things; more on that later
on) for your
consideration, including what, if anything, to do about
it.Read it
here.
• Robert S. Griffin, Looking Over the Wall to See
What a Stranger is Up To, 12 pp., 2022.
These days, very near the end, images from long ago pop
into my head, seemingly on their own; I don’t know what
prompts them, and
I let them take me where they will.A
couple of days ago, it was of a moment from the mid- to
late-1980s in Burlington Vermont. Read the article here.
• Robert
S. Griffin, “What-If” Thinking:Imagining
Alternative Histories as a Way to Know, 13 pp., 2021.
I’ve found it useful to engage in a “what-if” thought
exercise. The idea is to imagine what it would be like now
if what
happened in the past had happened in some other way, to
envision an alternative history and see what it implies.Read the
article here.
• Robert
S. Griffin, Thoughts on Kenosha, 9 pp., 2021.
This was written on November 20th, 2021, the day after
the not guilty verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse case in
Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Streaming the trial got me thinking.This
article shares some of what came up for me for your
consideration. Read
the article here.
•Robert
S. Griffin, What’s to be Learned from Jon Gruden
Getting Kicked Out of the Game, 6 pp., 2021.
At this writing in mid-October, 2021, Jon Gruden,
coach of the National Football League’s Los Vegas
Raiders, has forced to resign
from his coaching position and undoubtedly been
cancelled for life after it was found he used offensive
language in personal emails to
former Washington Football Team president. Bruce Allen.
Race hasn’t surfaced in the Gruden matter, at least
explicitly, but it informs
what went down in his case. Read the article
here.
• Robert S. Griffin, My Take on James W. Loewen,
Sociologist and Civil Rights Champion, 13 pp., 2021.
At my late stage of life, I find that the first thing I
read every morning is the obituary section of The New
York Times.I
took particular
notice of the obituary of James W. Loewen in the August
20, 2021 edition of the paper.It
prompted me to rework a review of a book of
his I had written many years earlier.Read the
reworked review here
• Robert S. Griffin, If
I Had Made the Closing Argument in
Defense of Derek Chauvin . . . , 13 pp., 2021.
At this writing, in mid-May, 2021, former Minneapolis
police officer Derek Chauvin has been convicted by a
jury of second-degree
murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree
manslaughter in the death of George Floyd during Floyd’s
arrest.The
first charge carries
a
maximum of forty years in prison.I watched the
defense closing argument on television, which brought up
questions for me and
prompted this writing. Read the
article here.
•
Robert S. Griffin, Hemingway’s
Truth: A Consideration of Across the River
and into the Trees, 9 pp., 2021.
I don’t consider Across the River and into the Trees
a major literary accomplishment, so why am I putting
energy into writing about it?
It’s because
after I finished the book I did what I often do with
books and films, cruised the internet reading what other
people,
including scholars, have said about it and it hit me
that if the people I read are right I misread the book’s
plot in a big way, and that intrigues
•
Robert S. Griffin, Three Fine Films, 4 pp., 2020.
In late December of 2020, I wrote a thought for this
site called “On the Working Poor.” It was based on three
films that, tied together,
I found artistically superb, personally moving, and very
thought-provoking.I decided to expand it into an article.Read the
article here.
• Robert S. Griffin, Was “Eyes Wide Shut” A Cultural
Watershed?, 10 pp.. 2020.
“Eyes
Wide
Shut,” released in 1999, was the last film of the
legendary director Stanley Kubrick. I watched
again recently, and while I found
its
merits wanting to say the least, I speculate that it may
have been a watershed in our collective life, a turning
point, an historical moment in
the core culture. Read the essay here.
• Robert S. Griffin, Looking Into “What’s My Line?” 9
pp., 2020.
When I was a kid, around eleven or twelve I
suppose--this was way back in the 1950s, Saint Paul,
Minnesota--in an upstairs room Mother,
Dad, and I rented in Mr. Jensen’s house—he and his
family lived on the first floor--all alone, I watched a
game show called “What’s My
Line?” on CBS at 9:30 p.m. on Sunday nights on our
17-inch black-and-white Zenith television set that
looked like a small refrigerator,
never missed the show.Read the essay here.
• Robert S. Griffin, Competing with the Negative Story
About Whites, 21 pp., 2020.
We need to put forth a positive narrative of the white
race to counter the negative one being propagated from
all sides.Read
the complete
article here.
• Robert S. Griffin, Getting
Control in Your Life,
11 pp.,2020.
This writing began with a meditation on a slogan of the
authoritarian, repressive Party in George Orwell’s
dystopian novel,
Nineteen Eighty-Four, often referred to as 1984, published
in 1949.I
let the process take me wherever it did and it turned
out to be some
advice
to young people especially.Read the
complete essay—I think that’s what this is—here.
• Robert S. Griffin,
The Tale of Bob Mathews, 12 pp., 2020.
In 1983, The
National Alliance—a white activist organization founded
and headed by William Pierce—held its annual convention in
Washington, D.C.A young mine worker from the Pacific Northwest by
the name of Bob Mathews was
scheduled to give a talk at the
convention.Mathews
had been an Alliance member for three years and actively
recruiting new members for the organization among the
farmers and
ranchers and working people around where he lived in
Washington state.Dr. Pierce asked Bob to tell the people at the
convention how his efforts were going, and about the
situation generally in his part of the country.Read the tale here.
• Robert S. Griffin, A Suggestion to American White
Advocates:Root
Your Arguments in This Country’s Core Political and
Cultural
Ideals, 10 pp., 2020.
This is a shortened version of the article just below on
this site, The
White Racial Movement’s Historic—and
Unfortunate--Embrace of the
Far
Right.It was posted
in the internet magazine, The Occidental
Observer, in June of 2020.The edit
required a change in title.Read
this
version of the article here.
• Robert S. Griffin, The White Racial Movement’s
Historic—and Unfortunate--Embrace of the Far Right, 15
pp., 2020.
The cause of white people has historically been linked
to the far-right end of the social/political spectrum,
which I find problematic
both philosophically and
practically.Read
the article here.
• Robert S, Griffin, More on a Recent Article About
COVID-19, 5pp., 2020.
I wrote an article on the public response to the
COVID-19 virus called “Thoughts from a Leather Couch on
Covid-19.”This
article expands
on it.Read
this article here.
• Robert S.
Griffin, Thoughts from a Leather Couch About COVID-19,
11 pp., 2020.
Yesterday’s (March 30th, 2020) New YorkTimes headline
was “As U.S. Death Toll Climbs, Washington Weighs New
Emergency Steps.”Today’s
is “Virus May
Kill
100,000 to 240,000, Experts Say.”I read the Times online,
but what I would call the front page had 13
stories—every one of them was about the
current
COVID-19 crisis.There
were 11 opinion pieces on the front page—same thing.Read the
complete article here.
I read with interest Professor Thomas Dalton’s article
in The Occidental
Observer (an online magazine) posted on December
8th, 2019,
“The ABC’s of the
Alt-Right: A Guide for Students.”My experiences
and analyses have led me to different conclusions and
proposals
than
Professor Dalton expresses in his article.I hope what I
set out here in response to Professor Dalton’s article
will prompt reasoned
dialogue and
debate.Read the
article here.
• Robert S. Griffin, Why I Owe
Jim Bakker an Apology and Thank You, 14 pp., 2019.
In the mid-1970s to the late-‘80s, Jim Bakker and his wife Tammy
Faye hosted a daily Christian talk show called
“The PTL Club,” which
was seen
widely on a satellite network Jim had created.It was never
clear what PTL stood for--Praise the Lord or People That
Love, one of
the two or
both—later on, after Jim and Tammy got in trouble,
people said it stood for Pass the Loot.Read the full
article here.
• Robert S. Griffin, “Midnight Cowboy”
Revisited: Making New Sense of an Iconic Old Film, 14
pp., 2019.
The film “Midnight Cowboy” has turned
out to be one of the three iconic American films of
the 1960s—the other two, “The Graduate” and
“Easy Rider.”One’s
understanding of that time in American history is
enhanced by a consideration of the social and cultural
significance of
these three
films, how they both reflected and shaped collective
and individual life.And since one thing leads to another, giving
attention to
them will
shed light on contemporary reality and how it got to
be this way, which includes how you, if you are an
American, and perhaps
even if you
aren’t, think about things and conduct your life. This
writing considers artistic merit of “Midnight Cowboy”
and three themes
in the
film. Read the
article here.
• Robert S. Griffin, Who Shall
Remain Nameless: Al Hanzal and Democracy in Action, 14
pp., 2019.
In Saint Paul, Minnesota, a parent at the Linwood Arts
Plus School brought his concern about the Monroe part of
the school’s name to the
school’s
Parent-Teacher Organization.James Monroe,
he offered, isn’t the kind of person the school ought to
be named after. The PTO
co-chair
sided with the parent: “It’s a critically important
issue that James Monroe was a slave owner, and that
doesn’t reflect the kids that
go to
Linwood-Monroe in the slightest.”The
Linwood-Monroe name change looked to me like a done
deal.But
not so fast.On
to the
scene comes
Al Hanzal.Read
the full article here.
• Robert S. Griffin, Where is Calvin Coolidge When We
Need Him? 10 pp., 2019.
People who have done the talking all of my life don’t
like presidents like Calvin Coolidge.Read the
article here.
•
Robert S. Griffin, Who Will Sign Bryce Harper? How
Media-Derived Narratives Shape Our Perceptions, and What
Am I Doing with
My Life?, 12 pp., 2019.
At this writing, a story dominating the sports
headlines—ESPN, the sports pages of newspapers, and so
on--is the fate of baseball free
agents
Bryce Harper and Manny Machado.Free
agents are players who aren’t under contract with any
team and thus able to sign with any
team
for any period of time and for any amount of
money.See the complete
article here.
• Robert S.
Griffin, William Gayley
Simpson on Christianity and the West, 9 pp., 2018.
"Someone else you might want to include in this
[book] project [The
Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds]," William Pierce called
out to me as
I
was leaving his office at the end of one of our evening
talks, "is William Gayley Simpson.Do you know
about him?"Read
the full
article here.
•
Robert S. Griffin, A Commentary on The Sky King, 5 pp.
2018.
On
August 10th, 2018, Richard Russell,
29-years-old and married, a baggage handler at the
Seattle-Tacoma Airport, who had no training as a pilot,
and who as far as anyone knows had never flowna plane
before, took an empty 75-seat twin-turboprop bombardier
Q400 plane and flew it for about an hour over Puget
Sound, executing wild,
dangerous, and highly impressive rolls and such, all the
while engaging in self-effacing chat with an air traffic
controller, before—in all likelihood with suicidal
intent--plunging into sparsely populated Ketron Island
25 miles southwest of the airport, demolishing the plane
and ending his life.Read the commentary here.
•
Robert S. Griffin, The White Racial Movement and Gays,
12 pp., 2018.
Back
in
2008, I wrote an essay/review for this site--I called it
a review at the time, but it was as much an essay as a
review--of the book Gay Artists in
Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy byMichael S.
Sherry (The University of North Carolina Press,
2007). I went back to the gay artists writing
again a couple of days ago, and this time thought to
myself, this gets at an important issue, what about
doing an edit and creating an updated version?Read the
complete essay (I excised the review part of the 2008
writing) here.
• Robert S. Griffin, William
Pierce and a Play by George Bernard Shaw, 9 pp., 2018.
In the early part of this
century, I published a portrait, as I called it, of the
white activist William Pierce, who died shortly
thereafter, called The Fame of a Dead
Man’s Deeds.I called the book a portrait rather than a
biography because it was basically my sense of Pearce
after spending a month living in close contact with him
on his remote compound in West Virginia.One of
Pierce’s prime traits, he took ideas very seriously and
lived in accordance with the ones that gave him
direction in his life’s project of living an honorable
and meaningful existence in the time he had allotted to
him on earth (it turned out to be 68 years).One
major source of perspective and guidance for Pierce was
a stage play, Man
and Superman, by George Bernard Shaw.The following
is an excerpt from the Fame book about that play’s
impact on him.Read
the complete article here.
• Robert S. Griffin, Where’s Nordic-Boy?A Game for Our
Time, 8 pp., 2018.
During intermission of a modern dance performance I
attended, I looked through the program handed out to
everyone in attendance that
evening.A couple
of pictures--one having to do with the center’s
education programs, the other with its arts
programs—caught my eye. Read the article here.
• Robert S. Griffin, Learning from Baseball, 3 pp.,
2018.
There are lessons to be
learned from the game of baseball.Read the article
here.
• Robert S. Griffin,
Don’t Give People a Club to Beat You Over the Head With,
16 pp., 2018.
In November of 2016, I
wrote a couple of related articles I thought were good,
but nobody else did, so I set them aside.In March
of 2018,
I felt drawn to revisit them.Read the article here.
• Robert S. Griffin, Who
Was Revilo Oliver? 13 pp, 2018.
If a thorough history of the white racial movement is
ever written, Revilo Oliver (1908–1994), a classics
professor at the University of
Illinois,
will indeed be prominent in it.Read the
profile here.
• Robert S. Griffin, William Pierce and Cosmotheism, 12
pp., 2018.
During the early 1970s, the
late white activist Dr. William Pierce formulated a
religious orientation he called Cosmotheism to provide
the spiritual
basis for the direction he was taking in his racial work.Read the article
here.
•
Robert
S. Griffin, Who Was George Lincoln Rockwell?
9pp., 2018.
For those unfamiliar with
George Lincoln Rockwell (1918-1967), perhaps this writing,
drawn from my book on the late William
Pierce, The Fame of a Dead
Man’s Deeds, will provide a sense of him.Read the profile
here.
• Robert S. Griffin, What Hitler
Believed, 12 pp., 2018.
All my life, it’s been Hitler this and Hitler that.For me, it
was like the Norm Macdonald joke, the more I heard
about the guy, the more
I didn’t
care for him.Finally,
I took it upon myself to read Hitler’s magnum opus, Mein Kampf,
and see what I could pick up about him
for myself.Read the
article here.
• Robert S. Griffin,
The Tale of John Kasper (2017), 17 pages, 2017.
In 2007, I wrote the article on the white activist John
Kasper (1929-1998). The Kasper writing came to mind this
past week (early December
of 2017) because I
happened upon a reference on the internet to a new book
about Kasper—John
Kasper and Ezra Pound: Saving the Republic by Alec Marsh.Read the
article here.
• Robert S.
Griffin, "Moneybull": An Inquiry Into Media Manipulation
(short version), 12 pp., 2017.This is an abridged and
slightly revised version of a
2012
writing on this site.It’s
about the 2011 film “Moneyball," a fine piece of
entertainment, but I question its messages.Read the
revised article here.
• Robert S.
Griffin, Addictions:An Example of the Interplay of the Public and
Private, 11 pp., 2017.
Almost exclusively, white
racial discourse has focused on public concerns: white
identity and culture, historical and current realities,
philosophical and
ideological concepts, and proposals and strategies for
collective action.And that’s all well and good, keep it going. The argument
here is that at the same time we’re doing that, let’s
give attention to the opposite of a public focus: let’s
look at things from a
private, or personal or
individual, frame of reference; and take note of the
interplay of the public and private, how each affects
the other. The private concern I shine a
light on here is addiction.Read the
complete article here.
•
Robert S. Griffin, World War II and the Walters
(Lippmann and Winchell): Their Implications for
Our Time, 10 pp., 2017.
Around the turn of the century, I wrote a book about
white advocate William Pierce.One of the
things that stuck with me about that experience is
Pierce’s consuming interest in World War II.Read the
article here.
· Robert S. Griffin, He Doth
Opine:A
Review of Making
Sense of The Alt-Right by George Hawley (Columbia
University Press, 2017) 218 pp. , 5pp. review, 2017.
With any book, it helps to take into account who wrote
it and who published it.Read the complete review here.
· Robert S.
Griffin, Feelings and Thoughts on Charlottesville, 3
pp., 2017.
Like everyone—in the world, really—I was riveted by the
events in Charlottesville, Virginia in mid-August of
2017.White
racial activists had gathered in that city
to protest the planned removal of a statue of
Confederate general Robert E. Lee and to hold a “United
the Right” rally. Read
my commentary here.
· Robert S.
Griffin, Serena, Ingrid, and the Story of My Time, 2
pp., 2017.
The August, 2017 issue of Vanity Fair
magazine has the naked and very pregnant tennis star
Serena Williams on the cover.When I saw
it, a thought flashed
to
my mind: “Ingrid Bergman wasn’t naked on the cover of Life in Dad’s
shop.”Read
the full commentary here.
· Robert S. Griffin,How Movements Succeed,
commentary, 3 pp., 2017.
One way to be successful is to learn from the successes
of others. Three successful movements in recent decades
have been the civil rights, feminist,
and
gay rights movements.Read my
commentary here.
• Robert S. Griffin, The Downsides of Being a Teacher
for Me (And Maybe for You), 21pp., 2017.
In recent days, I read a couple of good books on
teaching.They
got me thinking about the effects a career in teaching
had on me. Read
the complete
essay here.
• Robert S.
Griffin, How Movements Succeed: Lessons from the Past, 3
pp., 2017.
This is a commentary drawn
from a section in the two articles immediately below on
this site—“The Alt Right and Tyler Durden’s Advice”
and
“Seize the Center.” It examines the black
civil rights movement in the 1950s and ‘60s, the modern
feminist movement, and the gay rights
movement, all three of them successful, to see what
might be learned from them.It was posted
in March, 2017 in the webzine American
Renaissance. Read the commentary here.
· Robert S.
Griffin, Football Players Making a Better World,
commentary, 3 pp,, 2016.
On December 17th, 2016, the University of Minnesota
football players called off their threatened boycott and
will play in the Holiday Bowl game
in San
Diego on December 27th.Read my commentary here.
• Robert S.
Griffin, Seize the Center: A Critique of the Alt Right,
Including Tyler Durden’s Advice, 17pp., 2016.
This is a
revision and update of the article immediately below
this one on this site,“The Alt Right and Tyler Durden’s Advice.”It was
written just
after the conference that was central to the article,
and just after President-Elect Donald Trump’s disavowed
of the Alt Right. Read the
complete article here.
• Robert S.Griffin,
The Alt Right and Tyler Durden’s Advice, 21 pp.,2016.
In November of 2016, I received a notice for a
conference:
CELEBRATE THE ALT RIGHT!The past 12 month might be remembered as the year
of Donald Trump . . . the year of the Red Pill . . . and
the year of the
Alt
Right.It
was a time when more people joined our movement than
ever before and when our ideas invaded the mainstream.Become Who We
Are/2016—
which
will take place after November’s presidential
election—will give us the opportunity to ask what’s next?
This article offers thoughts keying of the conference
notice.Read
the article here.
• Robert S. Griffin, From a Chat to
Metapolitics: A Journey in Thought, 18 pp., 2016.
Four current or retired faculty members at the
University of Vermont were chatting with a new dean who
had recently arrived in
town from
California.The
new arrival commented that he was indeed happy to come
to Vermont, great state, but that he realized it
takes a generation
for you--or I guess better, yours--to be accepted by
Vermonters as one of them, as a real Vermonter.Read the full article here.
• Robert S. Griffin, Blacks As Emotional Abusers of
Whites: The Exploration of a Possibility, 13 pp., 2016.
I’m picking up a basic difference in black-white
relations in America these days compared to past times,
and this writing is an attempt
to make sense
of what’s it’s about.Read the complete article here.
• Robert S. Griffin, The Real
Ernest Heminway? 16 pp., 2016.
On June 20th, 2016,
in a post entitled “The Real Ernest Hemingway," the
Occidental Observer reprinted the first few paragraphs
of a writing
that had appeared
in the February, 1979 issue of Instauration, a white
interests magazine, along with a link to the complete
source.I
found
the Instauration
material from 37 years ago in its entirety fascinating,
and the contemporary comments in TOO intriguing; and I
found all of
• Robert S. Griffin, The Orlando Shootings: Talk,
Reality, and The New York Times, article, 19 pp., 2016.
In Orlando, Florida in the early morning hours of June
12, 2016, 50 people were killed and 53 others injured in
Pulse, a gay nightclub,
by, it appears at
this writing, a lone gunman of Afghan decent by the name
of Omar Mateen.Now,
after the reality of the event, essentially,
and most
importantly, the Orlando tragedy is what people say and
write about it and what comes out of that. It’s about
language, and to
make sense of
what happened in Orlando, it is important to look at it
from a linguistic angle. Read the complete thought
here.
• Robert S. Griffin, Creating a White Future, article,
11 pp., 2016.
For its fourth anniversary issue in the fall of
2016, Le Harfang, a French Canadian white nationalist
publication, invited foreign
contributions
from a number of people, me being one of them, I’m an
American, that 1) speaks to how the contributor sees the
world for
white people “in
four or forty years,” and 2) offers advice on how to
prepare for tomorrow’s world.The
editor said length was up to me, and
that he’d
trim what I wrote if need be as he translates my English
into French.I
replied that I’d give it a go.This writing
is my response to the
Le Harfang
charge. Read the
complete response here.
• Robert S. Griffin, How We Can Be Had: An
Inquiry into the Ploys of People Who Sell Us Something(Or At Least
It Began As That), 25 pp., 2016.
The focus in this writing is on how somehow like me, and
I presume you, can be taken for a ride, or the title of
this thought, how we can be had.While the
example
here is how an
investment company representative manipulated me to
serve his employers’ interests as well as his own, I
think these tactics, maneuvers, stunts,
are employed
by anybody looking to get money out of people: real
estate agents, car salesmen, mortgage company
representatives, doctors, psychologists,
interior decorators, travel agents, personal
coaches (golf, skiing, etc.), the list goes on, use your
imagination.Read the full article here.
•Robert
S. Griffin, What Schools Could Learn from Skateboarding,
article, 15 pp., 2015.
One of my
students in a university course I instructed last semester
brought his skateboard with him to classes. He
carried it under his arm as he came in the door and
it sat
prominently on the floor in front of his desk during the
class hour. Read the full
article here.
• Robert S. Griffin, A Needed Paradigm
Shift in Education (Short Version), essay, 32 pp., 2015.
This writing is an excerpt from a long article I
authored back in 2010. If
you want to read the piece in its entirety—and candidly,
I feel very good about its
content--it’s down this page among the 2010
writings. Even though what’s here was composed
some time ago, I believe it is still relevant. Read the essay here.
• Robert S.
Griffin, Epistemology Matters: Reflections Prompted by a
Death in Missouri, 12 pp., 2014.
At
this writing, it has been four days since a highly
anticipated and nationally televised November 24th, 2014
press
conference conducted by St. Louis County, Missouri
Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch in which he announced
that a
grand
jury had chosen not to indict white Ferguson, Missouri
police officer Darren Wilson in the August 9th, 2014
death
of an
eighteen-year-old local black resident, Michael Brown.
What particularly struck me in the hours and days that
followed
the
immediate release to the public of the evidence and
testimony the grand jury reviewed in the process of coming
to its
decision, much of it supportive of Officer Wilson's side of
the story, was that it didn't appear to have been taken into
account
by
those who, from the beginning days of the case three months
earlier, were convinced that this was a racially motivated
murder of a black youth attempting to surrender to a police
officer and thus an outrage. This intrigued me and I
wanted to
make
sense of it. This writing is a report of the direction
my thinking went in this regard over the next couple
days. Read the
complete article here.
•
Robert S. Griffin, Poking into the Manosphere, 13 pp., 2014.
A book
review in the webzine Taki’s Magazine of “Thirty
Seven: Essays on Life, Wisdom, and Masculinity by the
obviously
pseudonymous author Quintus Curtius prompted me to read the
book and think about boys and men and masculinity in our
time.
Read my article here.
• Robert S.
Griffin, Joseph K., Kenny Rogers, and Me: My
Experience in an American University (with 2018 postscript),
35 pp., 2014.
"Someone
must have been telling lies about Joseph K., he knew he had
done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was
arrested." So begins Franz Kafka's classic book, The
Trial. The Trial makes the reader grateful for being
an American.
Certainly
nothing like this could happen here in America. My
faith in that comforting and reassuring thought
has
been shaken over the past few months. Read the article
here.
• Robert S. Griffin, Who Is
Jeannette Rankin? 10 pp., 2014.
Who's Jeannette
Rankin? I've asked that question to a number of people, both
men and women, in classes I teach at the
university and
just people I come across day to day--I suppose it's been a
total of thirty--and so far nobody's heard of her.
That has
intrigued me. Read the complete
article here.
• Robert S.
Griffin, How Baseball Has Changed--And Other Things Too, 15
pp., 2014.
One way to
get a handle on what is going on now is to look at how this
same thing went on in years past and compare.
Last
weekend, I had a chance to do that with baseball, which has
been part of my life since my earliest memory. Read the full article here.
• Robert S.
Griffin, Personal Computer Use in Our Time: An Addiction? 11
pp., 2014.
Last week
ago as I write this, I had a window seat on a five-hour
flight from Philadelphia to the West Coast. Seated
next me
in the
middle seat was a fit, dark-haired, polite appearing young
man of about twenty-two--fashiony clothes and glasses,
jeweled
stud in his ear, carefully outlined three-day growth of
facial stubble, clean and neatly filed fingernails. He
looked to
be a
charter member of this generation's college cohort, a senior
perhaps. In his left hand was a mobile phone. On
his
lap was a
laptop computer. I've thought about him every day
since. Read the complete
paper here.
• Robert S.
Griffin, Social Media, Young People, and Challenges for
White Activism, 5 pp, 2014.
My
read of things is that the pervasiveness of social media in
our time poses particular challenges to those on the
periphery
of
the social/cultural core of American life, and that very
much includes white racial analysts and activists. Read the
complete paper here.
•
Robert S. Griffin, Critical Theory in the American
University: A Critical Issue, article, 25 pp., 2013.
Critical theory, critical pedagogy, is currently the
predominant ideological perspective in the social sciences
and
humanities, education, social work, and the field of
higher education in American universities. This
article uses an episode in
a
class I teach in the university as a way to discuss the
implications of this reality. Read
the full article here.
• Robert S. Griffin, A
University Personal Growth Course Syllabus: For Your
Possible Use, 12 pp., 2013.
I
submitted a proposal to the administration of the college in
which I teach for a three academic credit course I would
instruct dealing with personal growth and
fulfillment. The proposal was turned down, but perhaps
you can make some use
of
this course. See the course
syllabus here.
•
Robert S. Griffin, Learning from Birdman. 4 pp., 2013
At this
writing, Chris "Birdman" Andersen, a member of the NBA's
Miami Heat--incidentally, Andersen is one of
nature's
rarities, an American white playing in the NBA--has been
suspended for an upcoming game in a championship
playoff
series between the Heat and the Indiana Pacers. It
seems that Birdman--so called because of his arms-flapping,
soaring
style of play--suddenly and seemingly out of the blue
knocked a Pacer player to the court with an elbow and
then
shoved him
when he got up and pushed a referee who tried to
intervene. I think Birdman's reaction when he was
questioned
about his
outburst has applicability to the circumstance of white
people, the race to which I belong, and a race I care deeply
about in
the same way other people care deeply about their
race. This writing also appeared in the June 8th
edition of
the
webzine, The Occidental Observer. Read the complete article here.
• 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. The interview was published in
French in Le Harfung, No. 6, Vol. 1, 2013. 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." This paper is my response to that call
and
has been
accepted for publication in that theme issue.
TOQ capitalizes White, so, while it is not my normal
practice, I
do it in this writing. This writing appeared in the
webzine The Occidental Observer in June of 2013,
and in the
journal The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 2, Summer
2013. 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.
• Robert S.
Griffin, 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 S. Griffin, Robert Henri on Education, 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.
• Robert S.
Griffin, 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.
• Robert S. Griffin, Ken Burns'
Show Business, 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.
Robert S. Griffin, The Tale of John Kasper, article,
2007.
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.
Robert S, Griffin, book review, R. Cort Kirkland, Real
Men: Ten Courageous Americans To Know and Admire
(Nashville: Duke Cumberland House, 2005), unpublished,
2007.
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--sothe complete review is available
here.
Robert S. Griffin, book review, Mattais Gardell, Gods
of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), The
Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 7, No. 1, Spring 2007, pp.
107-112.
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.
Robert S, Griffin, "From Sex Symbol to French
Patriot," book review of Brian Singer, Brigitte
Bardot: A Biography, American Renaissance, Vol. 18: No.
1, January 2007, pp. 8-10. Note the themes of
transcending early-life difficulties, personal change in
mid-life, doing what's right even if it is attacked and
punished, and animal welfare. Check American
Renaissance's web page for availability. In every
published article there is a give-and-take between the
writer and the editor. Not that it is necessarily
better than the published review, here
is my version of the review, a "director's cut,"
if you will.
Robert S. Griffin, A Knock on the Door, article,
American Renaissance, Vol.l7: No. 12, December 2006, pp.
11-13.
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.
Robert S. Griffin, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension
of American Racism, by James Loewen, book review, The
Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 6: No.2, Summer 2006.
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.
Robert S. Griffin, Afterword, in Samuel Francis, ed.,
Race and the American Prospect, (Mt. Airy, MD:
Occidental Press, 2006, pp. 425-431).
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.
Robert S. Griffin, The Conservative Bookshelf:
Essential Works That Impact Today's Conservative
Thinkers, book review, The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 5,
no. 2, Summer 2005.
This is a fine book.
Note my discussions of Christianity, individuality, and
contemporary artists in light of conservatism. Read the full review here.
Books
Robert S. Griffin, Sports in the Lives of Children and
Adolescents: Success on the Field and in Life (Westport,
Connecticut: Praeger, 1998).
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.
Robert S. Griffin, While There's Time: Conservatism
and Individualism in Education (Philadelphia: Xlibris,
2005).
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.
Robert S. Griffin, The Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds: An
Up-Close Portrait of White Nationalist William Pierce
(Bloomington, IN: 1stBooks Library, 2001). A
Swedish language version is to be published by Logik
Förlaget in 2013.
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.
You can get free PDF copy of the book on the home page of
this site.
Robert S. Griffin, One Sheaf, One Vine: Racially
Conscious White Americans Talk About Race (Bloomington,
IN: 1stBooks Library, 2004). Published in a French
translation as Paroles de Blancs (London: White
Revolution Books, 2012).
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.
Robert S. Griffin, Living White: Writings on Race,
2000-2005 (Bloomington, IN: Authorhouse,
2006) Published in French language edition
as Vivre en tant que Blanc (Saint-Genis-Laval: Editions
Akribeia, 2008).
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 Mans Deeds. In late 2008, a
French translation of this book was published
(Saint-Genis-Laval: Éditions Akribeia).
Short Writings, 2001-2005
Robert S. Griffin, "Ole Miss, New Miss:
American Renaissance Ad Shines a Light on the University
of Mississippi," American Renaissance, vol. 16,
no. 6, June 2005, pp.11-13. Also in my book,
Living White.
Robert S. Griffin, "Epilogue,' written for a Swedish
language version of The Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds: An
Up-Close Portrait of White Nationalist William Pierce,
2006. It appears this book will not be
published. Available here.
Robert S. Griffin, "While There's Still Time:
Reflections on a Book Project," 2005, included in Living
White.
Robert S. Griffin, "Out of Bounds," commentary
submitted to American Renaissance, unpublished, 2005. Available here.
Robert S. Griffin, "Education for the Second Vermont
Republic--Or the Current One,"article, 2005.
Submitted to a magazine of the organization, Second
Vermont Republic (see its web site), unpublished.
Available here.
Robert S. Griffin, "Going Public: Being Seen,
Heard, and Felt in Mainstream America," The Occidental
Quarterly, vol. 4, no. 4, Winter, 2004. Also in
Living White.
Robert S. Griffin, "Belgium in July," Citizens
Informer, Vol. 35, No. 5, Fall 2004, pp.1, 5, 6.
Also in Living White.
Robert S. Griffin, "Interview with Robert S. Griffin,"
written answers to questions, Blood, Soil, Honour, and
Loyalty, May 2004. Also in Living White.
Robert S. Griffin, " Abraham Lincoln: A New Look at
Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War,"
book review, The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 4, No. 2,
June 2004. Also in Living White.
Robert S. Griffin, "Displaced: A Racially Aware White
American Talks About Home,"American Renaissance, Vol.
15, No. 6, 2004, pp. 1-3. Adapted from Living
White.
Robert S. Griffin, "My Experience With George Lincoln
Rockwell's This Time the World, National Vanguard, No.
122, March-April 2004, pp. 30-31. Also in Living
White.
Robert S. Griffin, "The Need for Positive White
Visions and Actions," essay, 2004, included in Living
White.
Robert S. Griffin, "Racism: A Short History,"book
review, The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 4,
November-December 2003. Also in Living White.
Robert S. Griffin, "David Starr Jordan: Racial
Exemplar," National Vanguard, number 121,
November-December, 2003, pp. 3-8. Also in Living
White.
Robert S. Griffin, "William Pierce: A Reminiscence,"
National Vanguard, No. 119, January-February, 2003, pp.
3-9. Also in Living White.
Robert S. Griffin, "Living White: A Personal Challenge
and Responsibility," The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 2,
No. 4, Winter 2002. Also in Living White.
Robert S. Griffin, "The New White Nationalism: It's
Challenge to Integration," book review, The Occidental
Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 3, Fall 2002. Also in
Living White.
Robert S. Griffin, "Rearing Honorable White Children,"
American Renaissance, Vol. 12: No. 10, October 2001, pp.
1-3. Also in Living White.
