Why I Left the Right, Exhibit R for Robinson
Recently we’ve had several front page posts about Arthur Robinson, the GOP mutant candidate for Oregon’s 4th Congressional District, and his incredibly strange views on … well, everything. In addition, LGF reader freetoken put together an excellent Page on Robinson’s Christian Dominionist connections.
But it gets worse: Oregon GOP Congressional Candidate Sells Racist Book Suggesting Africans Are Like Retarded Children.
For the better part of a decade Arthur Robinson has been reprinting, marketing, and selling a virulently racist 19th Century English boys’ adventure novel that suggests Africans are like retarded children. “By Sheer Pluck” written by George Alfred Henty, is set in Africa and features a sympathetic character patronizing Africans as “just like children” and declaring, “the intelligence of an average negro is about equal to that of a European child of ten years old… Left alone to their own devices they retrograde into a state little above their native savagery.” Over the last decade, Art Robinson’s homeschool curriculum business has sold thousands of copies of the book.
Arthur Robinson has carved out a niche selling a Christian home schooling curriculum developed by his late wife, who according to Robinson compiled its curriculum from material culled from Christian homeschooling curricula published by Bob Jones University, the A Beka Book series, and other sources.
The Robinson Self Teaching Curriculum includes, as a reference for students, a 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica and a 1611 King James Version of the Bible which “is the foundational book of the Curriculum.” As a 2001 article in The American Spectator described:
[Art Robinson’s] family members have developed a home school curriculum consisting of over 250 books-among them the 30,000-page 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica—which the youngsters took turns scanning into computers. The curriculum was transferred to 22 compact discs, which are sold in a box for $195. Over four years, 20,000 sets have been sold. More recently, with typical single-mindedness, Robinson tracked down all 99 historical novels by the Edwardian writer G. A. Henty, and they in turn were optically scanned. Three thousand Henty sets (6 CD’S) were shipped in the first year. They retail for $99.
Read the whole appalling story.