- Peggy and Leonard Robinson photo courtesy of Jennifer Grossman
How Ayn Rand Inspired This Black couple to Triumph over adversity
Jennifer Grossman, CEO, The Atlas Society
2/23/2018
"There are dozens of Black History Month "reading lists" which include many books you might expect, ranging from biographies of civil rights leaders to novels by Toni Morison and poetry by Maya Angelou.
A book you would never expect to appear on any of these lists is "The Virtue of Selfishness" by Ayn Rand. And yet that's the book that helped shape how Peggy (85) and Leonard Robinson (88) would think about their identity - as teachers, parents, citizens and above all, individuals, who also happen to be African-American.
The Robinson's cited "The Virtue of Selfishness" as the work by Rand which influenced them most. On the surface it seems an odd choice for a couple who were motivated to pursue graduate studies at Columbia University in New York with the express desire to return to their communities to make a difference.
What struck me most about my conversations with both grandparents and grandson, was how little race mattered to them. And how wide was the gulf between their personal experience, and the public narrative of racial strife, manifested in such spectacles as African-American sports players refusing to stand for the National Anthem, in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, against supposedly racially drive police violence.
In a society, and particularly during a month, where black pride is exalted, Peggy Robinson put the focus instead on "self-pride. . . "
~ Read the entire article @: The Daily Caller
Pride
"Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man's values, it has to be earned - that of any achievements open to you, the one that makes all others possible is the creation of your own character - that your character, your actions, your desires, your emotions are the products of the premises held by your mind - that as man must produce the physical values he needs to sustain his life, so he must acquire the values of character that make his life worth sustaining - that as man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul - that to live requires a sense of self-value, but man, who has no automatic values, has no automatic sense of self-esteem and must earn it by shaping his soul in the image of his moral ideal, in the image of Man, the rational being he is born able to create, but must create by choice - that the first precondition of self-esteem is that radiant selfishness of soul which desires the best in all things, in values of matter and spirit, a soul that seeks above all else to achieve its own moral perfection,
valuing nothing higher than itself
~ Above found at Ayn Rand lexicon - Pride