Welcome
The Emergent Self is a place to think carefully about how we become who we are — through humiliation and recognition, belief and doubt, loss and meaning. I’m Robert K. Green, a writer and scholar who has spent a lifetime questioning what we’re told it means to be human. Read, disagree thoughtfully, and join the conversation.
Latest articles
The holidays feel like weather, something that simply arrives. They are a building, and buildings have owners, tenants, and people sleeping on the steps. For eight weeks I am walking through the building and asking who it was built for.
- Robert K. Green, Ph.D.
For fifty years my family has traded records and old photos, but one branch we left alone: a third cousin who became a Klan leader. What a family tree can and cannot explain about racial hatred.
- Robert K. Green, Ph.D.
Violence came into a classroom on East 38th Street. Years later I am still asking what brought those men there, and what it would take for a different life to emerge.
- Robert K. Green, Ph.D.
From the blog
Democrats won big on Tuesday, and I celebrated. Then I thought about my friends who voted the other way. What we do with this win will matter more than the win itself.
- Robert K. Green, Ph.D.
My friends laugh at me for talking to my computers. They laughed at the bicycle, the novel, the test tube, and the dating site too. The stigma that greets every new technology is never really about the tool.
- Robert K. Green, Ph.D.
"I don't see color" is usually offered as a promise of fairness. For many White people, it may really be a description of privilege.
- Robert K. Green, Ph.D.
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