Robert Jensen

 

Selected Resources for Robert Jensen

Jensen, Robert. The heart of whiteness: confronting race, racism, and white privilege, City Lights Books, San Francisco.  98 pages.  2005. Overview:  In The Souls of Black Folks, W.E.B. DuBois wrote that the question whites wanted to ask him was: "How does it feel to be a problem?" In The Heart of Whiteness, Robert Jensen writes that it is time for white people in America to self-consciously reverse the direction of that question and to fully acknowledge that in the racial arena, they are the problem. While some whites would like to think that we have reached "the end of racism" in the United States, and others would like to celebrate diversity but are oblivious to the political, economic, and social consequences of a nation-and their sense of self-founded on a system of white supremacy, Jensen proposes a different approach. He sets his sights not only on the racism that can't be hidden, but also on the liberal platitudes that sometimes conceal the depths of that racism in "polite society."  Overview from books.google.com/The_heart_of whiteness.

“Robert Jensen on White Privilege: Teachable Moments Require Willing Learners”, The Rag Blog, July 28, 2009.  http://theragblog.blogspot.com Accessed Nov 21, 2011. This blog contains a series of conversational stories during his college class that are examples of the privilege that comes with being a member of the dominant group in an unjust hierarchical system. It’s the same lesson men should learn about the sexual violence women face. Heterosexuals should learn it about the condemnation that lesbians and gays endure.

Tim Wise: The creation of whiteness, A video clip.  10 min. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3Xe1kX7Wsc. In this spellbinding lecture, the author of White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son offers a unique, inside-out view of race and racism in America. Expertly overcoming the defensiveness that often surrounds these issues.

This website http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/articles_race.html gives the following four excerpts from his book “The Heart of Whiteness.” This website also gives essays on white privilege as well as race and racism.  

• “The new White People’s Burden: Take a hard look in the mirror” http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/freelance/newwhitepeoplesburden.htm

• “We are the results of what we want and what society allows us” http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/freelance/racestories.htm

• “The fears of white people”  http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/freelance/fearsofwhitepeople.htm

• “White people's burden”  http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/freelance/whitepeoplesburden.htm

Sample Assignment - Robert Jensen

• Read Professor Jensen’s book “The Heart of Whiteness”. Following the ideas in his book “The Heart of Whiteness”, Jensen argues that – even decades after the significant achievements of the civil-rights movement and with an African-American president – it is still appropriate to describe the United States as a white-supremacist society, in terms of how we think and how we live.  Through an analysis of contemporary racial ideology, Jensen presents a framework for critiquing the naturalizing of power and privilege in other arenas of our lives (gender, class, nationality, and ecology).Respond to one of the following questions.
  • How have we come to accept so easily systems of domination and subordination? 
  • How did we become resigned to hierarchy? 
  • How can we challenge the unjust and unsustainable nature of the systems in which we live? 
• Based on Robert Jensen’s talk as well as his online musings, if we are to reach a state of equity in black/white privilege how would this parity be viewed by someone of the opposite race than yourself?  What things in our society and culture would be different?
• Present a cogent argument for or against the position taken by Prof. Jensen that the reason change in the parity between blacks and whites is white fear.