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Robert Jensen, Ph.D., far right, signs books Monday after his Martin Luther King Jr. day presentation. |
The North Dakota native doesn’t expect to see the outcome, but he is frank and honest in his quest to transcend white supremacy.
“I live on top of the privileged pile,” Dr. Jensen told a crowd of about 400 people at Monday’s Martin Luther King Jr. holiday commemoration at UNMC. “On every aspect of my identity and place in the world I am in a position of privilege.”
So why does the associate professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin engage in scholarly work to undermine his own privilege?
“What privilege does is take away your humanity,” Dr. Jensen said. “It robs you of your own ability to be a human being. I dream of the day in which I cannot just be white, but a human being in the fullest sense.”
He urged the audience to transcend white supremacy and seek racial justice by clarifying their own values and finding meaning in how one lives. “We have to become reconnected,” he said. “The history of social change is mass movement and you build toward that.”
Dr. King called for a radical revolution of values — a shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society — in his 1967 “Beyond Vietnam” speech in New York City: “When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered,” Dr. King said. “If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without mortality and strength without sight.”
“If we do act,” Dr. Jensen said, “there is no guarantee that we can make right all that has been torn asunder in this world. But we cannot wait for certainty that our actions will succeed. We have to act not only out of love, but out of hope.”
Dr. Jensen is the author of “The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege,” (City Lights, 2005), a book about the unseen and unspoken privileges that are accorded simply because one has white skin.
A true revolution of values, Dr. King said in 1967, “will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.the Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just..A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
Dr. King has become an icon for racial justice, but his messages have been ignored, Dr. Jensen said, quoting poet Carl Wendell Hines:
Now that he is safely dead
Let us praise him
build monuments to his glory
sing hosannas to his name.
Dead men make
such convenient heroes: They
cannot rise
to challenge the images
we would fashion from their lives.
And besides,
it is easier to build monuments
than to make a better world.
“If you live in privilege, you haven’t done enough. I haven’t done enough,” Dr. Jensen said. “We, collectively, haven’t done enough or the world would look different.”
Discussions on race must continue, he said, dispelling the notion of a colorblind society. White historically is not connected to inferiority, Dr. Jensen said, noting “you can see me as a white man and not have to immediately correct for some historical definition of being inferior.
“If black historically has been associated with degradation and deficiency then the only way I can make you human is to essentially de-race you. That’s not a sign of my transcendence. That’s a sign of how deeply rooted I am in a white supremacist society, that the only way I can treat you as human is to dissociate you from that racial history.”
Dr. Jensen urged the audience to read Dr. King, Malcolm X and James Baldwin, all of whom talked about a fundamental shift of values as it relates to race and hierarchy. Domination and subordination exist because of human choices, Dr. Jensen said.
“In each of those relationships – men, women, white, non-white, the United States and the rest of the world — there is an attempt by people on top to naturalize the relationship,” he said. Social relations, however, are not natural and can be changed, he said.
Still, it takes time. “Social change isn’t like microwave cooking,” he said.
For more information on Dr. Jensen and his work, visit his Web page here.