Robert Jensen > Quotes

“The world does not need white people to civilize others. The real White People's Burden is to civilize ourselves.”
― Robert Jensen, The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism, and White Privilege

“But too often men react to women in positions of power with misogyny, often in sexualized terms. I have heard men in such situations talk about how "I'd like to fuck that bitch and teach her a lesson," for example. That kind of reaction demonstrates that no matter what the class position of a man and woman, men can use the weapon of sexualized violence to attempt to assert their dominance.”
― Robert Jensen

“Mainstream politicians will continue to protect existing systems of power, corporate executives will continue to maximize profit without concern, and the majority of people will continue to avoid these questions. It’s the job of people with critical sensibilities—those who consistently speak out for justice and sustainability, even when it’s difficult—not to back away just because the world has grown more ominous.”
― Robert Jensen

“We're all in the race game, so to speak, either consciously or unconsciously. We can overtly support white-supremacist racial projects. We can reject white supremacy and support racial projects aimed at a democratic distibution of power and a just distribution of resources. Or we can claim to not be interested in race, in which case we almost certainly will end up tacitly supporting white supremacy by virtue of our unwillingness to confront it. In a society in which white supremacy has structured every aspect of our world, there can be no claim to neutrality.”
― Robert Jensen, The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism, and White Privilege

“I could settle for being a man, or I could struggle to become a human being.”
― Robert Jensen

“The United States is a society in which people not only can get by without knowing much about the wider world but are systematically encouraged not to think independently or critically, and instead to accept the mythology of the United States as a benevolent, misunderstood giant as it lumbers around the world trying to do good.”
― Robert Jensen

“Whiteness–the whole constellation of practices, beliefs, attitudes, emotions that are mixed up in being white–is the problem. Whiteness is degraded and depraved[…] To the degree that we accept any of the meaning that the dominant society gives to whiteness, we white people are degraded and depraved.”
― Robert Jensen, The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism, and White Privilege

“Complex systems produce complicated results, and still there are identifiable patterns: Patriarchy is a system that delivers material benefits to men—unequally depending on men’s other attributes (such as race, class, sexual orientation, nationality, immigration status) and on men’s willingness to adapt to patriarchal values—but patriarchy constrains all women. The physical, psychological, and spiritual suffering endured by women varies widely, again depending on other attributes and sometimes just on the luck of the draw, but no woman escapes some level of that suffering. And at the core of that system is men’s control of women’s sexuality and reproduction: Without”
― Robert Jensen, The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men

“A sensible way to begin a discussion of that greater good is to focus on the current conditions within the human family and on the state of the larger living world.”
― Robert Jensen, We Are All Apocalyptic Now

“It may be that in the long run, patriarchy has not been a successful adaptation and will lead to the extinction of the species. As we look around the world at the threats to the ecosphere from unsustainable human systems deeply rooted in patriarchy’s domination/subordination dynamic, that’s not only plausible but increasingly likely. That suggests that patriarchy is an evolutionary dead-end. Human”
― Robert Jensen, The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men

“Feminism remains a crucial element of any program for social justice today, which is why patriarchal forces attempt to eliminate or marginalize feminist ideas.”
― Robert Jensen, The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men

“The feminist philosophy that has shaped my thinking has been articulated most clearly by Marilyn Frye;67 Catharine MacKinnon68 has been influential in my understanding of the law’s role; Gerda Lerner helped me understand the relationship between gender and class; and Audre Lorde69 and Barbara Smith70 challenged many of my unconscious assumptions about gender and race. Important to the struggle to bring to feminist theory and politics a deeper analysis of the complexity of all these interactions among systems of power has been Patricia Hill Collins’ 1990 book on black feminist thought and “the matrix of domination.”71 Other sources of my early understanding of these themes were the work of bell hooks, especially her 1984 book72 and her ongoing critique of “white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” and the influential 1981 collection This Bridge Called My Back: Writing by Radical Women of Color.73 Today”
― Robert Jensen, The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men

“I am afraid of sex as sex is defined by the dominant culture, as practiced all around me, and projected onto magazine pages, billboards, and movie screens. I am afraid of sex because I am afraid of domination, cruelty, violence, and death. I am afraid of sex because sex has hurt me and hurt lots of people I know, and because I have hurt others with sex in the past. I know that there are people out there who have been hurt by sex in ways that are beyond words, who have experienced a depth of pain that I will never fully understand. And I know there are people who are dead because of sex. Yes, I am afraid of sex. How could I not be?”
― Robert Jensen

“Those four effects described above—shaping a male-dominant view of sexuality, initiating victims, contributing to difficulty in separating sexual fantasy and reality, and providing a training manual for abusers—are at work just as much with men who have not engaged in activities that meet the legal definition of rape. Here we have to let go of a comforting illusion—that there is some clear line between men who rape and men who don't, between the bad guys and the good guys.”
― Robert Jensen, Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity

“In talks I was doing on racial justice, I began talking about the United States’ three racialized holocausts: the large-scale death and destruction of cultures that resulted from the genocide of indigenous people on which the country was founded; the African slave trade that was central to the country’s emergence as an industrial power; and the post-WWII assault on the developing world that secured the country’s dominance in the contemporary world. Millions died in these projects, in which hideous levels of violence to expand one group’s wealth and power were justified, overtly or covertly, by the alleged racial superiority of whites. Some people were turned off, objecting that my language was too strong, but many more found the bluntness refreshing and told me the framework was helpful. These experiences taught me that watering down analysis and language to reach the largest possible audience often backfired—people who disagree aren’t persuaded, and those looking for a compelling argument tend to drift away.”
― Robert Jensen, Plain Radical: Living, Loving and Learning to Leave the Planet Gracefully

“We live in an industrial world with a globalized capitalist economy organized politically around nation-states. Finding a willing audience for even a mild critique of any of these foundational systems is not easy; suggesting that all three systems should be rethought in fundamental ways seems crazy.”
― Robert Jensen, Arguing for Our Lives: Critical Thinking in Crisis Times

“But an adherence to ideology, to any ideology, can give us the grand illusion of freedom when in fact we are being manipulated and used by those whom the theory serves. The struggle for freedom has to be a struggle toward integrity defined in every possible sphere of reality—sexual integrity, economic integrity, psychological integrity, integrity of expression, integrity of faith and loyalty and heart. Anything that shortcuts us away from viewing integrity as an essential goal or anything that diverts our attention from integrity as a revolutionary value serves only to reinforce the authoritarian values of the world in which we live.”
― Robert Jensen, The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men

“Our goal should not be to reshape masculinity but to eliminate it. The goal is liberation from the masculinity trap.”
― Robert Jensen

“What made Jim truly mystical was his ability to live fully conscious of how, every day, a bit more of the sacred becomes desecrated. Still, Jim’s awareness of how much had been lost didn’t stop him from appreciating what remained.”
― Robert Jensen, Plain Radical: Living, Loving and Learning to Leave the Planet Gracefully

“The system of patriarchy is a historic construct; it has a beginning; it will have an end. Its time seems to have nearly run its course—it no longer serves the needs of men or women and in its inextricable linkage to militarism, hierarchy, and racism it threatens the very existence of life on earth.5”
― Robert Jensen, The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men

“The various inequalities that define the contemporary world—imposed through white supremacy, imperialism, capitalism—all are based on this central feature of patriarchy, an attempt to make the domination/subordination dynamic appear to be a natural, and hence inevitable, feature of human societies.”
― Robert Jensen, The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men

“The radical feminists I have worked with do not limit their critique to patriarchy. To emphasize the radical potential of radical feminism: Beyond the sex/gender system, radical feminism’s understanding of the way in which patriarchy normalizes hierarchy leads not just to a focus on men’s domination of women but also to a deeper critique of power systems more generally.”
― Robert Jensen, The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men

“To deconstruct a concept is to analyze it in a way which reveals its construction—both in the temporal sense of its birth and development over time and in a certain cultural and political matrix, and in the sense of its own present structure, its meaning, and its relation to other concepts. One of the most impressive aspects of such an analysis is the revelation of the ‘contingency’ of the concept, i.e. the fact that it is only the accidental collaboration of various historical events and circumstances that brought that concept into being, and the fact that there could be a world of sense without that concept in it (emphasis added).26 In”
― Robert Jensen, The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men

“the difficult question these feminists raised: In women’s experience, how much consensual sex is consented to but not wanted? How much consensual sex is consented to out of fear? Out of insecurity? How much consensual sex is consented to simply because the woman finds it easier to have sex than to try to communicate with the man about her emotional state at the moment?”
― Robert Jensen, The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men

“Without (hetero)sexual abuse, (hetero)sexual harassment and the (hetero)sexualization of every aspect of female bodies and behaviors, there would not be patriarchy, and whatever other forms or materializations of oppression might exist, they would not have the shapes, boundaries and dynamics of the racism, nationalism, and so on that we are so familiar with.82 The”
― Robert Jensen, The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men

“Jokes are funny only in context. There is no such thing as abstract clever word play. Words have meaning in the world in which we live, not in the abstract. Take away the politics, and there is no joke. The joke wouldn't make any sense. if the joke is funny, it's funny precisely because it's racist and sexist.”
― Robert Jensen, The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism, and White Privilege

“Our goal should be not to redefine masculinity, but to abolish it.”
― Robert Jensen

“In the 200,000 years of the species Homo sapiens, patriarchy accounts for less than 5% of our evolutionary history. If we consider the 2.5 million years of the Homo genus, our direct ancestors, patriarchy is less than 0.5% of our history.”
― Robert Jensen, The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men

“On the Lake Street sidewalk, in front of the In the Heart of the Beast Theatre, were two big planters made of concrete and found materials, and Jim made a point for several years of trying to keep flowers alive in them: I walked over to HOBT to check on the flowers planted in the concrete sculpture constructions. As with the last two nights, several of the marigolds had been pulled out and left lying on the sidewalk. I push them back in the dirt and watered, but there is likely no winning this one. A measure of the level of alienation at large in the culture. (July 18, 1993) The sacred is everywhere, not just what has been touched by the ritual of the church and not just what is beautiful because it is untouched by human hands. Years later I found the philosophy behind Jim’s approach to this articulated with Wendell Berry’s typical clarity in his poem, “How to Be a Poet,” 2 and I called Jim immediately to read it to him. I choked up when I got to these lines: There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.”
― Robert Jensen, Plain Radical: Living, Loving and Learning to Leave the Planet Gracefully

“MacKinnon captures this is in her succinct lesson on the grammar of pornography and male dominance: 'Man fucks woman; subject verb object.”
― Robert Jensen, Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity