Most Recent Content-
- Tuesday, Jan 26, 2010
Commentary CNN's star anchor Anderson Cooper narrates a chaotic street scene in Port-au-Prince. A boy is struck in the head by a rock thrown by a looter from a roof. Cooper helps him to the side of the road, and then realizes the boy is disoriented and unable to get away. Laying down his digital camera (but still being filmed by another CNN camera), Cooper picks up the boy and lifts him over a barricade to safety, we hope. -
- Saturday, Nov 21, 2009
Commentary Over the past few years a growing number of white people have joined the longstanding indigenous people's critique of the holocaust denial that is at the heart of the Thanksgiving holiday. In two recent essays I have examined the disturbing nature of a holiday rooted in a celebration of the European conquest of the Americas, which means the celebration of the Europeans' genocidal campaign against indigenous people that is central to the creation of the United States. Many similar pieces have been published in predominantly white left/progressive media, while indigenous people continue to mark the holiday as a "National Day of Mourning". -
- Wednesday, Nov 04, 2009
ZNet Article The following is an edited transcript of an interview conducted for the KVRX radio show “The Pursuit of Injustice.†-
- Wednesday, Sep 16, 2009
Commentary Journalism schools have much in common with the mainstream news media they traditionally serve. As the business model for conventional corporate journalism collapses and digital technologies reshape the media landscape, journalism schools struggle with parallel problems around curricula and personnel. -
- Wednesday, Jul 29, 2009
Commentary Honoring President Obama's request that the controversy involving a black Harvard University professor and a white Cambridge police officer become "a teachable moment," here's my contribution to an old lesson that we white people tend to be slow to learn. -
- Tuesday, Jul 21, 2009
ZNet Article When we seek the truth, we try to make sense of a chaotic world. We struggle to achieve what clarity is possible. When we look honestly, we face the cruelty of that truth. But the crucible, the most important test of our capacity to face the truth, comes in the steps we take at that point. What if the human species has failed, finally? Can we move forward, even when we recognize we may face insurmountable obstacles? Can we work for justice and sustainability within a dead culture? ZNet Article Cristina Nehring's title marks the problem with her attempt to vindicate love and reclaim romance: Love needs no vindication, and we shouldn't be eager to reclaim the vision of romance she offers - dark and dramatic, tortured and tragic, always a heroic individual endeavor. If humans are to survive and thrive in the 21st century, we will need a very different vision of love from Nehring's. -
- Thursday, Jul 16, 2009
Commentary My transition to political radicalism -- going to the root of problems, recognizing that dramatic and fundamental change in the way society is organized is necessary if there is to be a decent human future -- involved a lot of pain, in two different ways. -
- Saturday, Jul 04, 2009
Commentary Power is typically approached as a question of dominance and submission. Power is marked by the ability to impose or the ability to resist that imposition. This is what some have called “power-over,†which assumes a zero-sum game in which individuals are always in competition for that power—someone dominates and someone submits. In such a world, one can use this kind of power with varying levels of responsibility to others, but in such a world it is inevitable that power routinely will be used unjustly. Because there is always the threat that some other person or group can grab the power, these kinds of systems will encourage people to seek always more power. This is readily evident, for example, in the emergence of the United States as the dominant power after World War II. -
- Thursday, Jul 02, 2009
Video In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois suggested that the question white people so often want to ask black people is, How does it feel to be a problem? This program turns the tables and recognizes some simple facts: Race problems have their roots in a system of white supremacy. White people invented white supremacy. Therefore, the color of the race problem is white. White people are the problem. White people have to ask ourselves: How does it feel to be a problem? -
- Saturday, Jun 20, 2009
Commentary My first venture into political activism was in the feminist movement to end men's violence against women and men's use of women in the sexual-exploitation industries (stripping, pornography, prostitution), grounded in a critique of the underlying conception of what it means to be a man that most of us have been socialized to accept: masculinity as a quest for control and domination, routinely leading to aggression and violence. Our understanding of what it means to be male has to change, and to drive home that point, I often offer this challenge to my brothers: "You can be a man, or you can be a human being." -
- Sunday, Jun 14, 2009
Commentary "During apartheid the racism of white people was up front, and we knew what we were dealing with. Now white people smile at us, but for most black people the unemployment and grinding poverty and dehumanizing conditions of everyday life haven't changed," a black South African told me. "So, what kind of commitment to justice is under that smile?" -
- Wednesday, Feb 04, 2009
ZNet Article As everyone scrambles for a solution to the crises in the nation’s economy, Wes Jackson suggests we look to nature’s economy for some of the answers. With everyone focused on a stimulus package in the short term, he counsels that we pay more attention to the soil over the long haul. -
- Tuesday, Jan 13, 2009
Commentary We need to analyze and strategize about political realities, but let’s begin with an emotional reality: For the past few weeks the scenes from Gaza have been driving many of us mad. -
- Saturday, Nov 15, 2008
Audio Vision, analysis, and strategy for a left/progressive movement in the aftermath of the election. -
- Thursday, Oct 23, 2008
ZNet Article We shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that the most important political moment in our lives comes in the voting booth. Instead, people should take politics seriously, which means asking considerably more of ourselves than the typical fixation with electoral politics. -
- Monday, Sep 22, 2008
ZNet Article When the bottom line is threatened, corporations typically show little concern for holding the line on political principles such as freedom of expression. In capitalism, freedom is too often just another word for maximizing profits. -
- Thursday, Sep 18, 2008
ZNet Article The term second-wave feminism is used to mark the U.S. women’s movement that emerged in the 1960s, distinct from the women’s suffrage movement -- the first wave -- that won the vote in 1920. In the 1990s, the idea of third-wave feminism became popular, though it has never been clear why the crucial insights of the second wave had become irrelevant or why the political work that second-wavers had initiated was somehow magically over. Nowhere is this clearer than in the public-health crisis of epidemic levels of men’s violence against women, where the brutality of patriarchy is so obvious and the analysis and activism of second-wave feminists remains more needed than ever. -
- Thursday, Sep 11, 2008
ZNet Article Given the disastrous decisions made by U.S. officials in the seven long years since September 11, 2001, it would be easy tonight simply to catalog those many mistakes and condemn the bipartisan depravity of the Republican and Democratic politicians who -- starting almost immediately after the towers fell -- manipulated people’s anger and fear to build support for illegal and immoral wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq. -
- Saturday, Aug 16, 2008
Audio We’re in trouble, on all fronts, and the trouble is wider and deeper than most of us have been willing to acknowledge. We should struggle to build a road on which we can walk through those troubles -- if such a road is possible -- but I doubt it’s going to look like any path we had previously envisioned, nor is it likely to lead anywhere close to where most of us thought we were going... -
- Saturday, Aug 09, 2008
ZNet Article One of the common refrains I heard from progressive people in Pakistan and India during my month there this summer was, “We love the American people -- it’s the policies of your government we don’t like.” -
- Friday, Jul 11, 2008
Commentary Islamabad, Pakistan - Some lessons learned while spending time in a different culture come from paying attention to the wide diversity in how we humans arrange ourselves socially. Equally crucial lessons come from seeing patterns in how people behave similarly in similar situations, even in very different cultural contexts. -
- Wednesday, Jun 25, 2008
ZNet Article This really isn’t a music review because I don’t know anything about music. I’m the guy they put in the back row of the choir with instructions to mouth the words as quietly as possible. I learned three guitar chords once; I remember two of them. -
- Friday, Jun 13, 2008
ZNet Article The ideology of contemporary corporate commercial journalism is incoherent, and one place to see clearly this confusion is the news media industry’s approach to “diversity.” -
- Wednesday, Jun 11, 2008
Commentary In a guest lecture about masculinity to a college class, I ask the students to generate two lists that might help clarify the concept. -
- Monday, Apr 28, 2008
Commentary It may seem odd to talk of sorrows around race and gender in politics when we are a few months away from being able to vote for a white woman or a black man for president of the United States. When I was born in 1958, any suggestion that such an election was on the horizon would have been laughed off as crazy. In the first presidential campaign I paid attention to as an eighth-grader in 1972, Shirley Chisholm -- who four years earlier had become the first black woman to win a seat in Congress -- was to most Americans a curiosity not a serious contender. Today, things are different. -
- Sunday, Apr 27, 2008
ZNet Article After years of being constantly annoyed and often angry about the historical denial built into Thanksgiving Day, I published an essay in November 2005 suggesting we replace the feasting with fasting and create a National Day of Atonement to acknowledge the genocide of indigenous people that is central to the creation of the United States. -
- Tuesday, Apr 15, 2008
Commentary As Abe Osheroff's body slowly began to betray him in his 80s and 90s, one of his favorite lines was, "I have one foot in the grave but the other keeps dancing." -
- Thursday, Mar 20, 2008
Commentary It has long been a staple of the antiwar movement that there can be no meaningful peace without justice on a global scale... -
- Saturday, Mar 08, 2008
Audio This interview focuses on how activists can bring dissenting views into the dominant media institutions, the place of institutional analysis in writing, and how activists should approach journalists and editors, and more... - All Most Recent Content
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Recent Audio-
- Saturday, Nov 15, 2008
Audio Vision, analysis, and strategy for a left/progressive movement in the aftermath of the election. -
- Saturday, Aug 16, 2008
Audio We’re in trouble, on all fronts, and the trouble is wider and deeper than most of us have been willing to acknowledge. We should struggle to build a road on which we can walk through those troubles -- if such a road is possible -- but I doubt it’s going to look like any path we had previously envisioned, nor is it likely to lead anywhere close to where most of us thought we were going... -
- Saturday, Mar 08, 2008
Audio This interview focuses on how activists can bring dissenting views into the dominant media institutions, the place of institutional analysis in writing, and how activists should approach journalists and editors, and more... - All Recent Audio
Recent BooksFeatured Jensen's Articles
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Robert Jensen's Bio Info:
Robert Jensen is an associate professor... more
Robert Jensen is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and director of the Senior Fellows Honors Program of the College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin.
Jensen is the producer of the film "Abe Osheroff: One foot in the grave, the other still dancing" and publisher of a pamphlet with an extensive interview with the longtime radical activist. Information about the film and pamphlet is available at http://thirdcoastactivist.org/osheroff.html.
Jensen's latest book is All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice (Soft Skull Press, 2009). He also is the author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang, 2002); co-author with Gail Dines and Ann Russo of Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality (Routledge, 1998); and co-editor with David S. Allen of Freeing the First Amendment: Critical Perspectives on Freedom of Expression (New York University Press, 1995).
Jensen was a consultant to the film "The Price of Pleasure: Pornography, Sexuality, and Relationships." http://thepriceofpleasure.com/ He also is the co-writer/producer of an educational slide show in PowerPoint about pornography, "Who wants to be a porn star? Sex and violence in today's pornography industry." Information about the show is available at http://stoppornculture.org/ or by writing to stoppornculture@gmail.com.
Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu and his articles can be found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html.
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