Jennifer Konner Quotes

The point of privilege and the notion of mansplaining is that sometimes I definitely feel like I should shut up. That's it functioning. That's the notion of privilege functioning.

I go to music festivals, and people want to talk to me about racism. I'm like, 'Bro, I'm trying to have fun!'

I think that liberal straight white men really need to stop patting themselves on the back for what they think they think and actually take a look at their actions.

So much has happened to obscure the dialogue about race and about gender and discrimination in general, especially where those things touch on economics.

All my friends' mothers were appalling women.

My father always defined my gender to my brothers. He'd say, 'This is your sister; you must take care of her.'

These awful middle-class queens - which is what the gay movement has become - are so tiresome. It's all Abercrombie & Fitch and strollers.

Women are not making it to the top of any profession in the world. But when I say, 'The blunt truth is that men run the world,' people say, 'Really?' That, to me, is the problem.

Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don't. Not yet, but according to the actuarial tables, I may have another fortysomething years to live, more or less, so it could happen. Though I'm not holding my breath.

I don't think that coming from a privileged background makes you this monster who doesn't feel things.

Hollywood is run by men who are big on vulnerability.

When you see the misogyny of hip-hop, it's so horrible, it's so putrid, it's so, you know, odious, that we know, we smell, we see it. The misogyny that is reified, that is reinforced, that is subtly reproduced in corporate America or in church life or in synagogues and temples and the like, is sometimes more subtly dealt with.

Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.

Even though I went to Exeter and Yale, and I enjoyed all the trappings of those places, I think at the same time - and maybe it's because I'm an immigrant kid and not white - there was always this other consciousness; that is, I was conscious of everything that was going on.

I wanted to have a body of work behind me before I wrote about racism.

I think I've been in situations where they looked at me and just see some rich white guy - they don't see me at all.

I think all these pop cultural media often reflect conversations we're having in the real world at that moment in time. I think one of the big conversations we're having as a culture is we thought we'd solved sexism and racism, and we're realizing more and more that we haven't.

I'm doing this play right now, the new David Mamet play. It's called 'Race,' and it's very interesting how people really leave the theater filled with the desire to talk about the play and the issues and the characters, and how they're all navigating their personal views around race.

I even felt like I liked guys better than women - that men were relevant and women weren't. It took me a while to realize I'd been socialized to have a slighting view of my own gender.

… as long as men, even socialist men, even the best men in the world, make laws these will be to their advantage and to our disadvantage.

I'm about as privileged as you can get. I'm a white, male, heterosexual front man of a rock band.

Why can't black women on stage tell stories that can affect white men in the audience?

James Brown's life was really a metaphor for our inability to talk about matters like race and class in America.

The cavemen are still in charge at the networks. They're all white males, and you can't get away from that.

Dealing with men in Congress - for the most part, it's pretty dispiriting in terms of the lack of regard they have for women. And they're not even... it's like they don't know what they don't know, and they don't even care what they don't know.