If you're white, he's talking about you.

"It's important for those of us who are white to realize that what we call the race problem is really a white problem," Jensen said. "The problem of white supremacy."

Jensen, an associate professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, will speak twice this week in Chapel Hill. On Tuesday, he will speak on UNC's campus and the next day at the Southern Human Services Center.

James Spivey, the acting director for the county's department of human rights and relations, said Jensen's visit is part of an attempt to spark what the Human Relations Commission is calling "courageous conversations," honest dialogue about race, diversity and privilege.

White supremacy, Jensen said, is the "unearned privilege that comes simply from being white in a white society."

"My work, as a white person, isn't to go into communities of color and explain this to them. ... It's to take it to a white audience that understands and to ask them simply, what are we going to do about it?" Jensen said.

Jensen points to continued racial disparities in wealth, home ownership, income, access to health care and infant mortality rates as evidence of a culture of white supremacy. He also sees it embedded in ideology.

"The majority of white people, even liberal white people who see themselves as appropriately multicultural, really do believe at the end of the day that that which comes out of Europe ... is a superior form of politics [and] culture," Jensen said. "What is held up as the pinnacle of human knowledge? It tends to be that which comes out of white Europe."

Jensen has focused his research on hierarchies of race, gender and class. His latest book, "Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity" examines the "increasing intensity and degradation of women" in pornography.

He describes what he calls the "paradox of pornography" -- that pornography has become more accepted even as it becomes increasingly degrading to women.

Matt Ezzell is a fifth year sociology Ph.D. student who is part of Feminists Students United, the group sponsoring Jensen's campus talk.

"He's one of the few men's voices speaking out on this topic," Ezzell said. "[Pornography] is ubiquitous. It's all around us. But it's also not something we talk about very often."